Gaby Wood and Hazel Sheffield
The Observer, Sunday 1 March 2009
Up a steep, strange, snake of a street and sheer, straight steps is a set of concrete buildings clinging onto the side of the Hollywood Hills. In an attempt to penetrate the bunker (I have an appointment, after all) I mistakenly walk into an empty recording studio, where a state-of-the-art mixing table spans several metres and a blank cinema screen covers a wall in front of it. Beyond this, the place is all skylights and high slit windows – a bright but viewless series of rooms with severe angles and unpredictable shifts, blind corners around which are an empty kitchen or an empty meeting room with a single lightbulb drawn in chalk on a blackboard. Once inside, its geography is impossible to decipher.
I have come to meet David Lynch, who lives, works and meditates here – the bunker includes offices, an outdoor painting studio and a home. Lynch has just brought out a lavish retrospective set of DVDs, which includes (among other things) material from his student days that he found in a foot locker, a brand new sound mix of Blue Velvet, Eraserhead, The Elephant Man and deleted scenes from Wild at Heart – all of which makes one wonder where he's been in more recent years. Mulholland Drive – an unparalleled triumph in my view – was released in 2001; since then he's made some entertainingly loopy shorts and Inland Empire, a three-hour ode to impenetrability that was shot on digital video and struggled to find a distributor . "I'm through with film as a medium," he wrote in a book published two years ago. "For me, film is dead." What ever happened to David Lynch?
He enters, a dishevelled version of himself: the rockabilly hair caving at an angle, the buttoned-up white shirt not as neat as it might be, silvery stubble on his chin. He offers me a coffee – his own brand, of which he drinks at least 15 cups a day – and settles into a battered armchair with a packet of American Spirit cigarettes. The concrete floors turn out to have a practical purpose: you can routinely drop cigarette ash on them without worrying about starting a fire (the chair in Lynch's studio is forever at risk of being buried in butts).
"I just love this camera," Lynch says, in his nasal, deliberate, almost robotically enthusiastic voice. We are looking at a large chiaroscuro nude, which has been printed in two parts and hung on the wall, and Lynch is telling me about his Hasselblad digital. Unbelievable. Thirty-nine million pixels. The camera remembers something like 4,000 pieces of information per photograph. It is machine. It's a machine." A look of delight passes across his face. "It's just a glorious world," he says.
Lynch has been taking a great deal of photographs some of which will be shown as part of the Format09 photography festival in Derby this month – and they have long been a component in his mixed-media canvases. He says he mainly likes to photograph nudes and factories, a curious combination until you see that the factories are defunct, celebrated for their decay and decomposition in a way that renders them organic – like the nudes, they seem stripped bare and almost mortal.
In 2007, the Fondation Cartier in Paris put together a big show of Lynch's artwork spanning more than 40 years. There were Keith Haring-like doodles and sketches on napkins; there were his taxonomic boards: a disassembled fish or pinneddown bees with names like Chuck, Bing, Ralph and Hank; there were large paintings that incorporated clothes, watches and words scrawled in oil paint. Lynch says he is now working on a new series of paintings – though the weather in Los Angeles this week has stalled him somewhat: it's unusually cold and gloomy, and Lynch works outdoors because he tends to use "toxic materials". These particular works include tile glue and cotton balls and, "you know, lightbulbs".
The muscular nature of Lynch's work is not something often associated with him. He's thought to be a reticent cinematic visionary, yet most of his time, when he's not working on a film (and just now he is not), is spent creating these sprawling two-dimensional works involving electric saws, brown sludge and molten plastic. A recent documentary (Lynch (One)) shows him doing this himself, always in his uniform of baggy beige chinos and buttoned-up shirt – the buttons are done even when the shirt is spattered with paint or half hanging out of his trousers. He is more Jackson Pollock than François Truffaut.
"I love paint," he says, in the same mechanical tone he used to describe his camera. "I like watercolours. I like acrylic paint … a little bit. I like house paint. I like oil-based paint, and I love oil paint. I love the smell of turpentine and I like that world of oil paint very, very, very much."
There are two traditional views of Lynch in person: either that he is as weird as his films suggest, or that he's unnervingly, wholesomely ordinary. The fact is, he doesn't like talking about his work. As Chris Rodley writes in his book of interviews, Lynch on Lynch: "Nowadays, a director's commentary on a movie's DVD release is standard issue. For Lynch, this is the very definition of a nightmare situation."
For instance, here is Lynch, when I meet him, on how his films come together. He speaks slowly, as if teaching me the basics of his mysterious art: "Sometimes I get an idea for cinema. And when you get an idea that you fall in love with, this is a glorious day. That idea may just be 1a fragment, but it holds something. It might be a scene, or a part of a scene, or a character, or a way the character talks, a light or a feel ... You write that idea down. And thinking about that idea will bring other ideas in – there's a hook to it. And things start to emerge. And then you see, one day, a script. A script is just words to remind you of the ideas. And you follow that, but always staying on guard, in case other ideas come in, because a thing isn't finished till it's finished. And one day, it's finished."
