‘My ideas just come to me, like fish’
As the iconic drama ‘Twin Peaks’ returns to our screens, John Hiscock enjoys a surreal encounter with its creator David Lynch
David Lynch is recalling a day in 1981 when, he says, he “rescued” five Woody Woodpecker toys that he saw hanging up as he drove past a petrol station. “I screech on the brakes, I do a U-turn, go back and I buy them and I save their lives,” he says seriously. “I named them Chucko, Buster, Pete, Bob and Dan and they were my boys and they were in my office. They were my dear friends for a while but certain traits started coming out and they became not so nice.”
Looking straight ahead, he says with a grim finality: “They are not in my life any more.”
It is a story like much of his work – idiosyncratic, mysterious and with an inconclusive ending. Or, in other words, “Lynchian”.
We are talking in Beverly Hills shortly before the 71-year-old filmmaker is due to leave for Cannes with the first two hours of his 18-episode return to Twin Peaks. Essentially an offbeat and hugely inventive whodunnit, the original two series (which aired in 1990 and 1991) saw FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle Maclachlan) visit the titular lumber town to investigate the death of prom queen Laura Palmer, and the first especially was a huge critical and commercial hit. Lynch’s reboot, on Sky Atlantic, now sees Cooper marooned in the infernal Black Lodge, with plenty more characteristically bizarre goings-on besides.
Lynch hasn’t taken a full feature to a film festival in more than 10 years, since going to Venice with his digital phantasmagoria Inland Empire, which he cheerfully concedes was “a three-hour film that no one understands”. He’s has had mixed experiences at Cannes over the years, winning the Palme D’OR for Wild at Heart in 1990, and two years later hearing his Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me being roundly booed. “It was a horrible thing,” he says with a smile. “It’s a lively crowd of cinema lovers and you never know what to expect. It’s a real celebration of cinema, and its very important and very beautiful.”
He spent five years creating the new Twin Peaks with his co-writer and collaborator, Mark Frost. “I love the world of Twin Peaks, and I would think about it fondly and sometimes would wonder what people were doing and wonder about how things were left,” he says. But I didn’t really think of going back into the world until Mark Frost invited me to lunch and we started talking.”
The early episodes have received decidedly mixed reviews. “You don’t know what will happen until you release something into the world. It’s out of your control. So it was a big surprise that Twin Peaks travelled around the world and people really liked it. And now, going back in, the rule was to follow the ideas, be true to the ideas, do it as well as you can, and when it’s finished, you release it. And there’s nothing you can do. You just do the best job that you can.”
His body of work, containing as it does babbling dwarfs, ominous red curtains and episodes of hideous violence, has variously been described as “weird”, “trippy”, “bizarre” and “twisted”, so it is no surprise that David Lynch himself comes across as a strange and occasionally baffling man. Plain-spoken yet inscrutable, he is cheerful and friendly yet enigmatic and brusque at times. Much like his work, he defies a tidy description.
More of a surrealist artist than a traditional filmmaker, he also composes songs and music, has produced several albums, makes wooden sculptures, has exhibited his paintings, drawings and photographs around the world, designed a nightclub in Paris and founded a coffee company.
He says he loves cinema, but adds: “I have not seen anything for years, and I am not really a movie buff. I love to make them, but I don’t really see a lot of films. And I don’t watch much TV, except I have been watching this Velocity Channel, where they have car shows and customise and restore cars. I have learnt so much – the metalwork and the upholstery and the engine work that these guys and gals do is thrilling to me. A lot of these people are real artists.”
Born in Missoula, Montana, the son of a research scientist father and English teacher mother, Lynch could have been a professional musician and as a child was a talented trumpet player. “I would have kept playing the trumpet but, at high school, if you are in a band or the orchestra, they make you come to school early in the morning and practise marching for football games,” he says. “And I said, ‘I am not doing that.’ So I had to give up the trumpet.”
Lynch went to art school in Pennsylvania and came into the world of cinema through painting. His first movie, in 1966, was a one-minute animated loop of six men throwing up. A little later came the 30-minute short The Grandmother, about a lonely boy who grows a loving grandmother in his basement. Then, over a five-year period, he created the nightmarish Eraserhead, which, on its release in 1977, propelled him to the forefront of the avant-garde film movement. However, his first foray into big-budget filmmaking, 1984’s Dune, was a notorious critical and commercial flop.
He has, though, had his fair share of praise from mainstream Hollywood. The Elephant Man (1980) was nominated for two Oscars, for writing and directing, and he won another Best Director nomination for Blue Velvet in 1987. Wild at Heart and The Straight Story were also relatively accessible (for him), but he returned to form in 2001 with Mulholland Drive, a dystopian look at the dark side of Hollywood, which marked his last appearance in Cannes until now.
Married and divorced three times, and romantically involved with Isabella Rossellini in the late Eighties and early Nineties, Lynch has three grown-up children and he married his fourth wife, the actress Emily Stofle, seven years ago. For more than 40 years, he has been practising transcendental meditation and he has formed the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-based Education and World Peace, dedicated to helping troubled children through meditation. Ten years ago, he embarked on a two-year global speaking tour that took him to 30 countries to talk to mostly college-age audiences about meditation, creativity and peace.
“Yes, I practise transcendental meditation, which is a technique brought back by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,” he says. “It’s a technique to effortlessly dive in and experience the internal level of life. It is so blissful to transcend and it’s an all-positive area within every one of us human beings, and when we transcend and experience that, we infuse some of that all-positivity and the result is that negativity starts to lift away and it’s like bringing in the gold and saying goodbye to garbage.”
A few years ago he was quoted as saying he would never make another film. Now, he says: “No I never really said that, but they interpreted it that way. For sure, I’d make another movie if I got an idea. See, to make a film or anything, you have to get an idea that is thrilling enough to get you out of the chair and go to work. And so if I get that idea, for sure I would do it”.
To David Lynch, silence is important: “It’s so powerful and it’s so missing in the world,” he says. “I don’t like phones. They’re a disturbance and every time the phone rings and you know it’s for you, it’s a torment. And I don’t like email. So it’s a world of disturbances.
“I love daydreaming. It’s getting harder to do because there are so many distractions, but sometimes ideas can come by just sitting and thinking and daydreaming. Or you can just walk down the street and an idea will come. You never know. I don’t know what triggers them, but ideas come in. I can’t take credit for any of them. They come from outside. They come into the conscious mind and they show themselves to you. It’s like a fish: the chef doesn’t make the fish, the chef just cooks the fish. And it’s the same with the ideas. They come along and you don’t know how, and they pop in and they are thrilling to the person who gets them. So it’s all about just catching ideas.”
But, even if he catches them, he bemoans, now is not a good time for independent filmmakers.
“It’s not like with the French or Italian New Wave of the Sixties, for instance, when it was a glorious time for the art houses which were getting more business than the regular theatres,” he says. “And it was beautiful. People were really experimenting. And then it changed. Now the art houses are gone, and what’s in the theatres is what a lot of people want, and it’s a business.”
But then he brightens. “It could come back,” he says. “I am off to the Cannes Film Festival and that is a festival that celebrates cinema.”
‘Twin Peaks’ is now on Sky Atlantic