Room to Dream

by David Lynch

  I met people from all over the world in the chat room on my site, and I made a few friends I’m still in touch with. I met this Japanese girl, Etsuko, and sent her a script for a game called Where Are the Bananas? The game centered on phone numbers and you have to try to find these numbers, and when you find a number you dial a beautiful rotary phone and you go somewhere. Etsuko would say, “Where are the bananas?” then she’d say, “This is the view out my window,” and we’d see out her window in Tokyo. Then she’d say, “This is my kitchen sink,” and while you’re looking at her kitchen sink you notice there’s a phone number in the bottom of the sink. You write that down, then you go to the phone and dial it, and you go somewhere. I did the animation for Where Are the Bananas? but I don’t know if it ever got going.

  The only things that stayed current on the site were the chat room and the weather report, so people liked those two things. And all kinds of things went on in the chat room. Toward the end I started this thing called Interesting Questions, and I’d sure like to do that again. It was really interesting and I wanted to ask many different questions, but I only got to ask two before dl.com ended. The first one was: Is there still gold in Fort Knox? Man, people wrote in so much stuff on that! They won’t let anyone in there, and the new generation probably hasn’t even heard of Fort Knox and doesn’t give a shit if there’s gold in there or not. I don’t think there is any, though, and that means that our entire system of currency is based on nothing.

  The second question I asked was: How did a 757 airplane get into the Pentagon through an eighteen-foot hole on 9/11? People wrote in tons and tons and tons. One person who called herself or himself Carol was CIA or a government person, I think, and she would attack people who didn’t believe 9/11 was a terrorist thing. This person was very knowledgeable, too. This other guy, also probably from the government, posted elaborate renderings illustrating how a plane could get into that hole. I said, “Nice try, buddy.” I just asked the questions, then stepped back and didn’t participate in the conversations they triggered, but those two questions generated talk that went on for months.

  * * *

  —

  One day I was out in the street and there was Laura Dern. She said, “David! I’m your neighbor!” I hadn’t seen her for a long time—during the years she was with Billy Bob [Thornton] I never saw her—and we said at the same time, “We’ve gotta do something together!” My dear assistant Gaye had cancer then and was at her husband’s house in Escondido, and every day I’d eat lunch in the studio, then I’d call Gaye. She was always up and cute as a button, and she didn’t seem to have any fear. We’d talk about what she had for lunch and stuff like that, then I’d write on a yellow pad. It took me about two weeks to write the scene for Laura that turned out to be the beginning of INLAND EMPIRE. At that point I thought, This is just an experiment and it may not be anything, but Laura still had to tell her agent, who was Fred Specktor at CAA at that time. Fred said, “Well, I guess so if she wants to do it. How much are you paying her?” I said, “The Internet rate is one hundred dollars,” and he said, “Okay, David, I’m going to pin that ten-dollar check on my wall.”

  We shot the scene with Laura pretty soon after I wrote it. We made a little set in the painting studio and shot on a balmy winter night and it was really quiet. Laura started speaking and we stopped only twice—once for an airplane and once to reload the camera—but those interruptions didn’t break the mood. Other than that it just went, and those were forty-five-minute takes. Laura’s very smart and I don’t think it took her long to memorize it, and she hardly missed a thing. Later, when I looked at the scene on the big screen in the studio I thought, Yes, this is a stand-alone thing, but it also indicates something way bigger and holds the key to everything.

  Later I got another idea but I didn’t know it related to Laura’s scene. I liked it, though, so I shot it, and a little bit later I got another idea that didn’t relate to either of the two things I’d shot. Then I got a fourth idea that united everything, and that started it. After I got that unifying idea, Canal Plus put in money. I don’t know how much they put in. I can do a lot with a little—not super little, but reasonable. These hundred-million-dollar movies are totally fuckin’ crazy.

