"The American director David Lynch made the cult film of the seventies, Eraserhead;" "the nightmare of the eighties, Blue Velvet and the surreal TV event of the nineties, Twin Peaks." "His idyllic childhood in Eisenhower era America has been the inspiration for most of his films." "But his second feature, The Elephant Man, was a rare trip abroad to Victorian London." "The film gained 8 Oscar nominations including Best Director." "It's producer Mel Brooks was one of the first to call Lynch" ""Jimmy Stewart from Mars,"" "and no phrase has better captured Lynch's other worldly boy-scoutedness." "But the film after that, Blue Velvet, gained another Best Director nomination and reviews to die for." "Wild At Heart in 1990 won the Palme D'or at Cannes, but for some was a retread of old ground." "Brilliant but shallow." "Then came Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me, which was booed by some critics, but which now looks like classic Lynch." "And the extraordinary Lost Highway, another commercial disappointment, which has the strangest story in modern American cinema." "David Lynch's new film, The Straight Story, about an old man who drives three hundred miles on a lawn mower to meet his brother is, like The Elephant Man, a work of the tenderest humanism." "The director's known for monstrous darkness, roars on soundtrack, the evil of BOB in Twin Peaks and Frank in Blue Velvet," "but there's always an angelic sweetness to the way he sees things." "And, it has to be said, a real eccentricity." "The man I'm about to interview has collected moldy sandwiches, likes building mounds of earth on the kitchen table and planned a book about spark plugs." "He says that interviews are like facing a firing squad but you don't die." "So that's what we're up against." "A man dreamt up by The Surrealist Manifesto." "His one time girlfriend Isabella Rosellini says that Lynch getting ideas is like fishing;" "you never know what you'll catch." "Here he is, surrounded by sharks, in his most detailed television interview ever." "David Lynch, you don't like ding interviews, do you?" "No I don't." "Why are you sitting on this sofa then?" "To do you a great favor." "But you're prepared to talk about your new film Straight Story?" "You bet." "Have you been interviewed a lot about it?" "I've done a few interviews concerning it, yes." "Your mother was a linguist, is that right?" "She has taught people English" "That's interesting that she's therefore a verbal person, but you are less verbal." "Right." "You know there's many different languages, and one of them is film." "Or painting." "And a lot of it is done without words." "What harm does it do to talk about a film?" "A film is it's own thing." "And in an ideal world I think film should be discovered knowing nothing." "And nothing should be added to it or subtracted from it." "Okay, let's break that rule immediately." "I've got here the opening clip from Blue Velvet" "Why is he waving so slowly?" "Is that shot in slow motion?" "I believe it is, yes." "Not that slow, probably 48 frames or something." "Why slow things?" "It's a mood." "You slow things down for a feeling, and these things are abstract reasons." "It's not obviously a comic feeling you're after." "It's dreamy or mysterious?" "It's a dreamy feeling and it could slide either way." "The next things that follow say more and more what it is." "Do you remember this book, 'Good Times on Our Street'?" "I sure do." "I haven't seen that for about, you know, 100 years." "Well, you've said several times in interviews that some of the images in this book influenced that film (Blue Velvet)." "And sure enough, if you open this book here you are, you've got picket fences." "There you go man." "So I guess what that means is these kinds of intense images in your film are things that were perhaps logged in your brain perhaps for a long time." "They can come from memories or they can be triggered  just come at you from the ether." "And if they are in the memory, if they are stored away, one day for some reason they're released and it seems like a brand new idea." "Or an idea comes in from the ether and as it pops it may be colored from something that you know." "The picture that forms" " sometimes reading a book the pictures that you put together from the past or your imagination kicks in, you can't really tell what forms those pictures " "I've got here the opening of your new film Straight Story." "It's a similar opening in some ways." "And this is based on a true story?" "Mary Sweeney first read about Alvin Straight in the New York Times." "And the trip he took." "And she developed a fixation for four years until she got the rights to the story." "And then she and her childhood