David Lynch: Climbing the 'Peaks' The cult-cinema director looks back on his landmark ''Twin Peaks'': How ABC ruined it, why he'd never work in TV again, and what, exactly, Agent Cooper is doing today. By Jeff Jensen | Oct 26, 2007 http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20154190,00.html DAVID LYNCH ''The question of what happened to Laura Palmer was the goose that laid the golden egg. Then ABC asked us to snip the… Image credit: Everett Collection DAVID LYNCH ''The question of what happened to Laura Palmer was the goose that laid the golden egg. Then ABC asked us to snip the goose's head off, and it killed the goose'' ''She's dead...wrapped in plastic...'' With these creepy words — intoned by the late Jack Nance — Blue Velvet director David Lynch and producer Mark Frost launched their deeply beloved, greatly irritating, and widely influential cult-classic TV series Twin Peaks in the spring of 1989. It was a smashing success...for a few weeks or so. Initially, the show became an international phenomenon thanks to its engrossing, aggressively marketed ''Who Killed Laura Palmer?'' mystery, quirky-cool hero (Kyle MacLachlan's pie-loving, coffee-swilling FBI agent Dale Cooper), and Lynch's auteur celebrity and distinctive brand of oddball wit, rich imagery, and atmospheric dread. But soon, viewers began tuning out in droves, alienated by the cryptically-plotted murder investigation, a deep dive into what the hell?! mysticism, and the general appearance of aimlessness. Following an erratically scheduled second season, the bizarre boomtown of Twin Peaks went bust in 1991. Now, after years of delays, due to wrangling over rights to the show's two-hour Lynch-directed pilot (which itself remains one of great artistic achievements in TV history), Paramount is bringing the entire Twin Peaks experience — the pilot, plus the first and second seasons — to DVD. Dubbed Twin Peaks: The Definitive Gold Box Edition (see the EW review), the 10-disc set is loaded with extras, including deleted scenes (a rarity for a Lynch-authorized DVD), the rarely-seen and truly spooky alternate ending to the pilot (created for a featurefilm version that was released abroad), cast and writer episodic commentaries, and documentaries tracking the creation of the series and the unique phenomenon it sparked. Once again, Twin Peaks lives — and it's wrapped in plastic, no less. An excited Lynch recently spoke with EW.com about Twin Peaks from Milan, where he was exhibiting a collection of his paintings. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You know this is a dream come true for Peaks freaks, don't you? DAVID LYNCH: Well, yeah, it's kind of a dream come true for me, too, because the pilot has never been included with the series [on DVD], and now it is. When I interviewed you a couple years ago about the history of Twin Peaks, you told me at that time that you love the whole notion of an ongoing, never-ending story, and that's really what you had hoped to achieve with Twin Peaks. A continuing story, right. Why is that a ''beautiful thing,'' to use one of your favorite expressions? Because you can go deeper and deeper into a world and discover more and more things. A feature film has an ending. A continuing story doesn't. Eventually it could, but it can just go and go and go, and if the ideas keep flowing, it can be pretty thrilling. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: In your imagination, is the Twin Peaks story still going? DAVID LYNCH: Well, yes and no. Obviously, there is a lot more. And there are clues, not only in the series, but in the feature film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me [the poorly received 1992 prequel], that indicate something more, but I've never had a chance to go there. Is there a chance that we could go there again? I don't think so. On the Internet, maybe, but it's a big deal. It's a hungry medium, and it would take 100% focus to go there. In your imagination, what's Agent Cooper doing right now? [Pauses] I'd rather not say. [Laughs] I know ABC asked you and co-creator Mark Frost to wrap up the Laura Palmer murder mystery much sooner than you wanted— About 10 years sooner! [In a previous interview with EW, Lynch revealed that his original plan was to resolve the Laura Palmer murder mystery at the very end of the series. The idea was that the ongoing investigation into Palmer's murder would reveal mysteries within mysteries to be solved, crimes within crimes to bring to justice.] In your mind, does that tarnish the way you personally feel about the Twin Peaks experience? For sure. Like I was saying before, the question of what happened to Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) was the goose that laid the golden egg. Then ABC asked us to snip the goose's head off, and it killed the goose. And there went everything. It was never meant to be — there was so much more to the mystery.... This DVD has many extras — deleted scenes, commentaries, a conversation with you, Kyle Maclachlan and Madchen Amick (who played Shelly the waitress on the show) about the series. But in general, are you an extras kind of guy? Do you like to put that kind of stuff on your DVDs? I believe that a film or a series stands on its own — I believe in the work the most. On the sidelines, extras can be very good. But it's a tricky business. Extras could possibly taint what's most important. But stories about the show or movie, or some deleted scenes — all of that can be good, okay. The conversation I had with Kyle and Madchen — they put us together in a kind of a Twin Peaks setting, and we had some pie together and talked. It was real nice. The cast of Twin Peaks was sensational. And there I was, after a long time, with Kyle and Madchen, and it was nice to go back in time and talk about things. