David Lynch is a unique filmmaker, and one of the most elusive artists in any field. He created his own strange, at times unutterable, language of film in a directorial career that started with 1977's Eraserhead and expanded to include The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Wild At Heart, The Straight Story, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Dr. He redefined what network TV might be capable of weathering with his series Twin Peaks. He put together a personal website full of art and video of him reading weather reports from outside his California house. Lynch's latest offering is Inland Empire, a bracing film that revisits Mulholland Dr.'s metaphysical math and carries it out a few extra decimal places. It was shot on digital video and has thus far been self-distributed—two distinctions that Lynch has described as profound changes to his method. The A.V. Club drank cappuccino and talked in rounds with Lynch when he was in New York for Inland Empire's première.
The A.V. Club: Welcome back from Poland. How is it there?
David Lynch: I was in Łódź, Poland. It's spelled L-O-D-Z, but it's pronounced "Wootch." There's a famous film school there, and it was the textile capital of the world, so there are huge old factories that were built in the 1800s. Incredible. The weather was pretty good when I was there, but they had two days of fog that shut down the airports in Warsaw and a lot of Poland. It has beautiful winter light, low-hanging grey clouds. The architecture and factories and leafless trees—it's beautiful.
AVC: How's the coffee in Poland?
DL: It's surprisingly good.
AVC: How did the idea first strike you to run a Polish folk tale parallel to a Hollywood story in Inland Empire?
DL: It all just comes with ideas. It's like I'm sitting there, empty, and bingo—in comes an idea. It might just be a little, tiny idea, but some of them I fall in love with. I fall in love with them for two reasons: the idea itself, and then what cinema could do to that idea. It always goes by in fragments, and then the whole thing starts revealing itself. On Inland Empire, it started with one or two things that I would write and shoot. I never thought of it as a feature film. I thought of it as a scene or some kind of thing, and I would just shoot it. Little by little, these scenes that didn't relate to one another started… I start getting ideas to relate them, to bring in a thing and find a bigger thing emerging. That's how it went.
AVC: What can cinema do to an idea?
DL: Cinema is a medium that can translate ideas. But wood can translate ideas, too. You have wood and then you get a chair. Some ideas are for different things.
AVC: Does that translation draw out parallels between different ideas that you weren't aware of when you started?
DL: For sure. I wasn't aware of anything. Then, suddenly, you're aware. It's like somebody giving you a puzzle piece without any kind of frame—you get a puzzle piece and then a few more. It doesn't help you much, but you love the little pieces. You don't know if they relate. In this process, hopefully, a feature film script will emerge. And then, one day, you're surprised by how it all comes together. That's how something like Poland could relate to Hollywood. Everything relates—that's the cool thing about it.
AVC: Do you think literally everything relates?
DL: Everything! The ideas go together themselves. I hardly do anything.
AVC: So do you consider it your role as an artist to make yourself open and receptive to these ideas?
DL: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. When you force something, there's a feeling you get when you know it isn't correct.
AVC: Is that feeling the same now as when you started making films?
DL: It's the same, but it happens more smoothly, with more enjoyment.
AVC: Would you describe it as an intellectual phenomenon, or is it something different?
DL: Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business—everything. I think you could have an intellectual ability, but if you can sharpen your intuition, which they say is emotion and intellect joining together, then a knowingness occurs. Feeling correct is a feeling I think everyone knows.
AVC: You've been making films for a long time. Is that feeling really still the same?
DL: Some things get easier, some things get harder. When you make your first film, it's really hard in some ways. You're just nowhere. But then you have something. If you have a success, then you might be looking to take a fall. If you had a fall, you get a certain kind of euphoria because you're not dead, so you can still do it again. It's about how you go through the processes. Do you enjoy that "doing"? Is it getting less fun or more fun?
AVC: Is it still getting more fun for you?
DL: Yeah. There's a way to make it not fun, and that's to give up final cut. Then you can be guaranteed that you'll die the death.
AVC: What were the pros and cons you found in using digital video for Inland Empire?
DL: There were no cons. Only pros. The con would be that the quality is, in some ways, less than film. It's for sure less than film-quality, but it has its own qualities. But all the pros added to that are phenomenal. It's a whole new way to go through shooting where you don't get bogged down in massive amounts of weight and huge loss of time, huge loss of energy, where you're killing scenes because of the slowness and heaviness and oppression.
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