  I shot the film with a Sony PD150. I’d started it with that camera, and once things got rolling I didn’t want to change the look of the film, so I shot the whole thing with it. I loved my Sony PD150. It’s not good quality, but it’s the quality INLAND EMPIRE lives in. I feel like I’ll never shoot anything on film again. It’s not that I don’t love film, though. Celluloid is like analog in sound. As good as it is, digital seems brittle compared with analog, which is thick and pure and has a smooth power. It’s like the difference between oil paint and acrylic paint. Oil is heavier and I always want to go with the heavy one, but there are things you can do with acrylic that you can’t do with oil.

  Toward the end of the INLAND EMPIRE shoot, a bunch of us went to Poland to film some scenes. I fell in love with that place like you can’t believe. In the summer it’s not so good, but in the winter it’s got a mood and it’s got these beautiful factories and there was this feeling in the air that you could do anything. Laura Dern, Emily Stofle, and Kristen Kerr were there and they had to be dressed in their San Fernando Valley summer clothes for the scenes we shot. It was thirty below and we were shooting outside, so they could only go out for about a minute, tops, because they’d die if they were out longer than that. You could see the muscles tighten up in their bodies the second they got out there, and as soon as we said, “Cut,” we raced them back into the van. We had the heat up full blast, and when they went out they’d stay warm from the van for about three seconds, then they’d have to tough it out. We had this fantastic goulash soup and vodka, and that stuff keeps you alive in that weather.

  INLAND EMPIRE did well when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival. After it screened, we were on a boat at night, whizzing across the water, and I remember feeling so relieved. Laura Dern sat next to Catherine Deneuve, who said she loved the film, which made me feel good. When we got back to the States we went to different cities and sort of four-walled INLAND EMPIRE. I’d get a musician to play first, then I’d read a poem, then the film would start. It didn’t do any business at all, though. A three-hour film hardly anyone understood? Absolutely dead. Most people got lost and bored and had zero interest. I think it’s being reassessed in the same way Fire Walk with Me was, but more slowly. I love INLAND EMPIRE, though, and I loved making it. I recently watched it for the first time in a while, and I dug it. It’s deep in interesting ways, and it goes into different places and has different textures that hook together. You enter the film in one place and you come out in another. The film seemed short to me, though.

  After the film came out, I got this idea that I’d have a cow and a sign saying CHEESE IS MADE FROM MILK, and I’d sit on the lawn of a church at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea. I was doing it for Laura, and I had a big picture of her and a sign saying VOTE FOR LAURA. I sat there from late morning until five or six at night and it was real low-key. The news media never showed up, but two guys came and filmed their talk with me, and by seven that night their film had gone around the world. It was fun being out there. It was a beautiful day and people were great—they’d stop and see the cow and say things like, “What are you doing here, David?” If they didn’t know who I was, they just said, “What are you doing here?”

  Plenty of people don’t know who I am. Are you kidding me? Plenty of people! I went to Lowe’s to get some electrical supplies the other day and no one recognized me in there. Another time I had to go to a meeting with the president of the Producers Guild or the Directors Guild or something, and Erik Crary is driving me and I’m dressed sort of like a bum. Erik drops me off and drives off to park and I finish a smoke then go into the lobby. There are these big policemen-type guys at the desk and they’re seeing me there. Fine. Then Erik co
mes in and I march over and slap the desk and say, “I’m here to see the president!” They look at me and say, “Oh yeah?” I say “Yeah! He’s on the sixth floor.” They say, “That’s interesting. This building only has five floors, buddy.” We were in the wrong place and they sure didn’t know who I was, and they were on the verge of calling somebody—like the police or the men in white coats.

  * * *

  —

  Building the recording studio was a huge job, and it was complicated. After it was done I walked into the studio and hardly knew how to turn the lights on. In a way that’s still the way it is—I don’t know my own studio. There are so many things you have to know, and I need technical help. This guy named John Neff was working, sort of, for Studio Bau:ton, the acoustic architects of the studio, and one day I said, “Who’s gonna run this place?” and John raised his hand.

