Lynch on Lynch

I’m currently finishing this book and it was an enjoyable read. A few excerpts from the book below:

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“Some people, just by their nature, think about the President of the United States and Africa and Asia. Their mind thinks over thousands of miles, big problems and big situations. That just completely leaves me cold. I can’t get there. I like to think about a neighbourhood – like a fence, like a ditch, and somebody digging a hole, and then a girl in this house, and a tree, and what’s happening in that tree – a little local place that I can get into.” (p.10)

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“We favour ourselves in all our memories. We make ourselves act better in the past and make better decisions and we’re nicer to people and we take more credit than we probably deserve. We candy-coat like crazy so we can go forward and live. An accurate memory of the past would be depressing, probably. [...] like Fred Madison says in Lost Highway, ‘I prefer to remember things my own way.’ Everybody does that to a certain degree.” (p.13)

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“I’m living in Philadelphia and I’m married to Peggy and have a little baby, Jennifer. And I’m living in a twelve-room house! [...] the entire house cost me $3,500! The ENTIRE HOUSE! So you can imagine the type of neighbourhood that this house was in! [...]
We lived cheap, but the city was full of fear. A kid was shot to death down the street, and the chalk marks around where he’d lain stayed on the sidewalk for five days. We were robbed twice, had windows shot out and a car stolen. The house was first broken into only tree days after we moved in, but I had a sword that Peggy’s father had given me. I don’t know what era this sword was from, but I kept it under the bed. And I woke up to see Peggy’s face about one inch from mine with a fear that I hope I never see on a person’s face again. ‘There’s someone in the house!’ I leapt up, put my underwear on backwards and grabbed this sword, and started screaming, ‘Get the hell out of here!’ I went to the head of the stairs with the sword raised and kept screaming. And these people who’d broken in were confused because the house had been vacant for so long, they were used to coming in. It dawned on them that someone was living there now and they left. [...] the bricks might as well have been paper. The feeling was so close to extreme danger, and the fear was so intense. There was violence and hate and filth. But the biggest influence in my whole life was that city.” (p.42-43)

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“So Rick and I went over to Dino’s office and they had the cards from the screening [of Blue Velvet]. They were like: ‘David Lynch should be shot!’ Question: ‘What did you like best about the movie?’ Answers: ‘The dog, Sparky’; ‘The ending!’; ‘When it was over!’ It was like the worst preview screening Larry – who’d been in the business for years – had ever seen. The cards were the worst he had ever, ever seen. And if it wasn’t for Dino, they might have put the movie on the shelf. I’m not kidding. But Dino said, ‘David. We took a chance, and we see now it’s not a film for everybody. So we learn and we go on.’ (p.149)

This is btw. more or less true for all Lynch’ movies. They aren’t for everybody and some people will simply hate what others consider to be his best works.

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Winning at Cannes was the worst thing that ever happened to me. (p.207)