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Twin Peaks introduced the world to your ''fondness'' for many things, including coffee. Last year, you launched your own line of coffee, David Lynch Signature Cup Coffee. How's the business treating you? DAVID LYNCH: It's going good. Every business is tricky. The coffee is very, very good tasting. I drink it every day. I'm looking forward to getting it out into stores. A lot of cinemas are starting to take it, and that's cool — it's becoming like a cinema coffee. And it's fitting, because part of the profits goes to the American Film Institute, which helped put me on the map. So there are ideas in every bean, and great, great taste. Nice tagline! Twin Peaks is an incredibly influential show, and inspired a lot of the great TV that's on today, including shows like Lost. Do you watch much TV? Have you kept track of what's out there? No, I don't watch TV too much. Except when I travel. I haven't seen Lost. You tried to return to TV a few years back with a pilot for a drama set in LA. When ABC passed on it, you famously salvaged the pilot and turned it into one of your most acclaimed movies, Mulholland Drive, which earned you an Oscar nomination for directing. Would you ever be tempted to work in TV again? No. I'd go onto the Internet, because Internet is the new TV. [You can find some of Lynch's experiments in digital filmmaking and storytelling at his website, davidlynch.com.] One last question: did you know that Ray Wise — who played Laura Palmer's demon-possessed father on Twin Peaks — is now playing the devil himself on a show called Reaper? Didn't know that! Ray can play the very, very good side and the very, very bad side of people. I'm glad he's working away — but I hope it doesn't take him down playing the devil. WELCOME TO TWIN PEAKS Serious Soap Text DAVID TOOP .. where the cherry pie is good and the scenery is beautiful, but where there´s an occult evil in the woods, a brothel across the river, and a drug cartel operating from the local roadhouse. Everyone in this American smalltown has something to hide - a retarded son, a secret society, a violent husband, an adulterous affair, a drug habit or a business intrigue. But when the body of a schoolgirl is found on the lakeshore, the deceptions start to unravel. A marriage of two Blues Hill Street and Velvet - the first series of this radical soap had 35 million Americans glued to their screens and ended with a cliffhanger more tense than the shooting of J.R. Ewing... ... Now it´s your time to watch "I feel a little bit strange," says David Lynch. The beginning of a sentence, not a particularly strange sentence in itself, but it captures the moment. We are sitting in a large, L-shaped room. One wall, vast as a drive-in movie screen, is glass; behind it lies the vegetal mystery and darkness of the Hollywood hills at night. Lynch lost his dog to this darkness - eaten by coyotes, he maintains. The room echoes with voices and explosive snaps from a log fire, spearing the cold air, ricocheting off the walls and ceiling. Three items of Fifties furniture occupy the broad expense of the floor, megalithic in their hapless, solitary engagement. Lynch may well have deliberately placed these few chairs at shouting distance from each other in order to make relaxation and intimacy as difficult as possible. "I don´t do too many things deliberately," he says, slopping around his disquieting home on a Sunday night wearing baggy trousers and soft shoes. "That´s strange in a way," he continue. "I sort of know how things should be, for myself. I´m also the victim of many happy accidents. Freddie Francis used to call me Lucky Lynch." It was a happy accident that led him to a collaboration with writer Mark Frost on a television soap called Twin Peaks. The waves of excitement, profligate praise, dismay and skepticism that greete first the content of the series and then its US audience ratings, have been rippling across the Atlantic since the first cherry pie, doughnuts and coffee cult began to emerge. Lynch met Hill Street Blues writer Mark Frost through a packaging project - initiated by the agency they both share. The project - a story about Marilyn Monroe - came to nothing, but Lynch and Frost clicked. "Although this thing about Marilyn Monroe was not a comedy," says