  Not long after we finished the studio, we formed a band called blueBOB and made a record with nine or ten songs on it. Some of them are good, and we got invited to play the Olympia in Paris, where the all-time greats have played. I never wanted to do it. Play live? It was ridiculous. I can experiment, but I can’t play the same thing twice, but I said “Okay, we’ll be the opening act and we’ll do four songs.” Beth Gibbons from Portishead was supposed to close the show, and the only way it could’ve worked was if we opened the show. But they made us the closing act and put my name on the thing. Beth Gibbons was great and didn’t get bent out of shape, but the audience was upset because we only played four songs. One of them was a cover of Bo Diddley’s “You Can’t Judge a Book by the Cover.” It was a night to remember, like the Titanic going down. I won’t do anything like that again.

  Dean Hurley runs the studio now. Dean looks like he’s fourteen years old today, but when he showed up I thought, Where are his parents? Who’s going to change his diaper? He looked really young. But he was recommended by Ron Eng, who’s been on mixes for a lot of my films, and Ron’s a really good sound man and a good guy. And Dean is solid gold.

  Relationships are like films, and people come and they go. Lots of things have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and when I was in junior high I had a different girlfriend every couple of weeks. Things change, and they changed when I met Emily. Emily and her sister were neighbors of Eli Roth, and he brought them up to model for nude photographs. Then Emily did the voice-over for Boat and she did really well. One thing led to another and now we have Lula.

  * * *

  —

  One day I was in the office, watching the Maharishi channel, and they announced that Maharishi was offering a monthlong enlightenment course. It was expensive, but walking home I thought, I could do this. I could do this! And I’m going to do this! I filled out the form and sent in my money, then they called and said, “David, we can’t accept your money. You’re a regular meditator and you have to be a Siddha to do this course, so we’re returning your money.” I said, “No, keep the money; put it toward world peace.” They said, “You really want to do that?” and I said yes. Pretty soon I heard that Maharishi said he’d offer a course on the Siddhis to me and to a girl named Debbie, who lived in the D.C. area and also wanted to go and wasn’t a Siddha. So I got to go.

  A year or so later I was in the living room of Dr. John Hagelin’s house in Fairfield, Iowa, and he said, “David, how would you feel about starting a foundation with your name?” I’d never thought about it and I don’t know what he envisioned as being the purpose of the Foundation, but since he was asking I figured he wanted me to say yes, so I said okay and I put the first money into it. Then—I didn’t even know quite how it happened—I suddenly realized I was on a tour, talking about meditation, and I’d think it was over but it was just beginning. It unfolded and it was pretty amazing. I did a sixteen-country tour and a thirteen-university tour—I did more than that, but those were the big ones.

  Bobby Roth got it going by asking me to speak at a few small gatherings. At first I tried to memorize what I’d say, and that was a nightmare. If the thing was a week away I’d be tormented for a week. If it was two weeks away I’d be tormented for two weeks, night and day. One time I had to speak at this golf course/country club–type place in L.A., and I hyperventilated and was stumbling on words even though I’d memorized them perfectly. So I decided I’m just going to do questions and answers, and that was much better. But still a total torment.

  At the beginning of all this I was speaking in small rooms. Then I’m backstage in Detroit, and Bobby, all excited about what he’s going to show me, motions me over and pulls the curtain back a little and I saw like ten million people! Tiers and tiers of people! It was a giant place and I almost passed out with fear. I remember walking to the microphone, one foot in front of the other, and it was thousands of miles to that microphone. When we got to the East Coast we were driving from one university to the next and Bobby’s organized all these phone interviews, and I’m on the phone all the time in the car. Catching the Big Fish was Bobby’s idea, too. That whole period was intense and tormenting and seemed to go on forever. I did it for Maharishi and I learned a lot and now I’m very thankful that I did it.