"Christ!" I thought when I heard this, "What am I supposed to do with that?" In the course of our interview Lynch had made (I felt) a series of didactic yet meaningless speeches of varying length, none of which lent itself to illustrating any particular point. But afterwards I found myself laughing, because I realised he was not so much unforthcoming as bordering on the Delphic. He is – unbudgingly, impenetrably, but nevertheless magnificently – a character of his own making.
In his movies the characters who talk like this – a sort of scattershot guru-speak, in which sayings are either wise or total rubbish, depending on what sticks – are fortune-tellers, random ciphers or mysterious orchestrators of strange plots (the dancing dwarf in Twin Peaks, the Cowboy in Mulholland Drive, the witchy neighbour in Inland Empire). In other words, the most unnatural among the dramatis personae. But when you listen to Lynch you realise they are (in their delivery at least) the most natural, the most like him.
Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana in 1946, and brought up in various places around the US, depending on where his father's job as a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture took him.
"I think his happiest time," Lynch says of his dad, "was when he had the Boise National Experimental Forest. A whole forest to experiment with! Things like erosion, bugs – so many different kinds of bugs – disease … And I loved going into that wood. There were little stands with little houses on the stands, and you'd open up the door and there'd be all kinds of weather equipment in there – little read-outs. It was really kind of great."
If there are two things from Lynch's childhood that have continued to influence him, it's experimentation with organic phenomena and the strangely polarised era that was the 1950s. He loved the jitterbug, the big cars, the picket fences and the sound of planes flying overhead – a child's view of an idyllic time. But the 50s were also about appearances: this very idyll masked warring agendas – things people refused to know and other, often incorrect, things they insisted on knowing.
"All the problems were there," he once explained, referring at least to the atomic bomb, and probably to McCarthy, "but it was somehow glossed over. And then the gloss broke, or rotted, and it all came oozing out." In a now-famous quote published in Lynch on Lynch, he explained that he'd grown up in "middle America as it's supposed to be. But on the cherry tree there's this pitch oozing out – some black, some yellow, and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath."
The reason this has been quoted so often is that it seems an apt distillation of Lynch's imagination – a version in words of the unforgettable image in Blue Velvet of a perfect lawn leading to a severed ear and the insect-ridden earth. For those seeking weirdness in Lynch's life, it's almost a relief to hear that he once asked a vet for a cat's corpse so he could dissect it ( just out of interest), or that he once owned a pickled uterus. But if you understand him as the son of a scientist and a housewife called Sunny, as an experimenter as well as a dreamy fi lmmaker, none of this really seems odd.
The shorthand for Lynch's interest in things is "nerdy" – whether it's cameras, music, weather or the effects of transcendental meditation, which he has been practising twice a day since 1974. But he could be thought of more as an old-fashioned natural philosopher – someone for whom dissection, technology and the unconscious all exist on a single plane of curiosity. When I ask him whether he has visited Thomas Edison's factory, thinking this would be up his photographic street, he replies immediately: "No. I don't like Thomas Edison. I'm a fan of Nicolai Tesla," fervently taking sides about these two 19th-century inventors as if they were contemporary politicians.
In 1967, Lynch was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He had made a painting and he wanted to "see it move". So he projected a one-minute animation onto a sculptured screen and added a siren soundtrack on a loop. The result, Six Men Getting Sick – which was shot on reversal film so has no negative – is mesmerising. Painted heads grow tubes, exposed stomachs and random hands; an x-ray of a torso is added; the ground changes from white to black to red to purple, and fountains of white paint emerge from the heads and spatter the canvas.
It was his next short film, The Alphabet, that gave him "the bug". Then he made a 34-minute film based on a dense, eight-page script (The Grandmother), and by the time he came to shoot Eraserhead, which took four years and became at one point Stanley Kubrick 's favourite film, Lynch had settled on the convoluted logic of a lifetime. The oozing mechanical chickens, the slimy foetal offspring, performing ladies in steaming radiators, dissolving beds, electric hair, a severed head. Even the theatrical, curtained room with a black and white floor – a signature in Twin Peaks – was already there.
Many consider Blue Velvet his greatest picture (he had made the classical Elephant Man by then and the sci-fi curio Dune); others prefer Wild at Heart or the Twin Peaks series, which was justifiably cultish. Lost Highway has fewer fans, and The Straight Story, a faithfully linear narrative, was considered un-Lynchian.
But Mulholland Drive, which so divided critics that serious public rows were had over the film's meaning, is a work of sheer genius. It's like a Lynch movie about a Lynch movie – dream logic imposed onto dream logic, with many of his favourite themes reshuffled to create a new order in homage to Hollywood. Yet it's possible that, having disassembled the grammar of cinema so fruitfully, he has committed – perhaps condemned – his films to be forever broken down, re-syntaxed.
