Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch Read Free Book Online Page A

to smile and laugh. He was able to go golfing later with seemingly very few problems about the whole thing. I wondered how, if a person did these deeds, he could go on living. And we found this great psychology term—“psychogenic fugue”—describing an event where the mind tricks itself to escape some horror. So, in a way, Lost Highway is about that. And also the fact that nothing can stay hidden forever.

RESTRICTIONS
     
     
     
    Sometimes restrictions get the mind going. If you’ve got tons and tons of money, you may relax and figure you can throw money at any problem that comes along. You don’t have to think so hard. But when you have limitations, sometimes you come up with very creative, inexpensive ideas.
     
    My friend Gary D’Amico is a special effects man. And he loves to blow things up. He’s the one who blew up the house in Lost Highway . And he didn’t have the stuff to do it. I didn’t even know I was going to blow up that house.The production manager asked, “Are we going to tear the house down? Do you want to save any of the stuff?” And I said, “Tear it down?” And I started thinking. I went to Gary and said, “What if I wanted to blow up something?” His face lit up. And I said,“I want to blow up this house.”
    And he said, “Oh, I wish you would have told me. I don’t know what I’ve got.” But then he said, “Yeah, yeah—we can do it.” And so he went in and wired up this thing with everything he had. And it was the most beautiful sight. If he had brought in what he would have, had he known in advance, it wouldn’t have been as beautiful. It was a soft explosion . It sent the stuff for hundreds of feet. But softly. And then we shot it backward. So it turned out incredible.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE
     
     
     
    Mulholland Drive was originally going to be a continuing story on television.We shot it as a pilot: open-ended, to make you want to see more and more.
    I heard that the man at ABC who was making the decision whether to accept the pilot or not saw it at six a.m. He was watching television across the room while having some coffee and making some phone calls. And he hated what he saw; it bored him. So he turned it down.
    Then I had the chance, fortunately, to make it into a feature. But I didn’t have the ideas.
     
    Now, you don’t use meditation to catch ideas. You’re expanding the container, and you come out very refreshed, filled with energy, and raring to go out and catch ideas afterward.
     
    But in this particular case, almost the day I got the go-ahead to turn it into a feature, I went into meditation, and somewhere about ten minutes in, ssssst! There it was. Like a string of pearls, the ideas came. And they affected the middle, the beginning, and the end. I felt very blessed. But that’s the only time it’s happened during meditation.

THE BOX AND THE KEY
     
     
     
    I don’t have a clue what those are.

A SENSE OF PLACE
     
     
     
    A sense of place is so critical in cinema, because you want to go into another world. Every story has its own world, and its own feel, and its own mood. So you try to put together all these things—these little details—to create that sense of place.
    It has a lot to do with lighting and sound.The sounds that come into a room can help paint a world there and make it so much fuller.While many sets are good enough for a wide shot, in my mind, they should be good enough for close scrutiny, for the little details to show. You may not ever really see them all, but you’ve got to feel that they’re there, somehow, to feel that it’s a real place, a real world.

BEAUTY
     
     
     
    When you see an aging building or a rusted bridge, you are seeing nature and man working together. If you paint over a building, there is no more magic to that building. But if it is allowed to age, then man has built it and nature has added into it—it’s so organic.
     
    But often people wouldn’t think to permit that, except for scenic