David Lynch Interview, Total Film, December 1999

	His favourite hobby used to be exposing the dark and seedy underbelly of smalltown America. But his new film, The Straight Story, is the tale of a man travelling cross-country on a lawnmower. Has David Lynch gone sane?
Interview by Damon Wise. Photography by Alistair Thain / Katz Pictures

There`s a scene in an episode of Twin Peaks, David Lynch`s surreal, mystery mini-series, in which Agent Cooper is woken up by a ringing telephone. For no apparent reason, we see that his hair is piled up into a Woody Woodpecker plume because of the way he`s been sleeping. He takes the call - which is clearly serious since this is the middle of the night - but the sheer absurdity of this vertical tuft counterpoints Cooper`s deadpan performance.

Meeting Lynch himself, you can`t help wondering if this happens to him often. Wearing a light, sandy coloured suit, dark shirt (buttoned to the neck, as usual) and no tie, Lynch looks every bit the man you`d expect him to be, possibly even more so. His conversation is wry and funny, peppered with cute Midwestern slang - words like "woulda", "lotta" and "coulda" - delivered in that kind of gurgling Jimmy Stewart delivery.

But it`s the hair that catches the eye, breathtakingly sculpted into an elegant wave, so perfectly curved that you half expect to see a tiny model surfer in there. Lynch famously dislikes interviews but he`s polite, courteous and surprisingly frank about his achievements. Now 53, he`s fully aware that his career has been a switchback ride: from his disturbing debut Eraserhead to the frankly demented Lost Highway, Lynch has been vilified as much as praised. His new film, The Straight Story, is one of his success stories.

A world away from the eerie, perverse Blue Velvet, it stars Richard Farnsworth as Alvin Straight, a cranky Midwestern pensioner who learns that his estranged brother is at death`s door. Alvin won`t fly, won`t drive and refuses to be a passenger in anyone else`s car, so instead he makes the journey. over hundreds of miles and across the state border, by lawnmower. There are no midgets, no foul-mouted substance-abusing maniacs, and, sadly, neither is there Jack Nance, the star of Eraserhead and a key figure in all of Lynch`s movies until his death two years ago.

Nance would have been perfectly at home in Alvin Straight`s rural idyll, a setting that confirms, despite speculation to the contrary, that David Lynch is a homeboy at heart, a romantic American dreamer, not some twisted evil genius. Last night was Halloween, but Lynch spent most of the evening in his room after dinner in the bar. Does he ever do anything special for Halloween? He laughs and shakes his head. "Uh-huh."

You missed the real Alvin Straight by some years. How much of the film is based in fact?

When I read the script, it just didn`t matter to me. What I read came alive in my head and that`s what made me wanna do it - the things I felt from it and the things I imagined from it. Obviously, some liberties were taken. I could`t say what percentage, but a great deal of it is based on absolute truth.

You seem to poke fun at action movies in the film, particularly when Alvin`s hat blows off and, later, the crane shot that sweeps up the road ahead of him. Was that a joke you had on the set?

It`s wrong to say that it`s like a joke. The hat blowing off becomes a major event because of the tediousness of what he has to do. And then going up to the clouds - it`s the idea of just how slow it goes. You could probabyl cut after going up to the clouds, but coming back down ought to be drastically different. But this way it`s the same. Pretty nearly.

The most Lynchian moments of the film are the scenes where the sound cuts out and you can`t quite hear what people are saying in the distance. Why did you do that?

I`ve always loved hearing sound through a little wind and not being able to really understand it. It also makes me a little bit sad. I don`t know, I like the feeling of it. It`s life going on. Someone said it actually pulled them into the movie, but I think you could just sit back when those things happen. What is being said isn`t so important - it`s a feeling. It puts somebody in the landscape, you sorta see the environment differently.

Does it bother you that people are saying this is a departure to you? That peope think of you as being out in a Big Bob`s Diner in a weird world of your own?

This is a weird world! You know, you have to make a world of your own. No world belongs to anybody, really, and you gotta be open to different things. You never know what`s gonna strike you. It would be absurd not to do something different each time. Some things are a little bit more closely united than others, but you just have to be able to go different places. Otherwise you`re cutting off something that could be important to you.

The Blair Witch Project parallels the impact you had with Eraserhead. How do you feel abou not having that power of surprise anymore?