Lynch, "I sensed that he had a kind of comic side. I had an idea for this thing called One Saliva Bubble and asked him if he wanted to write it. We put that together and we had a blast doing it. It´s a wacko comedy. It didn´t get made either." Despite this sequence of non-events, their agent, Tony Krantz, pestered them to work on something for television. "Then one day," says Lynch, "we started getting these ideas fro this thing that later became Twin Peaks. It started drawing us in. Then it didn´t matter what it was for. We just wanted to do it. At first, I liked the story and I also liked the idea that it would continue and that it could be like a thing where you could explore this world and keep it going. But at the same time I didn´t really think that it would continue. But every single time we turned around we were getting a green light." Initially, the response to Twin Peaks from ABC-TV, the commissioning network, was cautious but enthusiastic. "They don´t trust themselves," says Lynch. "In TV you can´t trust anything and they learn that the hard way." The pilot of Twin Peaks directed by Lynch, has been available on video since last December, and the series will begin transmission on BBC2 in October. In true Blue Velvet style, it is a story of festering, perplexing, resolutely secret secrets set in small-town America. FBI agent Dale Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan, arrives in the rural logging town of Twin Peaks to investigate the murder of a teenage girl. To most of the 51,201 residents of Twin Peaks, the killing makes no sense, but clues begin to emerge which suggest pornography, drugs, dark rituals, torture and serial murder. Agent Cooper operates with an unsettling blend of robotic charm, Tibetan mysticism and social brutalism; his attention is divided equally between appreciation of "damn fine coffee", the native cherry pie and wildlife, or his talent for inspired, perhaps psychic deduction. "You know why I´m whittling?" agent Cooper asks local sheriff Harry S. Truman as they sit together on a stakeout. "Cos that´s what you do in a town where a yellow light means slow down and not speed up." "I love a small town," says Lynch. "It has to be a certain size small town. It can´t be too small. It has to be big enough so that you don´t know everybody and yet there´s these pleasant places and then strange secrets and sickness there as well." Growing up in Montana, Idaho and Washington, Lynch found his occasional childhood trips to Brooklyn had a disturbing, contradictory effect. "It was like plugging yourself into the electricity outlet. I couldn´t believe what I was feeling and what I was seeing and it kinda got worse and worse... more fearful and more violence and the air. Now, it´s just thick in the air. It was a very powerful, fearful thing. It was not pleasant but sort of thrilling. I wanted to know about it, but at a safe distance." Did you feel that the places you grew up in were innocent? "Not really," he says. "I know there was just the same sickness. The proportions were the same but the numbers were smaller." As soaps go, Twin Peaks is less bizarre, less remote, than Dallas, Dynasty, or any of their cheaper derivates, yet it is more selfconsciously skewed and disturbing. Lynch ahs received the lion´s share of the credit for this, but Mark Frost´s contribution is evident if we remember the original impact of Hill Street Blues, with its interwoven, open-ended narratives, eccentric characters and moods that veered sharply between pathos and bathos. Some critics have suggested that the whole exercise is a cynical intellectual jibe at popular television. Perhaps it is more to the point to say that Twin Peaks is an elaborate form of pop art which takes the soap opera genre as a subject, rather than the more basic stimuli of early Sixties pop art - comic strip frames, hamburgers, newspaper small ads. "I really like soap operas," says Lynch. "I got hooked when I was printing engravings at art school. This lady I was printing with was just completely addicted to two particular soap operas - Another World and The Edge Of Night - so I got hooked as well. I dug them. The frustrating thing about them is that they draw the smallest torments out forever. It works, but it´s frustrating. It think ours will be a hair less frustrating. We´ll see. We may fall into the same thing." Six other directors have worked on the first series of Twin Peaks, with Frost as the constant factor to keep the original idea on the rails. Lynch´s two-hour pilot, the episode that kicks off the series, has already been released here on home video, though the otherworldly `red curtain´ ending is lopped off for the TV version and reappears later in the series as a dream sequence. In this scene, agent Cooper appears to be in communion with alien beings or embodied spirits. Lynch filmed the whole episode in reverse, with two of the actors speaking their lines backwards and running through their moves from back to front. The mood is as convincingly dissociated from human experience as anything