friend John Roach wrote the script and handed it over to me." "Surely it's constricting to tell the story of a real person?" "Not really." "The word 'based on a true story' gives you more room to move." "And when you make a film you're making a different kind of reality anyway." "Why, for example, is the camera high here?" "It feels correct." "Well you want to get the lay of the land, and you're observing, nowyou'refloating." "Why float?" "Why not move faster in?" "You want to enter-in seeing things and float slowly into the story." "What sort of community is this?" "It's a small neighbourhood in the town of Lorens, Iowa." "It's a very small town." "There's just this one main street and there's several smaller streets off of it, but it's very small" "Is this the sort of place you feel comfortable in?" "I prefer a little bigger town." "Or no town." "What was that thump?" "You have to wait to find it." "I can say." "Ok" "The main character of your film, Alvin Straight, has just collapsed." "Yeah." "He's slipped and fallen." "And soon after in this scene there's a phone call that his brother has fallen ill." "Yeah." "Is your father like Alvin Straight?" "There's only one Alvin Straight." "But there's similar qualities to him, yeah." "I read in an interview that you said your father was an innocent in some way." "Uh huh." "And it's the thing that makes him similar to Alvin Straight?" "That's one of the things, yeah." "What else?" "Well it's a cowboy thing, the old west, and there's an inner strength coupled with an innocence and a tender side." "That Alvin has." "Alvin is a lot like a cowboy." "Do you remember the way you portray the birth of the Elephant Man in The Elephant Man?" "Yeah." "How did that seem right to you to portray the bith of someone with a puff of smoke?" "Well, smoke is not a solid thing." "But on film it almost appears to be solid." "And I think the smoke ties in with organic growth." "And the Elephant Man's neurofibromatosis growths always reminded me of Mount St. Helen." "A smoke frozen." "The flesh became like a smoke, and it erupted from inside the bones and protruded out and became this smoke, frozen." "And do you remember the birth in The Grandmother where it's like little white things under the ground, like these little shoots that grew up?" "And it's a similar things." "An abstract way of portraying growth, isn't it?" "Uh huh." "When you were about seventeen, you planned this trip to Europe that I've read about, and you planned to go there for..." "Three years." "And you stayed... 15 days." "Now that's a rather eccentric thing to do." "Why?" "It wasn't for me." "I was going to go to school in Salzburg, Austria and study with a painter called Kokoshka." "And he wasn't there when I arrived and I very quickly realized that Salzburg was too clean." "But you have clean Blue Velvet, it's very clean!" "But I was studying painting and I felt it was too clean to paint so I went searching still in Europe, and each place didn't feel correct." "Alvin Straight went to Europe." "He fought in World War II wasquiteawiseman." "If he hadn't had that experience," "do you think he would have been a wise man also?" "Sure." "Life is made up of many experiences and if you allow them to they'll teach you things." "But if he hadn't left this town, how would he learn about things like other cultures for example?" "Well there's unity among people." "And there's something about 'It's A Wonderful Life"." "You know he stayed in town, he wanted to go but he stayed in town." "He still had a full life." "The human experience is true one place to another place." "You don't have to travel to get a lot of experience." "There's something about the way the world is, you can almost kind of tap into feelings outside your environment." "Here's a scene in The Straight Story where" "Alvin Straight and his daughter Rose are sitting at night and" " it's almost like this thing we're talking about - trying to discern the nature of the universe." "Without giving too much away, there's another part of this film that end up with the camera going into the sky;" "and The Elephant Man ends up the camera going into the sky." "Why does that feel right to you?" "Is it just the pleasure of looking into the stars?" "No, it's the small and the infinite sort of hand in hand." "And the stars are there for everybody and they make you dream." "And Alvin Straight shared the stars with somebody and it's a beautiful memory for him." "And it' a time not to talk again?" "Yes." "I'm going to tell you a story about that." "What?" "It was just one of those things after which Freddie starting calling me "Lucky Lynch"." "Freddie Francis?" "Freddie Francis." "Right." "The camera was just drifting in very