I let the actors work out their ideas before shooting, then tell them what attitudes I want. If a scene isn’t honest, it stands out like a sore thumb.
Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way we make heads or tails of it is through intuition. Intuition is seeing the solution – seeing it, knowing it. It’s emotion and intellect going together. That’s essential for the filmmaker.
Many of the things I see in the world seem very beautiful, but it’s still hard for me to figure out how things can be the way they are, and I guess that’s one of the reasons why my movies tend to be open to many different interpretations.
When you finish anything, people want you to then talk about it. And I think it’s almost like a crime. A film or a painting – each thing is its own sort of language and it’s not right to try to say the same thing in words. The words are not there. The language of film, cinema, is the language it was put into, and the English language – it’s not going to translate. It’s going to lose.
What you’re reading here is basically a person having a conversation with his own biography.
Never turn down a good idea, but never take a bad idea. And meditate. It’s very important to experience that Self, that pure consciousness. It’s really helped me. I think it would help any filmmaker. So start diving within, enlivening that bliss consciousness. Grow in happiness and intuition. Experience the joy of doing. And you’ll glow in this peaceful way. Your friends will be very, very happy with you. Everyone will want to sit next to you. And people will give you money!
If we didn’t want to upset anyone, we would make films about sewing, but even that could be dangerous.
Stay true to yourself. Let your voice ring out, and don’t let anybody fiddle with it. Never turn down a good idea, but never take a bad idea. And meditate.
I don’t necessarily love rotting bodies, but there’s a texture to a rotting body that is unbelievable. Have you ever seen a little rotted animal? I love looking at those things, just as much as I like to look at a close-up of some tree bark, or a small bug, or a cup of coffee, or a piece of pie. You get in close and the textures are wonderful.
I love the French. They’re the biggest film buffs and protectors of cinema in the world. They really look out for the filmmaker and the rights of the filmmaker, and they believe in final cut.
In Lynch’s realm, America is like a river that flows ever forward, carrying odds and ends from one decade into the next, where they intermingle and blur the dividing lines we’ve invented to mark time.
Cast as Lucy Moran, the eccentric secretary at the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department, Kimmy Robertson recalled the shooting of the pilot as “heaven. It was pure fun, and there were silly things with David that were magical to me. If I asked him nicely, he let me run my fingers through his hair. The hair that grows on top of that head and what’s inside that head – you can feel that in his hair. David’s hair does something and it has a function and the function has to do with God.”17.
Stay true to yourself. Let your voice ring out, and don’t let anybody fiddle with it.
Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.
People think anger is an edge, but anger is a weakness that poisons you and the environment around you.
These so-called bleak times are necessary to go through in order to get to a much, much better place.
Human consciousness is too vast to fit between the covers of a book, and every experience has too many facets to count.
I don’t know how I got to that thing of not caring what other people think, but it’s a good thing. The thing is, you fall in love with ideas and it’s like falling in love with a girl. It could be a girl you wouldn’t want to take home to your parents, but you don’t care what anybody else thinks. You’re in love and it’s beautiful and you stay true to those things.
Ultimately, each life is a mystery until we each solve the mystery, and that’s where we are all headed whether we know it or not.
It would be great if the entire film came all at once. But it comes, for me, in fragments... In Blue Velvet, it was red lips, green lawns, and the song – Bobby Vinton’s version of ‘Blue Velvet.’ The next thing was an ear lying in a field. And that was it.
What a great time to be alive if you love the theater of the absurd!