  Dr. John Hagelin once said that the Bible is written in a code, and under incandescent lights it’s one thing but under a spiritual light it’s something else. I’m in the living room one day and I get out the Bible and I’m reading along, and lo and behold, the page just lit up and there it was. The page seemed to almost turn white, and whatever was on the page lit up a much bigger thing and it all became clear. It hit me that the trip we’re on as human beings is so beautiful and it has the happiest of happy endings. Everything is okay. There’s nothing to worry about. Everything is just beautiful.

  With the building of his recording studio in 1997, Lynch completed what he’s described as his “setup.” At that point he began living in an environment where he could develop pretty much any idea that came to him without leaving home, and the urgency surrounding film deals diminished. He’d been working in his compound for quite a while by the time Stofle moved in at the beginning of 2007. “We’d talked about it, then one day I just started bringing clothes over and he said okay,” she said.

  Another turning point that year was a show of Lynch’s artwork at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris called The Air is on Fire. Organized by Hervé Chandès, it opened on March 3rd and was a massive undertaking that was pulled together in surprisingly short order. Films were screened in a theater with opulent velvet curtains and a checkered floor fashioned after the stage in Eraserhead, and photographs, paintings, and drawings dating back to his childhood were exhibited. Lynch and Zebrowski performed at the Fondation Cartier while the show was up, and in conjunction with the opening, German book company Steidl published Snowmen, a selection of black-and-white photographs Lynch shot in Boise, Idaho, in 1992.

  All of this happened quickly and necessitated additional staff. “The people in David’s office knew I’d worked for artists, and in 2006 they called and told me David had a big exhibition coming up and asked me to work on it,” recalled Skarbek, who played a crucial role in the production of both the exhibition, the catalog, and the Steidl book. “It was a huge job. David is a pack rat who saves everything, and part of my job was to organize his visual art, which was completely disorganized when I arrived. All his work dating back to Philadelphia was there, and things were casually stored, stacked up, and leaning on things in the garage. At that point there wasn’t anyplace on the property strictly devoted to his artwork, and there were bits and pieces all over the place.” The Air is on Fire was a very big show that traveled to three other cities (Milan, Moscow, and Copenhagen), and it kept Skarbek busy for the next three years.

  When Lynch went to Paris to oversee the installation of the first iteration of the show, he met Patrice Forest, proprietor of the lithography workshop Idem. “Hervé Chandès is a friend, and Idem is just a few blocks from the Foundation,” Forest said.
“There were periods when David had to wait while things were being built, and Hervé asked him, ‘Do you want me to show you a place you might love?’ David came and opened the door and fell in love.”1

  Born and raised in Lyon, Forest was a radio journalist covering the arts until 1987, when he established a lithography workshop in Paris. Ten years later, a historic printshop dating back to 1881 and located in the heart of the city was for sale, and he moved his operation there. A fourteen-thousand-square-foot space with skylights, outfitted with beautiful old presses that printed work by Picasso and Miró, among many others, Idem has become a haven that Lynch returns to annually.

  “I asked David if he’d ever made a litho and he said, ‘Never and I’m very curious,’ and he went to work immediately,” Forest recalled. “He worked on zinc plates and made three lithos that were included in the exhibition, and those three lithos turned into a series of twelve called The Paris Suite. After we finished that I asked if he was interested in working on a stone, and he said yes and understood it immediately. Since that time we’ve made more than two hundred lithos, and when he comes to Paris he has as much time in the studio as he wants.

  “Cinema is big, and David works with hundreds of people when he makes a film,” Forest continued. “At Idem he works basically alone and can conceive of a work and make it come alive in a single day. It’s quiet in the studio and some of the people who work there have never heard of him, and I think he appreciates that because it allows him privacy. He loves hotel life, and he always stays in the same room at the same hotel, within walking distance of Idem. He arrives at around eleven in the morning; he likes the coffee from around the corner, and he can smoke in the studio.” The work Lynch produces at Idem is only available through Forest, who sells directly to collectors. “It’s rare to see David’s prints on the market. We don’t do galleries or auction houses, and the work sells well and is quickly absorbed by the market.”