David Lynch mastered the art of the interview

Film directors can totally get away with being enigmatic. They don’t usually appear in the products of their work, and often we don’t even feel that we fully grasp the exact shape or extent of their involvement in them. But when we consume that product, if it’s a good one, we have questions.

David Lynch is a man whose work raised a lot of questions. And, in what represents an enormous blessing for us all in the wake of his passing, he was often willing to answer them. Not just that, he made an art of answering them.

Part of this is just that he had a lot of interesting things to say about the medium of film, and about creative practice more broadly. Of ideas, he said, “I think they exist like fish – I believe if you sit quietly like you’re fishing, you will catch ideas. The real beautiful big ones swim kinda deep down there, so you have to be very quiet and wait for them to come along.”

In another interview, he described ideas as “like a seed… and then it explodes, like it’s got light and electricity connected to it… then the thing is translating that to some medium.” Fish, seeds – he could be a little abstract, a little kooky, but the sincerity with which he would genuinely try to explain his own original, deeply-considered ideas about the creative process was so much more generous than it ever needed to be.

That said, he was careful not to give everything away. After being asked by a journalist once to elaborate on his statement that Eraserhead was his most spiritual film, he simply replied, “No, I won’t.” But this wasn’t unkind, or obtuse – he issued his response with a trademark grin peeking out of the side of his mouth. He made his response funny, and it seemed to matter to him that it was funny, instead of rude or dismissive, while still conveying what he wanted to convey. That some thoughts must remain his own.