Die Woche: The opening sequence of Lost Highway is accompanied by David Bowie`s  I´m deranged. Is that the tone you wanted to achieve with the movie?

David Lynch: It only makes the emotions more powerful and vivid , it begins to shine on the inside of the movie.

Do you use music ironically to irritate the audience?

No. It´s exactly vice versa: I avoid any irony. Otherwise there be a too great distance between the audience and the movie. Fred Madison, for instance, plays his saxophone frenetically to express what he tries to control - his schizophrenia as well as other aspects of his character. Scenes like this are a perfect marriage between sound and image to me,

In Lost Highway you refer to images and motifs of your ealier movies...

I fall in love with figures, themes and ideas like I fall in love with a woman. Sometimes they disappear like a short-lived passion, but others remain silent until a late rendez-vous.

50 percent of Lost Highway reflect what`s going inside the insane imagination of Fred Madison. Do you prefer surrealistic means to logic structures?

No. Maybe my films appear dream-like, but there`s a link [(to reality].  There`s always someone to introduce the audience to the dream or a kind of reality they can cling to. My stories contain enough clues to decode them.

Not this time. Even the press kit offers different ways of interpretation. Lost Highway is presented as a kind of abstract Hitchcock there.

There are different ways to get an access to a film. If you have understood it intellectually you can verbalize it for others. But there`s also a way of emotional understanding, which is hard to put in words. The structure of my movie are similar to dreams. Ii don`t want to explain everything, I rather leave a door open so the dream can go on.

Is it because of this that your characters often long for sex in the obscure?

Sex can be an almost spiritual experience or a descendence to hell. We`re gripped by the visual power until our desires go insane. I find that most thrilling.

What role do the red-light -/ brothel -environments play as present in Lost Highway,  Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks ? Heaven or hell?

Both. You always remember you first stay at a brothel. It`s a lesson almost an education sentimentale. I often observe people with 'clean' backgrounds turing out to be the asolute opposite.

'Home' is a recurrent theme in your movies

Home is the place where anything can go wrong.

Which porn-movies have you watched at home?

I haven`t watched many, they`re all dissatisfying in the end. Interesting question: Is it possible at all to make a satisfying porn? Maybe I should try.

In Lost Highway, the woman who starred in porno movie, is dressed in white at the beginning, the colour of innocence. Do you believe in innocence?

Yes. To me that`s close to frankness and seriousness. Children often have it, but it`s no childish thing. Our environment often forces us to keep for ourselves: Innocence, to me, means being curious and not to judge.

Does sexuality destroy innocence?

Innocence knows many threats, most of all fear and hypocrisy. Concerning my characters, it`s rather their inner struggle than their fall from grace which interests me. They have to leave hell behind to obtain a different kind of innocence.

Are you influenced by your father, an agrar-scientist, in this aspect?

Certainly. He studies diseases of wood and insects. Nature represents this contrast of health and sickness.

So sickness is natural to you?

Absolutely. But it demands observation (laughs) By me?

Interview: Marcus Rothe