Lynch, or anybody else, has ever shot. Moods are important to Lynch, and he treasures them. "In a day you experience so many little different bits of moods," he says. "I guess what´s kind of strange is that it may just be just a half a second but you get a very strong mood and it makes a big impression on you. You remember it. It´s sort of the way ideas are to me. They hit you, but very quickly. They don´t last long, but they hit you, very hard. If you can remember those moods and stay true to them, you can share those moods with others." Are there specific moods you remember and attempt to reproduce? "I don´t do it specifially," he says. "In Blue Velvet I remember I always was thinking about like a ... not necessarily summer night - it coud have been a fall or winter night. A certain kind of neighborhood and a certain kind of thing where you could maybe just a little bit hear what was going on inside of some houses. I just kept seeing this woman with red lips. Then I kinda put that together with Bobby Vinton´s song and something started happening. I didn´t exactly have tht night in my past, but somewhere the mood cam about from the past. Little pieces here and there had all got together and there was something in my head." Are you interested in dreams, then`? "Not really. I´m interested in some of the strange moods that they instil in me. I´ve had some strange feelings in dreams." Speaking of strange feelings, some of the strangest in a David Lynch creation come from his capacity to generate a sense of dread. It is surprising how rare, almost obsolete, a quality dread has become in contemporary film and television. Dread is not the same emotion or reaction as horror, fright, shock, cardiac arrest, nausea, hypertension or deafness, all of which are adequately catered for by current cinema (though none of them by the ever-diminishing emotional spectrum of TV). Dread is a feeling of real fear that begins in the pit of your stomach and spreads to your bones, your skin, your hair. There are moments in Twin Peaks when dread permeates the banality and oddness: the animal howls of humans in emotional torment; the depiction of a serial murder´s paraphernalia - the evocation of what Lynch calls the tradtion and intelligence of evil; the eidetic mental image of an intruder, dredged from its surpressed place in memory. There are the small, chilling stabs of ice that have more in common with television of the Fifties than the present. Lynch describes his own episodes as "a hair more fearful, and a little bit stranger" than others, and agrees that television has lost its desire for fear. "Some shows were much closer to movies," he says, "and there were things that they did that were very fearful, especially to kids. They´ve stopped doing it now. It´s all kinda plastic and strange. I don´t know. You can get killed on TV. There´s just hundreds of murders on television, but they´re completely bloodless and painless and I don´t know what this kind of thing does to people." The powerfully ambiguous moods that Lynch is so skilled at deploying were at the root of his musical collaboration with composer Angelo Badalamenti. During the filming of Blue Velvet, producer Fred Caruso suggested Badalamenti (a musician who has written songs for Nancy Wilson, George Benson, country star Jerry Wallace and, more recently, orchestrated for the Pet Shop Boys and Dusty Springfield) as an arranger and vocal coach for Isabella Rossellini. Lynch also wanted Caruso to clear the rights to a song. "Fred was having a horrible time getting this song so he came to me with this wacko idea," says Lynch. "He said, `David, you´re always writing these strange things down on paper. Why don´t you call them lyrics and send some to Angelo? Tell him the feeling that you want and he´ll write the song.` I said, `Look, Fred, quit trying to save money, Angelo´s not a magician. He´s a musician.` And Fred said, `I´m gonna get you the song that you want but in the meantime, do yourself a favor. Give it a try.` Lynch claims he sent Badalamenti a column of 40 words, written on an envelope. Badalamenti recalls this incident during a telephone conversation some months after my meeting with Lynch: "He sent me a lyric called `Mysteries Of Love`. It was like six lines of poetry. I called him and asked him, `What do you want me to do with this? What kind of music?`He said, `Make it like the waves in the ocean. Make the music like a beautiful wind and like the song chanting through time. And cosmic.`So I said, `Oh, I´m glad you told me.