David Lynch

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An unprecedented look into the personal and creative life of the visionary auteur David Lynch, through his own words and those of his closest colleagues, friends, and family “Insightful . . . an impressively industrious and comprehensive account of Lynch’s career.”—The New York Times Book Review In this unique hybrid of biography and memoir, David Lynch opens up for the first time about a life lived in pursuit of his singular vision, and the many heartaches and struggles he’s faced to bring his unorthodox projects to fruition. Lynch’s lyrical, intimate, and unfiltered personal reflections riff off biographical sections written by close collaborator Kristine McKenna and based on more than one hundred new interviews with surprisingly candid ex-wives, family members, actors, agents, musicians, and colleagues in various fields who all have their own takes on what happened. Room to Dream is a landmark book that offers a onetime all-access pass into the life and mind of one of our most enigmatic and utterly original living artists. With insights into . . . Eraserhead The Elephant Man Dune Blue Velvet Wild at Heart Twin Peaks Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me Lost Highway The Straight Story Mulholland Drive INLAND EMPIRE Twin Peaks: The Return Praise for Room to Dream “A memorable portrait of one of cinema’s great auteurs . . . provides a remarkable insight into [David] Lynch’s intense commitment to the ‘art life.’ ”—The Guardian “This is the best book by and about a movie director since Elia Kazan’s A Life (1988) and Michael Powell’s A Life in Movies (1986). But Room to Dream is more enchanting or appealing than those classics. . . . What makes this book endearing is its chatty, calm account of how genius in America can be a matter-of-fact defiance of reality that won’t alarm your dog or save mankind. It’s the only way to dream in so disturbed a country.”—San Francisco Chronicle

New in paperback, this revelatory book features rarely seen multimedia works by the revered cult filmmaker David Lynch showing how he applies his powerful imagination and visual language across genres. David Lynch has always been in the spotlight as a filmmaker, directing some of the most iconic movies ever made, but as a visual artist, he is less widely known. Lynch delights in the physicality of painting and likes to stimulate all the senses in his work. This new paperback edition brings together Lynch's paintings, photography, drawings, sculpture and installation, and stills from his films. Many of these works reveal the dark underpinnings behind Lynch's often-macabre movies. Others explore his fascination with texture and collage. Throughout, Lynch's characteristic style--surreal, stylish, and even humorous--shines through. An introduction by music journalist and Lynch biographer Kristine McKenna, along with a thought- provoking essay by curator Stijn Huijts, offers fascinating new information and perspectives on Lynch's life and career. This book reveals an unexplored facet of Lynch's oeuvre and affirms that he is as brilliant a visual artist as he is a filmmaker.

A revealing look at the life and work of David Lynch, one of the most enigmatic and influential filmmakers of our time Every frame of David Lynch's work, from the '70s midnight movie Eraserhead to the groundbreaking TV series Twin Peaks, to the digital-video DIY feat Inland Empire, bears his unmistakable imprint. But the paradox of the Lynchian is that it's easy to recognize and hard to define. Lynch is a master of the inscrutable gesture, the opaque symbol. His career evades the usual categories: pop culture icon and subject of academic study, cult figure and industry outsider. He's a Renaissance man—musician, painter, photographer, carpenter, entrepreneur—and a vocal proponent or transcendental meditation. Dennis Lim, the newly minted director of Cinematheque programming at Lincoln Center, is a skilled cinephile wary of over-interpretation.David Lynch preserves the strangeness of the Lynch's universe and offers a personal meditation on the most distinctive filmmaker in modern American culture. It leaves what Lynch likes to call "room to dream," honoring the allure of the unknown and the unknowable.

Todd McGowan studies Lynch's talent for blending the bizarre and the normal to emphasise the odd nature of normality itself. In Lynch's movies, fantasy becomes a means through which the viewer is encouraged to build a revolutionary relationship with the world.

From his cult classic television series Twin Peaks to his most recent film Inland Empire (2006), David Lynch is best known for his unorthodox narrative style. An award-winning director, producer, and writer, Lynch distorts and disrupts traditional storylines and offers viewers a surreal, often nightmarish perspective. His unique approach to filmmaking has made his work familiar to critics and audiences worldwide, and he earned Academy Award nominations for Best Director for The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), and Mulholland Drive (2001). Lynch creates a new reality for both characters and audience by focusing on the individual and embracing existentialism. In The Philosophy of David Lynch, editors William J. Devlin and Shai Biderman have compiled an impressive list of contributors to explore the philosophy at the core of the filmmaker’s work. Lynch is examined as a postmodern artist, and the themes of darkness, logic, and time are discussed in depth. Other prominent issues in Lynch’s films, such as Bad faith and freedom, ethics, politics, and religion, are also considered. Investigating myriad aspects of Lynch’s influential and innovative work, The Philosophy of David Lynch provides a fascinating look at the philosophical underpinnings of the famous cult director.

Interviews with the acclaimed director of the films Dune, Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire and the hit TV series Twin Peaks

In this "unexpected delight,"* filmmaker David Lynch describes his personal methods of capturing and working with ideas, and the immense creative benefits he has experienced from the practice of meditation. Now in a beautiful paperback edition, David Lynch's Catching the Big Fish provides a rare window into the internationally acclaimed filmmaker's methods as an artist, his personal working style, and the immense creative benefits he has experienced from the practice of meditation. Catching the Big Fish comes as a revelation to the legion of fans who have longed to better understand Lynch's personal vision. And it is equally compelling to those who wonder how they can nurture their own creativity. Catching Ideas Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They're huge and abstract. And they're very beautiful. I look for a certain kind of fish that is important to me, one that can translate to cinema. But there are all kinds of fish swimming down there. There are fish for business, fish for sports. There are fish for everything. Everything, anything that is a thing, comes up from the deepest level. Modern physics calls that level the Unified Field. The more your consciousness-your awareness-is expanded, the deeper you go toward this source, and the bigger the fish you can catch. --from Catching the Big Fish

This is a study of one of Hollywood's most popular and critically acclaimed directors. Films discussed include 'Blue Velvet', 'Wild at Heart', 'The Straight Story' and 'Mulholland Drive'.