David Lynch: Interviews

Few directors in the past three decades have produced movies more compelling, controversial, or confounding than David Lynch (1946–2025). And fewer still have been so reluctant to talk about what they do. In this collection, editor Richard A. Barney has chosen the rare interviews in which Lynch opens up to questions rather than deflecting them. Whether Lynch is talking about his earliest film shorts such as The Grandmother or the breakout surrealist feature Eraserhead, the hit TV series Twin Peaks or his Oscar-nominated The Elephant Man or Blue Velvet or his experimental tours de force, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, he stresses the power of image and sound to communicate his vision.

David Lynch: Interviews is the first survey of conversations with the director covering the broad spectrum of his artistic activities throughout his career, including filmmaking, painting, music production, and furniture design. It documents the evolution of Lynch’s role in discussing his movies, from his self-described “pre-verbal stage” in the early years to his increasingly elaborate, though persistently elusive, articulations. It also registers the intense international interest in Lynch’s work, with interviews from French and Spanish sources translated here for the first time.