While Twin Peaks fans are currently prepping for the highly anticipated revival of the series, David Lynch is probably holed up in his L.A. art studio painting, drinking coffee, and smoking cigarettes. As a new documentary on the legendary director reveals, this is all David does when free of directorial duties. One can assume he also practices Transcendental Meditation — as he has 20 minutes a day, twice a day, every day since 1973 — and there’s vague evidence he eats at least half the occasional sandwich.
David definitely tells fascinating stories, ones that will leave audiences hanging off every word and scrambling for clues to the famously elusive director’s famously cryptic big-screen dreamscapes. At one point he recounts seeing a naked, bloodied, pale-skinned woman on a dark street outside his childhood home in suburban Idaho, which will make anyone immediately think of Blue Velvet. In another he recalls watching a Bob Dylan concert, or rather walking out on one, during which he pictured the musician the same size as the shrunken old people in Mulholland Drive. David once getting so stoned that he stopped his car on the freeway is not just hilarious but a clear link to Lost Highway. The Art Life ends with Eraserhead, the surrealist horror film which is perhaps almost entirely informed by David’s thrilling, terrifying experience in post-race riots Philadelphia.
As The Art Life opens in cinemas, we speak to director Jon Nguyen about creating the most intimate portrait yet of the reclusive artist.

How did you first become so interested in David Lynch as a documentary subject?
I’ve always been a fan of his films. The first one I saw was Lost Highway in theaters. The first time I saw Mulholland Drive I was floored. Lucky for me, I had a good friend who was David’s personal assistant on Mulholland Drive, so I called him up one day said, “Do me a favor and ask David if I can make a film about him.” David agreed.
Did that surprise you? He is very notorious for not opening up in interviewed.
When I first asked if I could make a film about him, people laughed. They said he was not going to do that. But he said yes. We worked on the first [2007] film for a couple of years, so our relationship with David was very strong by the end, then we came back to him about five years ago to propose this new film. It was right around the time his daughter was born, so it was a good time to tell his life story so she could go one day go back and understand her father. The two-and-a-half years we were there we conducted 25 hours worth of material. The deal was that we would turn over the material to her.
I love that. She’s in the film quite a bit too, painting with him in the studio, which reminds me of the story about David’s mom not buying him coloring books because she thought he was too creative.
She’s lucky that her dad is an artist. Most kids are sitting around playing games on iPads. His daughter gets to wander into the painting studio. His kids are all artists.
How familiar were you with his painting before you decided to make the film?
I was familiar with it. I’ve seen exhibitions of his. But we didn’t know that the film was going to be about the art life. It just came so naturally when we started making it. His life has been one big arc of the developing of an artist. The first memory that he has is playing with clay as a kid. Hearing about all the art studios he had in high school, I was like, “Wow.” Most kids when they’re in high school just get drunk and stoned. They don’t have five or six art studios. I knew David went to art school, but everybody thinks of him as a filmmaker. He really started off as an artist.

It’s also fascinating to see how experiences throughout his life have shaped both his art and his films. He is famously elusive about where his ideas come from.
We were hoping this would happen. David is known for being very reluctant to talk about his films. We wanted to know how we could get him to talk about his films without talking about his films. We knew that by getting him to talk about his personal life that the keys would come out and unlock a better understanding of his films. The naked woman matching up with Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet, the lines in the road matching up with Lost Highway, seeing Bob Dylan as a little person and being reminded of the little people in Mulholland Drive, and his dad wearing a cowboy hat matching up with the cowboy in Mulholland Drive. One thing that confused me when I watched Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive was how the characters will switch to different characters. When he told that story about how as a boy in high school he liked to keep things separate — his family life and art life and friends — it explained why in his films his characters are so compartmentalized.
Literally all David does in the film is paint, drink coffee, and smoke cigarettes. Were you aware that it was Robert Henri’s book The Art Spirit that provided him with a model for that lifestyle?
I never knew about that. I made a point of not reading books like Lynch on Lynch before shooting the film. I wanted to hear the stories from him. I read his Wikipedia — I didn’t dive into it too much, because I wanted to hear the stories fresh and from the source. I was not surprised that David enjoyed that book though, because it sums up everything he enjoys — smoking, drinking coffee, and painting. It just suits him to live the art life. He’s definitely not doing it to pretend to be a painter.
He is extremely committed to Transcendental Meditation. How has this impacted his art over the years?
He learned about Transcendental Meditation when he moved to L.A. If the film moved past Eraserhead it would have got into that but we decided to just take him up to Eraserhead. That’s why his memory is so clear. There aren’t many people who have been consistently trained to meditate. Because he has consistently done it twice a day for 40 years, he’s able to recall so much detail when he talks. David had some anxiety and agoraphobia. He had some issues that he wanted to deal with and he was going to go see a psychiatrist, but he didn’t want it to affect his creativity. The psychiatrist was like, “Yeah, it will.” So he decided he wasn’t going to deal with a psychiatrist. He was recommended meditation and it worked.
That makes sense. One of the parts in the film that stuck with me was when he was talking about how Philadelphia was so mean but that made it a perfect stimulus for art and creativity.
That’s why his films have the atmosphere and the mood that they have. You can feel the anxiety and the fear, because at one time he actually felt it. He’s able to duplicate fear because he had that experience in Philadelphia. David was a white boy from the country and he went to Philadelphia two weeks after the race riots. 224 businesses were burned to the ground and he moved into this neighborhood that was run-down. It was not a very safe place and he could feel it in the air. But at the same time he was drawn to that.
Tell me about the process of going through his old photos and artworks.
Everything in the film we received from David, except for four photos that we got from a friend of his from school. I wanted to show pictures of Philadelphia to show the audience what it really looked like. He gave us access to everything. He liked the paintings we chose, which was a relief, because we were essentially reinterpreting his work. He watched the film and said, “I’m very happy.” That’s all he said.
Credits
Text Hannah Ongley
Images courtesy of Janus Films