Jon Nguyen on his David Lynch doc The Art Life
With Twin Peaks coming back to TV, we have David Lynch on our mind. But where has he been for the last decade? Jon Nguyen, director of brilliant new doc David Lynch: The Art Life, which screened at this year's Glasgow Film Festival, has some answers
We miss David Lynch. Ten years have now past since his sinister LA masterpiece Inland Empire confounded and terrified us back in 2006. Where’s he been in that time? What’s he been doing? If Jon Nguyen's new documentary David Lynch: The Art Life is anything to go by, we have a good idea.
“[Lynch] smokes cigarettes, and he drinks coffee, and he paints day to night – that’s all he does,” says Nguyen when we sit down with him at London Film Festival the day after The Art Life’s UK premiere.
You wouldn’t think this daily routine would make for the most fascinating documentary subject, but it does. As we observe Lynch potter around his studio creating nightmarish charcoal drawings and crepuscular sculptures, we’re soothed by the Blue Velvet director's apple pie voice on the soundtrack as he discusses his memories of childhood growing up in 50s Montana and Idaho, his student days studying art in Boston and Philadelphia, and his move to Hollywood to create his first feature, Eraserhead, which he describes, quite accurately, as "a dream of dark and troubling things."
The 70-year-old filmmaker is notoriously reluctant to discuss his films, but Nguyen and his team tease out some evocative anecdotes from Lynch’s past that seem have echoes in his later work. We hear about the night an adolescent Lynch was confronted by a naked woman coming out of the dark as he played with his little brother on the curb outside his house (which calls to mind Blue Velvet), a story of the time he got stoned and then stopped on the highway when he became hypnotized by his headlights illuminating the white lines on the tarmac (shades of Lost Highway's bookends) and a hilarious yarn about walking out of a Bob Dylan concert because, from on stage, the troubadour look to be the size of Lynch’s thumb (the little people in Mulholland Drive, perhaps).
“We were hoping to hear him talk about his personal life, his past life,” says Nguyen. “I was hoping that we were going to get some clues to some of his films, and, of course, a lot of little stories that pop up make you think of certain scenes and moments from them. But David would never say the two are connected.” Nguyen also points to a more subtle connection with Lynch’s films and the way in which the director seems to compartmentalise his life. “He has this anxiety about keeping his family life, his art life and his personal life separate. That reminds me of how his characters often have different lives or switch roles. Like in Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive, all of a sudden one character will become someone completely different.”
How did they get the notoriously private Lynch to open up?
“The first time we interviewed David at his house, he just sat with his arms crossed and a cigarette in his hand and wouldn’t talk to us,” recalls the director. That film became Lynch, a fly-on-the-wall doc following the making of Inland Empire. The key to getting Lynch to open up, says Nguyen, was persistence. “The first 700 hours of filming him for Lynch, during the whole process he was clearly awkward with a camera following him. But now, he’s like, ‘I don’t even notice you guys any more.’ I guess after being around him for so long, we just became familiar. That’s how it is with anybody. If I hang out with you for 12 hours, by then I’ll forget your mic is there and I’ll talk a little differently.”
One had assumed that Lynch hasn’t returned to filmmaking for a decade because of financial reasons. He wouldn’t be the first master filmmaker to be left out in the cold for years because no one would bankroll his/her wild vision. Nguyen's film, however, makes it clear this isn’t the case: Lynch is completely content in, as the director calls it, “the art life.”
“David doesn’t do anything unless he gets the creative spark,” explains Nguyen. “We know him as a filmmaker because that’s what he’s famous for, but really he’s spent his whole life painting. When he was a senior in high school he’d already gone through six different personal painting studios. When I was a senior in high school, I was just out drinking and smoking. Everybody thinks that David became a painter later or that art is just a side project. But really it’s filmmaking that’s the side project. Painting is his real true love.”
David Lynch: The Art Life, released by Soda Pictures
The Art Life screened at Glasgow Film Festival 2017; read more about GFF in The CineSkinny
Follow Jamie Dunn on Twitter at @JamieDunnEsq