`" Lynch asked Badalamenti to find him a singer with an angelic voice. Julee Cruise was singing in the chorus of an off-Broadway country musical. Despite being a `belter` with a show voice, she took on the required angelic characteristics. Following this, the curious partnership came up with 40 songs and co-produced the remarkable score for Twin Peaks, "Floating Into The Night", which is, like the score for Twin Peaks, an eerie mix of cool jazz, ice-cream chords, brooding drones and the heavy twang of a "hair more fearful" bass on guitar. If Nino Rota had orchestrated "Pipeline" by the Chantays on opium then it might have come out sounding like this. Badalamenti describes the collaboration with Lynch as "an unbelievable marriage, my second best in the world. We just tune in to each other." Since Twin Peaks and "Floating Into The Night" they have worked together on Wild at Heart, a performance piece entitled "Industrial Symphony #1" and perfume commercials for Calvin Klein and Yves St. Laurent. In David Lynch´s house, another log from the fire goes off like a grenade. Lynch has to rise early in the morning to shoot. "Cinema is a thing where you have to use youre reasoned mind a lot," he says. "But you also have to go into intuition and the subconscious mind too, because cinema can work with those things so nicely." Earlier in the evening he justified the so-called sickness of his work: "The uncomfortable, stranger or sicker aspects should be done in a way that is cinematically thrilling. Then I think that people can see it as a cinematic, magical thing and enjoy all the different elements of the film. If it was just sick for sickness´ sake it wouldn´t be right." The cover image of the Julee Cruise album is a pink doll, maybe a baby or an inflatable sex doll, floating in blackness. Cover designer Tom Recchion recalls having been given the doll by Lynch, who had mutilated it into something quite horrible. As I wait for a cab to take me back into West Hollywood, Lynch says, "You should have a chickenshit." He hands me a poster he has designed. Late at night I unwrap it. It is a photograph of a chicken, a spineless chicken, moulded from chicken shit. "This is a real spineless chicken shit," the poster reads, "moving sullenly through its own desolate environment." I grow a hair less fearful. People, September 3, 1990, p-79-84 The brooding filmmaker behind TV´s Twin Peaks lives simply, but he´s wild at art By Jim Jerome It takes David Lynch´s limousine just 30 minutes to get from his Hollywood Hills home to the mysterious Pacific Northwest world of Twin Peaks (as re-created on a Van Nuys, Calif. soundstage), and sharing his early morning commute is just about the only way to get the 44-year-old filmmaker alone these days. Lynch is spending the summer filming the TV series` two-hour season premiere, which airs Sept. 30, and the set has been closed tight since a tabloid hit the streets claiming to reveal who killed Laura Palmer. Though show spokesmen insisted the tab was off target, a memo was promptly circulated, ordering all cast and crew members to shred their script pages at day´s end in order to prevent future Peaks leaks to "newshounds and fanatics" sifting through Dumpsters, and the elusive director virtually dropped out of sight. Lynch must be caught on the fly it at all. The other is that the brazenly offbeat soap Twin Peaks, with its 14 Emmy nominations, has helped turn one of Hollywood´s least-ready-for-prime-time players, the avantgarde director of films like Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, into the hottest, busiest property on town. Lynch´s new movie, Wild at Heart, opened Aug. 17, and he is about to launch a multimedia assault on the American mainstream. In the works are a new series for the Fox network and a slew of Peaks-inspired products (cherry pies and ties like those worn by Dr. Jacoby, the series´ weird shrink, were discussed as possibilities). A series sound track and a home video of his macabre Industrial Symphony No.1 performance piece (both composed with Peaks´ Angelo Badalamenti) will soon be released as well. "Working at this speed is unusually intense, but I really like it," says Lynch, setling back for the daily drive to Van Nuys. "It gets kind of crazy." And kind of crazy is what David Lynch does best. Since his first feature-length film, Eraserhead, a nearly silent black-and-white tragicomedy about a hapless father trapped in a room with his wailing, mutant newborn, Lynch has been serving up celluloid worlds in which the bizarre lurks just below the surface of the mundane. Blue Velvet, voted 1986´s best film by the National Society of Film Critics, was a surrealistic murder mystery that was set in motion with the arresting sight of a severed ear in a field. Lynch´s disquieting dreamlike style was less pronounced in The Elephant Man, 1980 (which earned eight Oscar nominations) and Dune (his only directorial flop, in 1984). But Wild at Heart, loosely adapted from a novella by Barry Gifford and starring Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage, may be Lynch´s weirdest offering yet. A "violent comedy, a love story in a twisted world" (by Lynch´s description) that includes freak-show cameos and a fatal head bashing to heavy metal music, it won the Palme d`Or at Cannes this spring. "There are certain things you can do in films that you can´t do on TV, obviously," says Lynch. "Wild at Heart goes to extremes - it´s not a film for everybody. But as shocking as some things in it are, they´re based on the truth of human nature, and there´s a lot of humor and