“Dream of dark and troubling things.” ~ Fish writer in residence #18.5

OK, just kidding! I have one more nugget I’d love to share, David Lynch in the Egyptian Theatre down in Hollywood, before he showed us the powerfully shot and written Sunset BLVD. You didn’t really think I was going to leave on such a whiny note, did you?

Q: What’s the most beautiful sound you’ve ever heard?

Lynch: “Well, I would say I love the sound of wind. I worked with Alan Splet - great sound man. On an island off Scotland Alan recorded a wind one day and I use this wind a lot. It’s very, very, very beautiful, a mowing wind. I also like the sound of silence.”

Q: What do you think about the current 3D film phenomenon?

“I say, beautiful! Every medium I say is infinitely deep, and every medium talks to us. I don’t know that much about 3D film, but I think through experimentation I’ll start getting a dialogue with this. It’s its own sort of form. I think a lot of the people that are doing 3D are doing it because they want to get people back in the theatres, so that’s maybe not the best reason for doing 3D, but it might be the biggest reason right now.”

Q: You get many ideas when meditating. Has a dream ever inspired inspiration for a painting or a film?

“Nighttime dreams I say have never given me ideas, specific ideas, but I love this thing of dream logic. The way dreams go. I always say cinema can say that dream logic, the language of cinema, so beautiful.

“One time, on Blue Velvet, I had the script almost complete. But it wasn’t complete – certain very key things were needed, and I needed ideas. And I walked in on this day to an office for a meeting in a studio. I don’t remember why I was there. And the outer room was the secretary, and she asked me if I wanted a cup of coffee and to sit down, because I couldn’t go in right away. And I said, sure. I sat down, and immediately remembered the night before I had a dream! And it all was coming back to me and I asked her, Please! Do you have a piece of paper and a pencil?” And she saw the urgency in my face. And she got that right away. I wrote down these things, and that was the completion of the script for Blue Velvet!”

Q: What is the biggest change in cinematography in the last 40 years for you?

“Digital. This thing of celluloid is just extremely beautiful, but this celluloid is kind of like, I say, a dinosaur now. Digital is the new way. Digital is getting better and better. It’s lighter weight – you see what you’re going to get right away and you don’t have to go to the lab. It doesn’t get dirty, it doesn’t tear, it doesn’t get water marks. And there’s so many things you can do to it after you’ve shot it, it’s a beautiful, beautiful thing – a big, big change. The price has come down and more and more people can make films and live in that world.”

Q: What elements of film as a medium are most important to you in creating an immersive sense of place?

“Every element is critical. We get these ideas, and sometimes we fall in love with an idea, and the idea tells us everything. The idea is like, even if it comes in fragments, it’s like a TV showing a fragment of a scene or a fragment of a character or a fragment of a mood. You get all these fragments together and do a script and then you follow that, but you don’t walk away from any element until it feel correct. So alll the elements are so critical, and this film, Sunset Blvd, I always say Billy Wilder, he’s a great, great director. One of things he does so well is make a sense of place. A place. And a world. That when you’re in it it’s so complete and so beautiful … His film The Apartment was that way for me. This film Sunset BLVD. is one of my all-time favourite films. It’s about our town, and it’s in a time when the golden age of cinema was really over, but it still holds so beautifully in this film!

“So every element.”

Finally, David Lynch explains his choices for films during his guest artistic director curation of AFI Fest. Collect ‘em all!

Hour of the Wolf, 1968 - “Bergman’s surreal masterpiece conjures startling experiences.”

Lolita, 1962 - “Staggeringly great performances, direction, writing and mood.”

Mon Oncle, 1958 - “Exquisite, extreme, French ’50s with the big heart and humour of Jaques Tati.”

Rear Window, 1954 - “The best people, the best mood, the best sitting for a murder mystery.”

Eraserhead, 1977 - “Dream of dark and troubling things.”

Sunset BLVD., 1950 - “I want to live in this world.”

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