David Lynch: 'Sometimes the fish talks back to you'
If you thought David Lynch's films were weird, just wait till you hear him
sing. Xan Brooks catches up with the surrealist maestro in the Paris workshop
where he's plotting his next creative masterstroke
Xan Brooks
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 3 November 2011 17.30 EDT
['Drink all the damn coffee you want!' ⦠David Lynch in a printing studio in
Paris. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian]
Tear up the notepad and throw out the questions: this road map is getting us
nowhere. Across the table, David Lynch appears to be gently yay-and-naying me
to death. "Yes and no," is his reply to my first query. "No, well, maybe," is
how he greets the second. I feel as though I'm stuck on my own personal stretch
of Mulholland Drive, going round and round in an endless loop.
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All of which is oddly reassuring. We go to Lynch for severed ears and nightmare
rabbits, dancing dwarfs and haunted radiators. We look to him for worlds that
are wild at heart and weird on top. Straight answers and facile interpretations
have never been his bag. There are no rules, he tells me kindly at one stage.
The truth is subjective, we live in relativity and every positive has a
negative side. Sometimes, it seems, in the course of the same damn sentence.
We meet at a lithographic studio on the Left Bank of Paris. There is an
ink-spattered table in the centre and antique printing presses against the
wall, while the far door opens on to a toilet cubicle that is so calcified â"
so positively infernal in nature â" that it may not qualify as a toilet at
all. The director explains that he has been based here, on and off, for the
past four years. He's been working on his lithos, on his painting, and on his
music, too. He's been designing a nightclub (Silencio), across the river, and
he has been waiting to catch the idea for his next feature film. "I'm jumping
around," he exclaims, sitting stock-still on his artist's stool.
He comes dressed for work, resplendent in a sky-blue smock. His face is blandly
handsome, his iron-gray quiff listing slightly to one side. Pass him on the
street and you might take the man for a small-town pharmacist, or a respected
high-school principal on the cusp of retirement. Instead, at the age of 65,
David Lynch has just recorded his debut album. Crazy Clown Time is a swirling
grab-bag of stealthy electronica and black-hearted country blues, its
soundtrack honeycombed with orgasmic whimpers and vocoder vocals. Lynch, it
transpires, sings lead on most of the tracks; spinning tales of sexual
obsession and existential anomie in an acrid wheeze that is perversely
endearing.
Crazy Clown Time shouldn't work and yet somehow it does. In the days before the
interview I listen to the CD again and again: first with trepidation, then with
anxiety, and finally with a creeping kind of relief. Noah's Ark is terrific: a
spare and creepy "song of love". I Know, meanwhile, unfurls as a compelling,
organ-heavy psychodrama. Give it a few more listens and I may even grow to
appreciate Strange and Unproductive Thinking, an epic, unabridged hymn to the
joys of transcendental meditation. "Bliss," Lynch sings. "Which is the result
of the laws which govern physical behaviour merging with the highest levels of
spirit and together manifesting the magical and mystical level of cosmic
awareness." Say what you like, you don't get that on The X Factor.
I ask what possessed him to sing the songs, and he chuckles in delight. "That
sounds like a value judgement: 'What the hell were you thinking, buddy?'" He
pauses to consider. "It's a bunch of stuff. You might get someone else, an
actor, to play a role. But then there are some roles where you think: 'I want
to be that person. I want to go into that world.' So I wanted to try. I wanted
to see whether I could nail it, assuming I could overcome a lot of fear and
embarrassment and find a safe place to work from. But yes, there's a lot of
fear involved. It's very fearful."
Is fear an important motivating factor? "No," he says firmly. "Well, in a way
it is."
Certainly, it has been a constant drumbeat in all his work. Films such as
Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive come fuelled by a
fearful fascination with the unknown, with what lies beneath, with a peculiarly
American strain of darkness. As a child, he says, he was intrigued by the black
pitch that oozed out of the cherry trees and wondered what went on behind the
white picket fences. His sister, he adds, was frightened of peas. "And I can
understand that, because a pea is a complex thing. It has this hard shell, but
then it's soft inside. It's the dual nature that made it unsettling for her."
Writing a song is much the same as writing a film, he explains. It's all about
chasing ideas; about telling a story or letting the story tell you. And this,
it turns out, is about as far as he is prepared to go in discussing his working
method. "Because none of the things are yourself, not really. The ideas come
from someplace else. It's like fish," he says.
What's like fish? "The ideas," says Lynch. "You didn't make the fish. You
caught the fish. Now you can cook it in a good way or a bad way, but that's as
far as it goes. The fish came from someplace else. And sometimes â¦" His eyes
take on a faraway look. "Sometimes it talks back to you. Tells you how it wants
to be cooked."