Mulholland Drive was originally made as a pilot for a TV series, like Twin Peaks. But the ABC executive who was to decide whether or not to commission it watched the pilot at six in the morning while having a coffee and making some phone calls. He turned it down. Lynch eventually made it as a film, of course, but years later, inspired by the intuitive way he'd worked on Mulholland Drive, he dived into Inland Empire, which stars Laura Dern, Justin Theroux and Jeremy Irons, shooting it "scene by scene, not knowing". The Lynch documentary observes him mid-experiment. At one point he says: "I'm so depressed I don't know what I'm doing." The result was, in his own description, "the kiss of death for a distributor".
I ask him if he ever worries that he won't get funding.
"No," he smiles benignly, "I don't care." Then he explains: "See, a painting is much cheaper than making a film. And photography is, you know, way cheap. So if I get an idea for a film, there are many ways to get it together and go realise that film. There's really nothing to be afraid of."
Is there a future in filmmaking that's funded differently, I wonder?
Lynch says it's distribution that's difficult. "Now there's the internet, you can distribute anything. The problem is, how do you get money for it? … It's gonna be very tough, coming up."
Are you in touch with a younger generation of filmmakers? I ask.
Lynch smiles. "No, I'm not in touch with an older generation! ... People think in Hollywood there's a family, where everybody gets together talks about stuff and we all know each other, and it's just not that way at all to me."
"How is it to you?"
"I like to work, so how it is, is work."
"But you meet people in the evenings, presumably?"
Lynch laughs and splutters at the thought. "I don't meet anybody! How would you meet anyone? – you gotta go out. Where are you gonna go?"
Lynch has a gratifyingly wicked sense of humour. It comes on slowly, then pans out into a big, boyish smile.
As it happens, Lynch doesn't seem to have a problem meeting new people. Last week, he got married for the fourth time – to a 26-year-old actress named Emily Stofle, who appeared without many clothes in Inland Empire. (Lynch's long-time composer-collaborator Angelo Badalamenti calls me from Beverly Hills on Friday morning, after "a late night of lots of champagne".) I'm not the first to wonder how someone who is so evangelically "blissed out" can live through the un-bliss of three divorces (he has a child from each marriage) and a well-publicised break up with Isabella Rossellini. To this Lynch will only say: "We live in the field of relativity. Things change."
On the subject of bliss, though, I inquire about the David Lynch Foundation, founded in July 2005 , which aims to spread the teaching of transcendental meditation in schools – encouraging, by extension, world peace. (The so-called "Maharishi effect" decrees that if the square root of 1% of any population practises transcendental meditation, it will produce measurable improvements in the quality of life, "thus creating sustainable world peace".)
"It's having incredible success," Lynch says proudly. There are now 20 schools – some of them once the worst in their state – that practise TM as a school twice a day. "The teachers say: Billy now is focusing. The students are sleeping better at night, they've got way more energy, they start liking themselves."
In contrast to many other things, "diving within" – or the "unbounded, infinite, eternal, immutable, immortal level" of experience – is a subject about which Lynch could speak forever. "Before I started, I thought maybe it was some kind of mind control," he admits. But when he was given his mantra and began, "It was as if I was in an elevator and somebody had cut the cable. Pooooookkkhhh! Into the thickest, most beautiful bliss ever. And I said: 'Where has this experience in life been?'"
"How young can you start?" I ask. Lynch's assistant has told us it's time to stop and we're getting up from our seats.
"You can get your walking mantra when you're old enough to keep a secret," he says, adding, "Five or six."
I'm not sure I'm old enough to keep a secret now, I mutter.
Lynch seems mildly amused. "You're old enough."
He shakes my hand and smiles that neighbourly smile. But he doesn't say "Goodbye" or "Nice to meet you." Instead, in a tone that suggests both a father in a 1950s TV series and an otherworldly being who may know more than you care to contemplate, he says: "Stay outta trouble, Gaby."
Then he picks up his cigarettes and walks toward the door.
Lynch pins: a director's life
Early life Born in Montana, 1946 . Father a research scientist and mother an English tutor. Lynch attended Boston School of Fine Art for a year before embarking on a failed trip to Europe. He later graduated from art school in Phildelphia, Pennsylvania, the city which inspired 1977's Eraserhead.
1980 Earns Academy award nominations for best director and best adapted screenplay for The Elephant Man.
1984 Directs Dune, a hugely expensive commercial and critical disaster.
1986 Blue Velvet released.
1990 Directs Wild At Heart and cult television series Twin Peaks.
1997 Lost Highway
2001 Mulholland Drive
Personal life Lynch has been married four times and had well publicised affair with the actress Isabella Rossellini in the 80s. He has three children from different mothers. Recently remarried, he now lives with his current wife, the actress Emily Stofle, in Los Angeles.
He says "If you stay true to your ideas, film-making becomes an inside-out, honest kind of process. And … there's a chance that people will feel that, even if it's abstract."
Isabella Rossellini on Blue Velvet "David Lynch came out of it a genius, and I came out of it a fat girl … the only comment I get about the part is the way I look."