slowly on Tony Hopkins face and exactly as it stops a tear comes out of Tony Hopkins eye." "And he told me later he'd been saying The Lord's Prayer during that scene and it moved him and out came the tear." "Now the street scenes in The Elephant Man were inspired by the fact that at the age of 19 you went and lived in Philadelphia, which is one of the most important influences on your life, and which you described as "an ocean of fear"." "Well Philadelphia was a city filled with fear, filled with twisted behavior." "It's called "The City of Brotherly Love";" "the absence of that love was alive and well." "There was a sort of sickness in the air; a twisted, infectious sickness and a decaying city." "But it was very powerful and a lot of Philadelphia seeped into me" "and it's a time in life when the window is wide open and things hit you particularly hard." "And it was a beautiful experience for me." "That seems paradoxical; to say that this terrifying place was a beautiful experience." "Well it fed many things that came along later." "There seems to be more fear in your films than in many others in your generation." "Well I think there's a mixture of things always in life and in order to have one you have to have the other." "In order to appreciate ups you have to have the downs." "And so films are made up of contrasts that are felt more than seen." "So there's feelings of things in the air, and sometimes they can take on a persona." "Is it true that during the making of the Twin Peaks series BOB wasn't in the original idea?" "Right." "I was on set in Laura Palmer's house." "We were going to shoot a panning shot in Laura's room to start with." "And Frank Silva was a set decorator, and he was in arranging some furniture." "And at a certain point he moved a chest of drawers in front of the door and someone said "Don't block yourself in there, Frank"." "And my mind pictured Frank blocked in the room." "And then I rushed into him and said "Frank, are you an actor?"" "And he said "Why, I happen to be an actor." So I said "You're going to be in this."" "And so we did a couple of pans without Frank and then I had him kneel down behind the bed and freeze." "And it panned around and there he was;" "kind of hard to see right away, but if you held for a while suddenly you sort of see him." "And I didn't have a clue what I was going to do with that." "And then later we were shooting the last set up in the house and it was pretty late at night and it was Mrs Palmer" "at the end of that day where she lost her daughter, smoking a cigarette, distraught on the couch and playing some scenes in her mind." "And she sees something mentally and lurches up and the operator has to crank very fast to catch it." "Nailed it." "Perfect." "She screams at the top of this thing in this big close up." "And I said "Beautiful" and I congratulated Grace on her job," "Seansaid"No,it'snot good, not good, not good."" "And I said "What's wrong?" and he said "Someone was reflected in the mirror"." "And I said "Who was reflected in the mirror?" And he said "Frank was"." "And then I knew I was onto something." "That was a sign?" "A very big sign." "And it led to many things that those two events kept unraveling." "That's a lesson on, a real reason for keeping your mind as open as possible, isn't it?" "Absolutely." "A lot of things that happen are maybe food for thought, but it ends up being useless." "But some of those things are such 3 great gifts... you can't imagine." "When you turned 40, by this stage you had two children and you'd had two divorces." "You made a film, Blue Velvet, and the lead character was very much like you, Jeffrey Beaumont..." "Uh huh." "....he dressed like you, as you're dressed now with your shirt done up, and apparently he wore the same wristwatch or something like that?" "Well I don't like wind on my collarbone and that's how that all started." "Oh yeah?" "Yeah." "And why did you used to wear three ties?" "And that's a sign of a person who's very insecure and needs protection." "I would have worn several coats if I wasn't so warm where I was, I just felt vulnerable." "Could I just point out that ties aren't the best form of protection?" "Well they feel good." "And why were you vulnerable?" "I was..." "I..." "I don't know why I was." "I had things that I wanted to do but I didn't like being in the world so much, out in the world, I liked being inside." "Is that agoraphobia?" "I have a hair of that." "How did that come about?" "It comes about, I'm not sure how it comes about," "but there's many things to deal with outside the house." "Bad things can happen and why bother with that?" "Why not stay inside and do your work?" "Yes indeed." "And Jeffrey Beaumont, he was quite a