Photo from AP, manipulated by Tara Sinn.

Blue Velvet Twin Peaks Wild at Heart Fire Walk With Me Twin Peak Blue Velvet
Inland Empire Mulholland Drive Wild at Heart Fire Walk With Me The Elephant Man Eraserhead Dune Catching the Big Fish Lost Highway Vice Vice: Hello, Mr. Lynch. I don’t know if you remember, but I interviewed you a few years ago. We spoke mainly about Transcendental Meditation that time.
David Lynch: I’m a practitioner as well, since I was a little kid.
I want to touch on TM this time as well but also go a little broader later on. I know that meditation is very important to you in terms of your creative process. I often find myself wanting to interrupt meditations to jot down ideas. Does this happen to you too?
Wow. I’ll do that from now on.
That’s happened to me a lot. Is it the same for you?
Now that I think about it, if I’m interrupted I sometimes find it easier to go right back into a deep meditation as opposed to a shallower one.
I guess it goes in peaks and valleys.
Just for different lengths of time.
That makes sense. It sounds familiar to me. I think I was around seven years old when I first started having experiences in meditation that felt transcendent to me.
laughs It was pretty funny. My grandparents and my friends thought I was in a cult.
not Our readers might start to tune us out now if they aren’t open to hearing about this stuff, but oh well. So yes, it’s true for me too—not meditating is sort of a waste of one’s own capabilities.
All good stuff, basically.
You don’t have to tell me.
laughs If the reader comments on our website from the last time I talked to you about this stuff are any indication, we’re going to get slammed. Anyway, based on what I’ve read about your working process, ideas might come to you and then not get used for years and years.
What’s your method for keeping track of ideas?
Right.
Is there also an element of the idea having a different context just because, say, five years—with all the changes that can happen in that amount of time—have gone by? Something that was mysterious to you when it popped into your head could be clear as day five years later.
Do you ever go back and watch your old films?
What do you call the place where ideas originate? The subconscious?
everything It’s pretty intense.
That’s true. It’s almost kind of scary.
Your more recent work, specifically Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, sort of has the rhythm of meditation to me. We drift, find focus, drift, and find focus. Is there anything to that, or am I reaching?
Sure, without the idea there’s nothing.
Why do you think so many people have such a desire to know the meaning of your films?
Just walking down any street could lead to a thousand different mysteries.
But even with all of that said, don’t you get tired of people asking you what things in your work mean?
Your films can be very scary. I know people who can’t even watch the first Winkie’s scene in Mulholland Drive. What do you think an audience might get out of being so freaked out by a movie? I know that there is something valuable for me in it, but I can’t put my finger on what it is.
with Of course.
Without that intuition, you can’t make art.
Going back to this fear thing for a second… You make it sound so simple, but a scary scene in one of your movies is way more than just the sum of its parts. Maybe you can tell me something that scares you.
Are there specific ways that you’re afraid you’re going to die?
laughs Maybe part of the enjoyment in watching really scary stuff is that it’s a safe way of experiencing that fear of death on a tiny scale.
That’s interesting, because a thing that gets said about you and your work a lot—especially since you’ve started talking so much in the press about meditation—is this question: “If this guy is so into the pursuit of bliss and enlightenment, why are his films so dark?” I think that’s kind of a dumb way to look at it.
I think what you say about putting suffering on the screen rather than in your life pretty much answers it. What would you say to my friend who is too much of a wimp to finish that Winkie’s scene?
Cinema can be much more immersive than a book, though.
Oh sure, of course. Now, you might think this is goofy, but I’ve always wanted to ask you if you believe in the supernatural to any degree.
That’s a good analogy. You mentioned beauty a minute ago. What’s a beautiful image you’ve seen in real life recently?
that I think that a lot of people fear that adjusting their attitude will take more sheer willpower than it actually does.
I was just looking at your photo series of female nudes draped in smoke. That got me thinking about your female characters and how they are usually mysterious and dangerous, or at least the keepers of big secrets. Do you think that men are capable of really understanding women?
laughs It really never gets old.
So you think that women don’t understand men either?
Maybe some people have a different idea of what “understanding” means. To me it’s not about solving everything like a math problem. It’s more about learning to coexist with whatever needs to be understood, and to sort of embody it, maybe.
Right. But it isn’t about trying to reach the end of an equation.
There are rumors going around that you’re done with narrative feature filmmaking.
laughs celluloid Are you working on a feature now?
We have an interview in this issue with Werner Herzog and he told us that you and he have talked about making good films for less money than the usual Hollywood budget. Do you feel like there’s overspending and bloat in the film industry?
Do you shoot with your digital camera just for the hell of it, even when there’s not a specific project going on?
Like the way that you worked on Inland Empire, where you shot a scene here and a scene there over the course of a couple of years.
I’m going to shift gears a little bit here. I asked a friend of mine who knows you what I should ask you about, and he said to ask you about cheese. Was he messing with me?
In what way?
It’s true.
Thinking about you and cheese reminded me of that extra on the Inland Empire DVD where you show us how you make quinoa. That made me wonder about what you like to eat for breakfast.
You drink a lot of caffeine.
I’ve read that it’s upward of 15 cups a day.
I’m sure you get asked this all the time, but do you think about the health implications of all the caffeine and all the smoking that you do?
You can’t smoke anywhere now.
I guess that the antismoking activists are more concerned about getting cancer from secondhand smoke, which I think is kind of ridiculous when it’s applied to public places.
Smokers are becoming pariahs.
How old were you when you started smoking?
Wow. So that’s just like the behind-the-woodshed, sneaking-one-to-see-what’s-it-like sort of smoking?
Are you the kind of guy who’s going to just keep smoking as long as he can?