Printer-friendly versionFour-time Academy Award nominee David Lynch, director of such contemporary classics as The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, is currently touring colleges around the U.S. to extoll the virtues of transcendental meditation. In preparation for his speech to Philadelphia students at Harrison Auditorium next Wednesday, Sept. 28 he talked to Street about his life, his films and, of course, transcendental meditation.
Street Film: Let's start by talking a little bit about yourself.
David Lynch: Well, I grew up in the Northwest, and I went to high school in Virginia.
SF: What inspired you back then?
DL: You know everything was sort of inspiring; I was always loving to paint and draw, but I didn't think that adults could do those things. That was in Virginia, when I met a friend whose father was a painter and that changed my life. So I was headed toward being a painter, and painting led to film.
SF: You spent a few years here in Philadelphia, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts. What did you learn there, what were your experiences?
DL: I had a love-hate relationship with Philadelphia, and I've said very nasty things about that place. It was one of the sickest cities in the world when I was living there, and it's supposed to be The City of Brotherly Love. I think transcendental meditation will make it that.
SF: What made it so sick?
DL: I saw hate, anger, corruption, unrest, sorrow, depression, anxiety ... you know, I saw a lot of negativity in Philadelphia, and I felt the fear of Philadelphia so strongly that it took a full year, after I got Los Angeles, to lift.
SF: You studied quite a lot, first in Philadelphia and later at the American Film Institute. Sometimes, when artists go to school for too long, they become too refined -- yet that's not something that characterizes your work. It's always raw and distinctive. How do you achieve that?
DL: We're all different, at least on the surface, and school, I think to me, can be a place of inspiration. But for me the learning was always in the doing. I like to make things and, in making things, ideas start flowing. Transcendental meditation, for me, makes that flow even more, and it makes it flow deeper. Things like intuition start growing, the joy of doing starts growing, energy starts growing, more and more and more, as the negative things recede. Transcendental meditation has been a huge thing for [my] creativity.
SF: So you're passionate about TM because it helps you focus?
DL: Exactly, focus is the key word. Where the attention is, that becomes lively, this ability to focus and this knowingness that grows by diving within and experiencing that field of unity within, that intuition. This is a huge tool in film-making and in every avenue of life.
SF: How did you discover TM?
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