naïve man, he hadn't experienced very much." "Is it odd that somebody who had by that stage experienced quite a lot in his life, would project so much of himself onto this, almost a teenager?" "He behaves almost like a teenager." "I don't see him as me, I see him as Jeffrey Beaumont." "I've heard that you, as a young guy, had this fantasy of hiding in a girl's room and watching her." "Yeah." "That's a fantasy." "Is it true that you used a new type of lens that would show as much of the apartment as possible?" "No." "Your cinematographer said you did." "No." "There might have been..." "He must have been telling lies?" "There might have been." "That didn't even look too wide a lens really." "How at the end of the film is Jeffrey different?" "He's shot Frank and he'll go back to college?" "Well we don't know." "That's the thing about the film." "It starts and then it ends, and nothing should be added and nothing should be taken away." "So it's wrong for me to say, but it's beautiful for, you know... anyone has the right to, you know, go where they want to go." "Say in private when you're not talking to an interviewer like me or when you're not on TV, do you explain?" "Do you talk more about your films?" "No." "To your family here?" "No." "They'll back me up." "Is that true?" "Yes." "Nods, yes." "And do you find it frustrating that he doesn't, or are you happy with that situation?" "Yeah, as long as he keeps making movies." "What's the best scene in The Straight Story?" "There is no best scene." "There must be." "No." "It's like music." "Every note is important to the whole, every element that you do is important, and so then the thing can hang together." "If you take anything out and just look at it without the rest it's not the same." "Film is a sequence of events, and the way they're ordered is critical." "I understand that point about structure, but there's such a thing as 'a bum note', isn't there?" "A scene where... surely if we sat and watched the film now you would have times when you think," "'If I had to do that again I would have done it differently'?" "No." "No?" "While you're working you don't leave until it feels correct to you because you're the spectator and the one that's trying to stay true to the story." "So if it feels correct, then you move on." "Okay well I'll say what I think is the best scene." "It's near the end of the film." "Alvin goes to a bar and he has a beer for the first time and he's very, very near his brother's house." "He's gone on a long journey and it was something to do with the pace of that scene." "Well that scene seems a little irrelevant and yet I don't know why, but always I felt that scene was critical." "It has its own pace and it" "it has a lot to do with the idea of drinking and why we drink;" "and it has to do with being near an end and wanting to prolong something." "This guy is great." "This bartender." "Why is he great?" "Just his face and the way he moves." "It's real calm." "It's like Zen or something this scene, isn't it?" "Yeah." "A Zen bartender." "It's from here that this scene becomes extraordinary, I think." "That is nice." "I don't know if you know the films of Ozu, the Japanese..." "No I don't." "...but this is the Ozu scene in this film, I can assure you." "In some interviews I've read you've used this phrase, 'the eye of the duck scene'." "What does that mean?" "Well, you know nature can teach us a lot of things, and there's something about... in painting, you're working within a certain shape canvas" "and there's many things that you, you know, one does intuitively to move the eye;" "there's repetition of shape, repetition of color." "But when you look at a duck you see your eye is moving in a certain way." "You see textures and colors and shapes and you start wondering about a duck." "What it can teach us about any kind of abstract, you know, painting or proportions, or even sequences, scenes," "and it always is interesting that the eye is in the perfect place." "If you move it to the body it would get lost." "If you move it to the leg or the beak, it's two kind of fast areas competing, even though the eye is the fastest, it's the little jewel." "Fast meaning what?" "Well there's slow and fast." "An empty room is a certain speed and a person standing there is another speed and that proportion is, you know, you know, it can be beautiful" "if the room is a 2 and the person is a 7." "Fire and electricity can go up to a 9 for instance, or a really intricately designed, decorated room is pretty disturbing sometimes." "It's too fast." "But then if you put something slow in it it would work beautifully." "A busy room and a person, they fight each other..." "Is this to do with how fast our eye moves to