Q&A David Lynch
Source: Boston Globe
Written by Kate Bolick
David Lynch’s public knows him as a deliciously weird antihero with a taste for inscrutable plots and gruesome imagery. But as I learned on a visit to the filmmaker’s house in the Hollywood Hills last week, up close he’s as polite and unpretentious as an Eagle Scout — which happens to perfectly suit the man otherwise known as the head of the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace (davidlynchfoundation.org).
Lynch discovered Transcendental Meditation 33 years ago; he’s been a devoted practitioner ever since. A mental technique introduced in 1958 by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (whom the Beatles famously embraced and then dropped in the 1960s), TM is founded on the idea that we all possess an internal reservoir of creativity and energy — otherwise known as the “unified field” — that can be accessed by sitting for 20 minutes twice a day and repeating a personal mantra. According to the Maharishi’s official website, the practice can reduce stress and reverse the effects of aging. It was scientific research into how TM helps students become more focused and creative, however, that prompted Lynch to establish his foundation last year to raise funds for bringing TM into schools.
But that’s not all Lynch had to talk about. His newest film, “Inland Empire,” a haunting psychological thriller shot with a hand-held digital camera, was released this month, and his first book, “Catching the Big Fish” (Tarcher/Penguin), about meditation, consciousness, and creativity, comes out in January. The book, an unexpected delight, serves as a sort of skeleton key to the rest: In it he muses on the relationship between TM and his work with appealingly nondidactic and non-New Age-y clarity, and in so doing opens the door — a crack, at least — to the heretofore impenetrable mysteries of his imagination.
Lynch and I had coffee in a spare, sunlit room adjoining his studio. His house is actually a complex of three houses that he’s bought and attached over the past 20 years. Swallowed by the stacked landscape and dense vegetation, the hulking concrete and glass structures feel implausibly modest, even unassuming — not unlike the man himself. He’s made of them an intricate kingdom of unfettered creativity, where on any given morning he can be found designing a lamp, tinkering with Photoshop, or creating a painting. “The day is driven by ideas,” he said.