Ten Lessons on Filmmaking from David Lynch 

David Lynch (Photo: Lucca Film Festival)

fans. David Lynch and Mark Frost have announced a return to the mythical town coming in 2016 to Showtime. The show is often credited for having paved the way for the golden age of television today, when many TV programs rival cinema for compelling stories. Through the episodic medium of television, Lynch was able to create a multi-layered world full of rich stories, diving deep into the lives of its characters. The season will pick up in the present day and bring back many of the show’s iconic roles.

Shortly before the announcement, David Lynch teased the possible comeback at the Lucca Film Festival in Tuscany’s storied city, where the director picked up a lifetime achievement award. There are few directors today as zen-like as Lynch. Today, he rarely discusses cinema, or even his own life progress, without delving into Transcendental Meditation. Not surprisingly, Lynch preached the benefits of Transcendental Meditation throughout the festival, discussing the path he’s used to expand his mind toward catching cinematic ideas, as well as achieving inner peace. We’ve gathered Lynch’s best advice from the festival on the secret to his success over the years.

We don’t know an idea until it enters a conscious mind. Ideas have to travel quite a ways before they come into the conscious mind. So by transcending, you start expanding that consciousness, making the subconscious conscious.

You’ll catch ideas on a deeper level. And they have more information and more of a thrill. It’s the happiness in the doing that got greater for me. Catching more ideas became easier, along with a kind of inner self-assuredness. Looking back, I did not have much self-assuredness in the beginning.

In this business, or in any business, you can just get streamrolled if you don’t have this inner strength. And the more happiness you have going in, life becomes more of a game than a torment. And so you look out at the world of people that used to stress you. It could happen that you would just put your arm around them and say, “Let’s go have a coffee.” Everything seems happier.

I always wondered if Transcendental Meditation would make someone just so calm that they didn’t want to do anything. They’d just become a bland person and only wanted to eat nuts and raisins. But it’s not that way. You get more energy. That’s the field of unbounded energy within every human being. It’s very, very important for the work, this thing of happiness. It’s so important to be happy in the doing.

Stories always have held conflicts and contrasts, highs and lows, life and death situations. And there can be much suffering in stories, but now we say the artist doesn’t have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand the human condition, understand the suffering.

A lot of artists say anger or even the experience of fear or these things feeds the work, and so the suffering artist is a romantic concept. But if you think about it, it’s romantic for everybody except the artist. If the artist is really suffering, then the ideas don’t flow so good, and if [he is] really suffering, he can’t even work. I say that negativity is the enemy to creativity.

4. Everything must serve to push the idea forward.

For me there is always a plot. There is a story that makes sense to me. But in the story, there are things that are more abstract. There are feelings, and cinema can say feelings and can say abstract thoughts. Cinema can go back in time, or forward, and it’s very magical. But you do not do it just to do it. You do it to realize the ideas you fall in love with. The ideas are gifts, such beautiful gifts. And I am always so thankful when I get an idea that I fall in love with. It is a beautiful day to get an idea that you love. What we need is ideas. That is the only thing we really need.

Don’t think about the money or what’s going to happen after the film is finished. The first thing you need is an idea, an idea that you fall in love with. The idea tells you the mood you choose for the characters, how the characters talk. It tells you the story, it shows you all the details, and so all you have to do is stay true to that idea as you shoot your film.

Even with a little amount of money it is possible to figure out a way to do things. So you stay true to the idea, and you don’t let anyone interfere with it. And all rules include final cut and total creative freedom. If you don’t have the final say or the creative freedom what’s the point of doing anything?

6. Everyone must be on board with your idea.

The trick is to get everyone working with you to go on the same road, based on the same ideas. And you do this by talking. In the prop department for instance, the prop person can bring me some things. They may be very good things, but they’re not in line with the idea. So, you tell the prop man the reason that they’re not in line, and to look for things that are more like this. And the next time he comes, it will be much closer to the idea. And one day he will bring things because he catches the idea.

It’s the same way with actors. You have rehearsals, and it gets closer by talking and talking. I always say, they catch that idea there, the way they talk, the way they think, the way they move. It’s the same way with all the departments that are helping me.

There’s a difference between influence and inspiration. I was never a film buff, and I was not really interested in art history when I was a painter. For me, I always say the city of Philadelphia was my greatest influence. The mood of that place when I was there, the feeling in the air, the architecture, the decay, insanity, corruption and fear swimming in that city are the things I saw in films.

I don’t really care what is going on in the world, nor with cinema. However, once in awhile, you can see a film that is truly great. Or you see some new paintings and say, “That person has really got something fantastic.” It is an inspiration, and it pushes you forward.

Cinema is very close to music. In music, lots of times you have different sections, so a very loud, fast technique and then very, slow; very high things and very low things. It is all moving forward at a certain pace, and everybody knows that the piece of music written on the page, that a certain conductor with a certain orchestra can get something so profoundly above the others. It’s a magical thing. Cinema moves through time like music. It goes from one scene to another. One of the things that is important is these transitions between one thing and another, one thing flowing into another. And these transitions are very important and very beautiful.

9. Cinema doesn’t need to make sweeping statements on society.

A lot of times, someone finishes a film and in the film there’s a man and a woman, and certain things happen. And the journalists will say, “Oh, does this mean you feel this way about women and men in general?” No. It’s this particular woman in this particular place going through these particular things. That woman does not represent all women — and this is very important.