love wrapped up in that." Domestic critical response to the movie has been mixed, but whether it´s a Palme or a bomb, Wild at Heart is sure to add to Lynch´s mystique as the cinema´s reigning Wizard of Odd. Not that he looks the part. A Montana native, born in Missoula, Lynch was an Eagle Scout at the Kennedy inaugural in 1961, and he still exudes a disarming heartland earnestness. He has yet to outgrow his upbeat boyish lingo ("you betcha", "neat", "cool"). He dresses like an overgrown schoolboy, in khakis, cap and longsleeved shirts buttoned to the neck - a look that almost never varies, even though by 9 A.M. it´s nearly 100 [degrees] F in the San Fernando Valley. ("I have an eerie kind of feeling about my collarbone," he once said, explaining the buttoned-up look. "Just a breeze on it is sometimes too much for me." Lynch values constancy in other aspects of his life as well. He prides himself, for example, on having consumed, at one point in his life, a chocolate shake and multiple cups of coffee every day at precisely 2:30 P.M. at the local Bob´s Big Boy. Says Mark Frost, Lynch´s Twin Peaks co-creator: "David seems to have fewer moving parts than the rest of us. But they´re from a high-quality watch factory, maybe from off the planet somewhere." At first meeting, Lynch reveals himself as a cagey mix of modesty, well-timed humor - and calculated impenetrability. He knows what you want - cluse to his disturbing, unhinged artistic vision - and finds myriad ways not to surrender them. "I never talk about themes," he snaps. "No way. A film should stand on its own. People talk way too much about a film up front, and that diminishes it." He will admit to reading Kafka for inspiration. He will also muse about how meditation, which he practices once or twice daily, helps give him access to his subconscious. "It expands the container and allows you to sink down and grab those big ideas as they swim by," he says. "An idea goes in a little pop like a spark. Everything is there in the spark. It´s kind of a fantastic process." Actors delight in sharing that process, letting Lynch guide them to new psychic limits before his lingering, voyeuristic camera. He is, says Kyle MacLachlan (star of Dune, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks), "a sound, mood and rhythm director. David hasn´t forgotten the images, fears and desires you have when you´re 10 or 18 or 25. They´re so pure, these images, that they have a lot of impact." Says Laura Dern, who played girl-next-door Sandy in Blue Velvet and in Wild plays the gum-snapping sex-bunny Lula: "All he´d say to me was 'More bubble gum, more wind,' and wind came to mean more mysterious, more eerie. David´s greates gift is that he sees making a movie like a trip to Disneyland." Lynch´s 22-year-old daughter, Jennifer, who was written a Twin Peaks companion book entitled The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer and is a budding director herself, offers further insights. "My father makes films about what he knows with certainty," she says. "He knows feeling lost, he knows the white picket fence with strange things behind the door, he knows passion, and he knows extremes of light and dark. Not Amityville Horror satanic dark, just darkness in the purest sense." He learned it all, somehow, growing up around Spokane, Wash. and Boise, Idaho. His father, Donald Lynch, was a forest research scientist with the Department of Agriculture; his mother, Sunny, was a housewife. David spent childhood summers hunting rabbits in the Idaho sagebrush and playing in western woods full of the same mystery that seems to linger in the fog around Twin Peaks. He found schoolwork uninspiring and retreated to imaginary worlds through his drawing. When he was in his teens, he, his parents and his brother and sister relocated to Alexandria, Va. There, Lynch had "a kind of happy persona," but discovered that "all the thrilling things just happened just after school or between classes. It added up to some sort of pitiful joke - so constricting it would drive you nuts. It inspired me to try to break rules. Behind it all, I was getting it together to be a painter." It was while studying art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia that Lynch began experimenting with film, animation and kinetic sculpture. The urban decay around him served as inspiration. "I loved Philadelphia," he says. "The most corrupt, fear-ridden city I´ve ever seen. It´s one of my major film influences." In 1967, he married fellow art student Peggy Reavey; daughter Jennifer came along the next year. In 1970, a 35-minute live-action-animated feature called The Grandmother - about a lonely, abused boy whose deceased grandmother sprouts back to life from a seed planted in his bed earned Lynch a place at the American Film Institute´s Center for Advanced Film Studies in L.A. He spent the next five years making Eraserhead - five years of guerilla filmmaking at its hungry, resourceful best. He supported himself and his young family with such odd jobs as a paper route: "$9.80 a night