I'm guessing it all comes back to transcendental meditation. The director began
meditating on the set of his debut feature, Eraserhead, back in the 70s and
recently wrote a book (Catching the Big Fish) about the influence of TM on his
creative process. Ask him about specific films, songs or paintings, and Lynch's
responses come swathed in shadow. Shift him on to the subject of transcendental
meditation, however, and it's though the lights have come on. It's beautiful,
he insists. We're beautiful. Happiness lies within. Enlightenment is our
birthright.
Is it pedantic to note the obvious paradox here? Fair enough that Lynch, via
the magic of TM, has achieved an exalted level of happiness and serenity. And
yet out of this blissful state come films (The Straight Story aside) that are
black and twisted and reeking of sulphur. Try as I might, I can't square the
circle.
"Yep," he concedes. "Sure. But it's not so much what you make; it's the lack of
suffering when you make it. There's so much happiness in the dark worlds, or in
translating the ideas that come. And if you can get rid of the negativity that
restricts your energy, it's as though a load has lifted. Then you can dive into
the treasury every day and still more energy comes from that. I mean, you can't
control what people are gonna think about a movie or a painting. So you better
enjoy the doing."
"But," I begin. "If what you dredge up is the dark sludge of the subconscious
â¦"
"It's not the dark sludge of the sub-conscious," he interrupts. "A cinema idea
is simply something that cinema can say and which reflects the world. We live
in a pretty dark and troubling world right now. The ideas are triggered by the
world."
It is at this point that an assistant sidles over with a jumbo-sized cup of
coffee. The director reacts with the excited air of a small boy surprised with
a birthday gift. "What's this?" he exclaims. "What's this? Oh Mindy, bless your
heart."
Time to try another tack. What value does he place on firsthand experience; on
viewing the "dark world" at eye level? In his days as an art student, for
instance, Lynch lived with his first wife (Peggy Reavey) in a run-down area of
Philadelphia. He has described this as an intense and uncertain time in an
intense and dangerous neighbourhood. The Fairmount district, he says, was an
important influence on his art and led directly to the writing of Eraserhead
("my Philadelphia Story"), in which a passive young printer nurses a deformed
baby and spies a miniature woman crooning about heaven from the radiator at
home. Yet Fairmount, I point out, is now a long way behind him.
Lynch nods. "I know what you're saying. But you do not have to suffer to make a
film about suffering. I remember the way I felt inside, when I was living in
Philadelphia. But that didn't help me make Eraserhead. That hurt me, you know.
And in any case, I didn't write Eraserhead in Philadelphia. I wrote it after I
left, and it just came out. I don't even remember the first thing that came,
just that next thing I knew I had a 21-page script. The ideas can come along at
any time."
Lynch shot his last feature film back in 2006. At the time I remember thinking
that Inland Empire might well prove to be the last feature he would ever make:
a demented psychosexual twister; the film in which the director finally shook
himself free from the moorings of conventional narrative and lit out for the
wide blue yonder. Happily this appears not to be the case. Film is dead, Lynch
tells me. It is too heavy, too much of a dinosaur, and its time has largely
past. But digital is alive and well and pointing to the future. He admits he'll
miss shooting on celluloid ("because it's so beautiful"), but is more than
happy to shoot on digital instead â" as and when the opportunity arrives.
Until then he's happy pottering around his studio and slurping his coffee;
painting his spooky black houses and singing his eerie songs of love gone sour.
"I can understand why people might be frustrated with me: 'Let's give up on
these side ventures and go make a film instead.'" He chuckles. "But all these
other things feed into the future. And if the ideas aren't there for cinema,
and if the pressure is on, then you might pick a bad idea and find yourself
forced to marry something you're not totally in love with. So I'm happy to
wait."
By now the bucket of coffee has been drained to the bottom. Lynch reputedly
guzzles at least 10 of these things each day. Once again, I'm not sure it quite
chimes with the image. Doesn't the caffeine get in the way of the
transcendental meditation? I have a mental image of the director hopped up on
beans, buzzing like an angry fly as he recites his mantra on the road to
enlightenment.
"No, no, no," Lynch says, as emphatic as he's been all afternoon. "You don't
have to give up anything! You don't have to live a certain way! You just add
the meditation â" the dive within â" to whatever you want to do. That's the
secret. The big treasury within is the self of all that is. The self," he
stresses. "Know thyself! Embrace that experience and kapow, you're ready to
boogie. You can drink all the damn coffee you want." And with that he's up and
away, gliding back to the bowels of the studio. His smock is flapping, his
hairdo is listing. He has a belly full of coffee and he's off in search of fish.
David Lynch is one of the contributing curators to the exhibition Mathematics
â" A Beautiful Nowhere, at the Cartier Foundation in Paris until 18 March
2012. Details: fondation.cartier.com
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/nov/03/david-lynch-crazy-clown-time)