10. Stop the film vs. digital debate. There’s room for both.

For a long time I championed digital. I fell in love with digital with

. And for the first time in a long time, I saw the footage shot on film, and I was overwhelmed by the depth of the beauty that celluloid, that film can give. It has such a depth and such a beauty. And I like to photograph factories, and I think that in photographing factories I also saw the difference between digital and celluloid in film.

So, there are all these different choices we have. In digital we have very long takes. You don’t have to stop the camera. You can keep it rolling. And you can talk about the scene while the camera is rolling, and a lot of time that helps to get a film deeper and deeper. Digital is lightweight, much faster, no dirt, no scratches, no tearing, and there is so much control in post-production. It is a beautiful thing. But maybe these different mediums will all stay alive and one thing will be right for this project and another thing will be right for that project.

Lynch says one must search for that idea and fall in love with it, yes, the idea is like a seed, in which it grows to be a tree as the film is made from that idea.

Really liked Lynch speaking out in defense of both digital and film here. He’s right, one really shouldn’t cancel out the other, they are both very different mediums and wonderful in their own ways.

its 2014, i think the digital vs. film debate is pretty much over by now.

Interstellar pretty much blows that argument out of the water

In 10-15 years, there’ll be 8k or 16k on large digital sensors, perhaps with light field for single-lens 3D and focus in post, and variable framerate (24-120fps) within a single shot, via compositing and projecting at 120fps. Going to light field could also be the way we get to glasses-free 3D.

I missed the part where you said about the things.

It’s funny that Lynch said stop debating about film vs digital, and you guys are debating about film vs digital.

Why should they slavishly listen to Lynch? Don’t ever listen to anyone who tells you to stop a debate.

By the way, I was interested in what you guys were saying.

Bigger is rarely better with films more than ever…young and impressionable people get hypnotized by bright shiny things but when you are older and your senses dull it’s only feeling that you remember if you really explore film…it’s a value that filmmaking as a whole has lost on a fundamental level. Way to sell that 3D though..how many fucks are there to give about that after about 5 years? Keep smokin! “Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”

And the contrast of both digital capture and digital projection will still look inferior, not to mention the continued problems of unnatural motion artifacts.

Variable framerate within a shot would allow for two-shots and other talky parts to remain at 24fps, it would just be upconverted to the display’s native framerate of some multiple (up to 120fps). Action, FX and fast-motion would be shot at the higher framerate for better definition and less motion blur. They could be composited together easily once the slower bits have been upconverted to the common higher framerate. IIRC Douglas Trumbull’s working on integrating variable framerates.

Also, light field would allow for selected bits to be in focus, and possibly for _everything_ to be in focus if desired. Either way, focus could be done in post, and could become more dynamic as a result (and could result in lower costs for not needing reshoots).

You didn’t address the shitty contrast or the shitty motion capture, unless at least in the latter you think everything should be shot at 120fps and down-converted in post to look more like film and less like shit video, in which case you’re getting just a fraction of the light and it would be impractical in most situations. Other than sports, most films are planned well enough that the use of very high frame rates are not necessary for “options”. You’d only use that for FX shots or action shots where everyone gets to wear sunglasses to look cool while you bath them in some insane lumen levels. That and I think slo mos are too overused.

I’m all for higher frame rate live action shots if played back at high frame rates, but film is still superior even for that. Look at MV48. It’s also important to point out that non-motion-capture HFR CGI involving people and animals is extremely lacking in its motion believability, which is why so much of the CGI action in the Hobbit HFR looks goofy, while the real people look fine. Your eye picks up on the synthetic nature of the footage a lot more easily with all the extra information.

Fraction of the light? Not if you’re using a 65mm-equivalent sensor and light field processing. In fact, it may be possible to have digital sensors scale far more easily than film sizes. For digital, you merely need a faster connection to disk or flash to accomodate larger data flows, while for film you’d need a whole new manufacturing infrastructure for larger film media, a whole new projection infrastructure to handle the larger film, etc.

I actually found the opposite in the Hobbit HFR myself, the HFR during, say, the dwarves in Bilbo’s home to be a bit unnerving and glassy, while the action sequences had less blur and better definition. With VFR I think the talky bits would have looked more “film” and been more palatable, while providing action scenes with better definition and less blur.

I’d actually be more interested to see what new sorts of things could be made possible by expanding imaging capabilities and providing new tools to people. I reckon it’ll be Cameron, Rodriguez, Guillermo Del Toro, Trumbull, etc., who pioneer it but I hope others come along to do interesting new things that would be simply impossible to do with film. I’d be curious to see how a director or editor would use focus in post rather than having to plan it ahead of time. More serendipity. Or where _everything_ was in focus, using that to set an unnatural mind state in an audience.

Just think, I can speculate ad nauseum and sound like I know what’s going to happen in the future. Awesome.

What I love about Lynch, in all the mediums in which he works, is that he’s not afraid to follow his intuition. It doesn’t matter if an idea doesn’t necessarily make sense at the time, and he’s not afraid to fail.

Listening to David Lynch can be very liberating for an artist. His words and ideas clear up a lot of confusion. Thank you! Meditation makes an artist deeper and better. That’s for sure.

He’s right…Philadelphia is a great place to learn film making. It has a terrific, vibrant artist community of actors and film makers, and it’s very welcoming.

I’m from Philadelphia and I agree that the city has a vibrant film community but that’s not what he was referring to. He was here in the 70s when the place was a mess. The buildings were falling apart, there was rampant corruption, a lot of decay and crime. Lynch felt like he was in constant danger but, for him, that was a fantastic feeling and he was able to take those emotions and turn them into art.

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