was not a thrilling rate, so I was pretty depressed," he says. "But I worked it to where I was shooting the route in one hour, almost to the second - a totally efficient hour. You learn to fold, bag and drive at the same time." Lynch persisted with his filmmaking, but his marriage ended amicably in 1974. (Reavey, remarried, lives in the L.A. area and is a teacher and writer.) Says Jennifer, who will soon direct her own first feature, Boxing Helena: "It was easier for David to handle having a child that could be his buddy rather than a responsibility, because I don´t think he was ready to teach anything to anyone. We grew up and matured together. Now it´s far more best friends than father and daughter. To David, marriage and children have absolutely no place in the art life." For a while Lynch wondered whether he had any place there either. "I got an awful lot of pressure to abandon Eraserhead and do something worthwile," he says, "I just couldn´t. It was frustrating, but also beautiful." The movie was released in 1977 to discouraging reviews. But it quickly found a passionate cult following and also caught the eye of Mel Brooks, who wanted to produce the story of John Merrick, the so-called Elephant Man, and needed a writerdirector. Lynch accepted, the movie was a hit, and his career was on its way. Today, Lynch lives in a posh section of Hollywood Hills, in a spacious, uncluttered home built by Llyod Wright, son of Frank. He doesn´t so much entertain at home, says Dern, as "blast you back into whatever space he wants to put you in" with his Bang & Olufsen stereo. Favorite selections range from Elvis to opera to Muddy Waters. Lynch´s taste in interior decor runs to homemade artworks like "the bee board - real bees pinned to a board with names under them like Hugh, Bart, Sam, Mack and Jim," says Jennifer. "He gets them dead from a bug store." As a father, Lynch has, fortunately, fared better than his Eraserhead alter ego. "I´ve always loved palling around with Jennifer," he says. "We´ve been close since she was born. I heard when she was very young that you´re supposed to put moving colorful objects near [children´s] eyes. It stimulates their brains. I glued all these things onto a matchbook and bent little red matchsticks out and had a little thread, and I´d dangle that in front of her. It seemed to work." Jennifer recalls offbeat adventures with Dad - hanging out at Bob´s Big Boy listening to ZZ Top, building a mud pile with tunnels and clay figures on her mother´s oak kitchen table, crawling inside the wood and plaster "palaces" Lynch built for her, and trekking off to film locations. "He was not your normal dad," she says. "But he´s been the best dad he could be, and we´ve never had a blast." Lynch was married a second time, in 1977, to Mary Fisk, sister of his longtime friend Jack Fisk (a director who is married to Sissy Spacek). David and Mary split some years later, and have a son, Austin, 7, who lives in Virginia with his mother. "Austin´s kind of quiet with a real dry sense of humor," Lynch says. "He´s now using Warren Beatty as his idol - he wants to direct and act." Lynch won´t say much more than that about his private life. Responding to the inevitable questions about Isabella Rossellini, whom he directed in Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart and has dated for four years, he throws up his hands to deflect curiosity. "She´s one of the people David comes to life around," says Jennifer. "His wit sharpens. They smile constantly. I´ve never seen two people have more fun together. But David enjoys his independence. Isabella live in New York, and the distance is probably the most painful part, but it also keeps them wanting each other." The two get together regularly, often at Rossellini´s country home, where Lynch enjoys running his 1942 motorboat on Long Island Sound. It is one of his few relaxations. "Happiness is doing what you really enjoy," he says. "What I do is called work, but I love working in all these mediums." He hasn´t committed to another film yet. But with his directing fee in the million-plus range, he doesn´t have to worry about running out of cash. Not that he would. He recently sold his beloved, perpetually overheated ´58 Packard and now drives a ´71 Mercedes and an old pickup. "I´m not afraid of not having money," he says, and in fact one of the few drawbacks of his current success s the complication it has brought to his life. "I really liked living the way I did during Eraserhead," Lynch says. "I had a TV, a shop with enough wood to build things, a radio, a house, a washing machine. No dryer - the sun dried my clothes, which was amazing. Now I go onto a set with 60 people, and it´s just not the same. It´s harder to feel the mood and settle into it." He will manage, of course. For he still has plenty of skewed fantasies he wants to unleash on the world. "I like things that go into hidden, mysterious places, places I want to explore that are very disturbing," he says. "In that disturbing thing, there is sometimes tremendous poetry and truth."