scan it, to see what's happening?" "It's a relationship thing I think." "Fast and slow areas." "OK." "What's the eye of the duck scene in The Straight Story?" "I haven't thought about it." "I have to think about it." "I can't just jump in and think, but I believe every film has the eye of the duck scene, but it can fool you, you know, which one it is, it could be the scene we were talking about." "I don't know." "What's the eye of the duck scene in Blue Velvet?" "I used to know." "Is it the 'In Dreams' song?" "It's the eye of the duck scene, that's the eye of the duck, yes." "Yes." "And what's the eye of the duck scene in Elephant Man?" "I used to know." "Is it the scene when he goes to the theater near the end?" "No, I think strangely the eye of the duck scene is the ending." "OKay." "Today lots and lots of film makers are using computer generated imagery and everything that you haven't used that so much." "There's still a magic lantern quality about your films." "Even in Lost Highway in that transformation from one guy to the other guy, you didn't use a computer to do that." "It was all in-camera stuff and it reminds you of the sort of things Jean Cocteau was doing, you know, the reverse motion and all that kind of thing." "Why does that appeal to you?" "It's organic and I'm not against computer, you know, the computer or digital and I love manipulating images." "But film still has the beautiful organic quality." "And a lot of times with light and the emulsion and the way it's developed and some happy accidents," "you get something that's thrilling to the soul." "I think right now digital's, you know, coming up every year but it hasn't matched, you know, the beauty of film." "Even when you're making a much more complex story, for example in the end of Fire Walk With Me after Laura is killed and we go into the Red Room, there's a lot of kind of complicated things going on and" "still you're using very simple techniques like the Surrealists would use, the reverse." "It's the same thing." "Plus there might have been some way to, you know, work by pouring over to digital and then coming back to film but it would have been way too expensive for us." "Except for the screen, ratio that kind of film making could have been done in the 1920s." "And why do you smile when I say that?" "Because it's so beautiful to discover ways of doing things." "It's a beautiful medium because it allows so many things to happen." "I remember when I first saw Fire Walk With Me at the Cannes Film Festival there were loud boos." "How does the apparent failure of a film like this affect you?" "Dune was a failure to me because I didn't feel I did, you know, the Dune I should have done, and this was not a failure to me because I felt it was a film, you know," "that I did the way I should have done it." "So we learn that we can't control anything that happens after a film is finished and sometimes things go well in world and sometimes they don't;" "but if you believe in the film and you've done your best they can't take that away from you." "There's the thing, there's the doughnut and there's the hole, and we should keep our eye on the doughnut and not on the hole." "Everything that happens after a film is finished is maybe interesting and it can be, you know, very hurtful or exhilarating in certain ways but it has not much to do with the work." "I would like to go back to work as quickly as I can, or do, you know, painting or work on music and be separate from those things which, you know, I can't control." "What about criticism some of the themes of your films?" "Like I read a piece recently that Angela Carter wrote about the way you portray women in your films." "She said, you know, that your films have got a sort of misogynistic view of women, that the characters are not understood, they have no inner life." "How do you react to that?" "Does that just bounce off you also?" "Well the problem is that somebody sees a woman in a film and then mistakenly assumes that that's the way the person sees all women." "In actuality, it's just that particular woman within this particular story." "It means nothing more than that, although it could have repercussions." "A small story can open up a bigger feeling, but it doesn't mean Alvin Straight represents all 73 year-olds any more than Dorothy Vallens represents all women, or whatever she was talking about." "She's very anguished there cause she's saying that the angels have all gone away, and yet at the end of this film the angel comes." "So is she wrong?" "No." "Things can go away and they can come back again too." "And there are angels in lots of your films." "There are?" "I don't remember them all." "Well, in The Elephant Man, in several others -, there are angels." "You don't literally believe in angels?" "Oh yeah." "No you don't." "Do you?" "Yeah." "Is that because you were, hum, taught to believe in angels as a kid?" "Have I seen them?" "No." "You don't literally mean top of the Christmas tree type thing?" "I really don't believe you do." "There are many things I think that are out there that we don't know about but sometimes, you know, you get certain feelings." "Do you feel much in common with other American film makers roughly your same age, or anything like that?" "No." "Do you feel part of a generation of painters or artists who came from an art school background like you?" "No." "I feel strangely, and I think other directors feel somewhat alone." "And you make friends but so much of the thing is internal." "When you look at a lot of American actors and directors today they're quite involved with politics, and in the past, famous Hollywood supported JFK and things like that." "Do you feel... you're smiling at that." "Why are you smiling at that?" "Well I'm not a political person." "Oh yeah." "No." "So when you look at the way that Hollywood, and of course it's not all sorts of politics." "It's mostly the Democrat side, not always, when you look at those relationships are you cynical about that or are you just ..." "No, no, no, I'm not cynical at all." "I'm just saying that I don't understand politics," "I don't understand the concept of two sides and I think that probably there's good on both sides, bad on both sides, and there's a middle ground, but it never seems to come to the middle ground" "and it's very frustrating watching it and seemingly we're not moving forward." "Some change, simple, simple really, relatively speaking, and we're going forwards somewhere, you know?" "It could be a beautiful place." "There's many little obstacles and there's many many people that are just opposed and we're not going forward." "When you were talking before there about Straight Story and about the possibility of understanding the whole world from your own small place, it was almost the sort of thing that Ronald Reagan would say." "Is that true do you think?" "I have no idea what Ronald Reagan would say." "Wel, I know you had dinner at Reagan's White House, but what I had in mind was that provincial idea," "where you root your whole view of life just in the small everyday understanding you have of the earth." "I think that there's a time to go out and gather things together and they say when you're little the window is open and then the window closes, not all the way, but closes for safety reasons so stuff stops coming in and you can work with," "the things that are there and new things can pop in and join with them but now it's a time to start, you know, doing some things with those things you've gathered." "You're, I think, around 53 now." "What age do you feel?" "Inside we're ageless, and when we talk to ourselves it's the same person we were talking to, the same age, when we were little." "It's the body that is changing around that ageless centre." "See, surely that's not true." "I used to be scared of things as a kid and I'm not scared of them now." "That's not the self that you're talking to, that's the amount of information you have, and information and experience, knowledge and experience is part of the... is the process." "So the more knowledge you have coupled with experience you know, the more you go, but the self you talk to, I was talking about, that's the one that's sort of ageless." "Doesn't mean ignorant, it just means it just doesn't have an age." "OKay; the ending of the Elephant Man:" "he decides to sleep like a normal person, and in doing so he kills himself and then camera goes up into the stars again as we have seen it doing here in The Straight Story." "Now, what is that saying?" "Does that mean that even 'though someone dies, that something remains afterwards?" "Yes." "What remains?" "Well, they say many things remain." "It's just the body that's dropped." "A good place to end." "I think so." "A critic once said of your work, "David Lynch is very interested in getting inside our heads, but he has nothing to do once he gets in there"." "Do you understand that?" "Hum, not one bit." "It's been a pleasure talking to you." "Good to talk to you." "Thank you very much." "Great everybody." "What critic said that?" "I think it might have been Serge Donni." "Do you know that guy?" "No." "I think he meant that your films make people dream, but there's no surface message there." "Oh, that's okay then." "Yeah." "I want to see this book..." "This book even smells... yeah... it's a beautiful smell." "Scene by Scene, BBC Two Scotland, late 1999." "Presenter, Interviewer Director:" "MarkCousins"