That`s always the way it is. As soon as you`ve done one thing, that part is over. And the next thing you do, no matter how hard you try, becomes the second thing. And always, in the hundred years of cinema, there are two things going on: people wanting to do the things they feel and others wanting to do things to make money. So when something comes along that came out of the right way of working, and it makes hundreds of millions of dollars, it shakes things up in a beautiful way.

The ending of the Blair Witch Project is creepily suggestive, in the style of one of your own movies.

I have yet to see it. But I`m in favor. Endings are extremely important. I mean that`s kinda common sense! [Laughs] And beginnings are and middles are. But I always thought the ending of Chinatown was the most perfect ending.

That`s the kiss of death. Someone told me around that time that you have two years of bad luck. I don`t know whether I made that come true because I heard about it, but it was a bad time after that.

1991, 1992. Somewhere in there. Around the time of Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks.

Well, I loved Twin Peaks. I loved the world of it. That`s all I cared about - going into a world in a continuing story. Mark Frost and I never wanted to solve the murder of Laura Palmer. The second year, I would come back and do something every then and now, but basically I left it because you can`t do everything. I have misgivings about the way it went but I still - and always will - love that world.

It`s interesting that Twin Peaks featured David Duchovny, who went on to make The X-Files, a series that makes a virtue of never solving anything.

Well, I do watch some television. But I usually watch golf. I like to watch golf on TV. A lot.

Oh. I like all the pro golfers, both sides of the Pond. And I just get mesmerized by it. I took up golf a couple of years ago but I`m a pathetic golfer. But I love watching it in the hopes that some of that will rub off, y`know? But I`m painting and working on music, those are the two main things I`m doing now.

Yeah. It`s an incredible room. We mixed The Straight Story in that room. We can record music, mix music, mix film and video. It´s a screening room as well. It`s a place to experiment. Experimenting is what I always wanna do with sound.

Angelo saw her in the street in New York. I think she`s writing songs, but no, I don`t really know what`s becoming of her.

Apparently you used to leave long messages on her answerphone. You`d be going, "Julee...? Julee...? Pick up the phone, Julee..." Did you think she was avoiding you...

Yeah, some of them are absurd. But finding the right absurd one is the key. And I don`t have one right now, `cos I haven`t thought of a good one.

One said: "We`re at the gun store. Get back to ya." People don`t usually leave crank messages when they hear a thing like that.

There was a period in your career when you branched out into the art world. Why did you stop your cartoon strip, The Angriest Dog In The World?

I didn`t drop it, they dropped me! When it first started, there was an editor at the paper - I can`t even remember the name of it - that took it on. The he left and another came in and kept it going. Then that one left, a new one came in and it still kept going. Then the original editor came back and dropped it!

No, no, no! I wanted to keep on going. Because it forced me to think each week of something different, and I ususally focussed on it Monday morning. The I`d phone the dog in and they`d fill in the balloons. So thinking about the dog and phoning in the dog was sort of a Monday morning thing, and I liked doing it.

Yeah. I felt after the screening that there was a feeling in the room that I hadn`t felt before. It was a feeling of people being together. And it was a warm feeling. And that was worth it for me.

Were you worried that you`d gone too far with Lost Highway? You said earlier that endings are important but Lost Highway doesn`t give one.

But that`s important! I mean, it ends there! That`s a beautiful ending in my book.

People have different interpretations. But abstractions exist around every corner in so-called life, and these are things that make us start thinking. The we, being like detectives, start looking more closely at certain things, and wondering. So sometimes the experience of watching film, when things are abstracted, engages the mind and the emotions. Like, insanity is so abstract that people still don`t know what it is or how it can be undone. It`s an abstraction, so how can you understand something that`s not understood? But you can experience it and start thinking about it. And one person`s evaluation is just as valid as someone else`s .

Do you ever expect anyone to show your pilot for Mullholland Drive, the mini-series you started making for the ABC network? Or have they killed it?

Yeah, I heard about that,. But I think they only about three signatures or something.

I`m not happy with it. What`s wrong with it is that a pilot plants seeds. I mean, it focuses on certain things but at the same time plants some other things. And I took my seeds out. Plus some critical scenes as well, and the scenes I didn`t cut I had to butcher down to get to this arbitrary 88 minutes. And I`m sick about it, and I don`t even know what to do. `Cos there´s a version floating around and it`s not right.

In the correct way, but I don`t think that could happen. I could be hopeful but I don`t know what will happen.

If you never made another movie would you mind? Or do you need to make movies?

Oh, no, no, no. I could easily keep going without. But I love it if I fall in love with the subject. I`m hoping that will continue to happen.