
The last thing I wanted to do was get on a plane. In October 2001, just a few weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, my fear was nearly overpowering. Before the flight from Portland to Los Angeles, I earnestly wrote to a friend and his wife, “In case I don’t make it back, I love you guys.”
However, I knew the chance to interview my hero, iconic filmmaker David Lynch, was too great to pass up. And I was right. Mourning Lynch’s death at age 78 on Jan. 15, 2025, I’m thankful for what became the greatest moment of my career.
I interviewed Lynch in Los Angeles on October 18, 2001, the day before his masterpiece, Mulholland Drive, was released in theaters. Naturally we talked about that film, as well as classics like Blue Velvet and Eraserhead, and TV’s Twin Peaks. But the conversation was much more than a young journalist’s Q&A with a great director, at least to me. It felt like an audience with a guru.
Listening to me talk earnestly about his movies and share my anxiety over the flight, Lynch’s empathy and advice actually helped me overcome that post-9/11 fear. “When you get depression and anxiety you can get lost in there,” he said. “Facing the music and learning from it is all you can do.” After all, mining his own youthful fear had become the basis for Lynch’s brilliant career.
Because David Lynch was not only a profoundly committed visual artist and filmmaker but also a seemingly guileless man decidedly marching to his own drummer, the afternoon also had its quirky moments — as when he suddenly urinated into a sink, keeping the conversation going all the while. (More about that later.)
Movie Madness

2001 was my first year as a full-time journalist. Though architecture would ultimately become my beat, in those early days I dreamed of becoming the next Roger Ebert. At New York University, home to perhaps America’s most prestigious film school, nearly all my friends aspired to the screen trade. Freshman year in 1990, the first movie I saw in a theater was Lynch’s raucous Wild At Heart. Each Tuesday night, we gathered in front of the TV to watch Lynch’s Twin Peaks. By senior year, I was writing a film column for the NYU student newspaper.
The early nineties were a remarkable era for movies: We made pilgrimages to see Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, the Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. But the late nineties and early aughts, when I was starting to write about movies, were memorable too. As a young Willamette Week reviewer, my year-end top ten lists included Lynch’s The Straight Story and Lost Highway, as well as now-classic films like Heat, L.A. Confidential, The Royal Tenenbaums and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.
During these years, the Internet was in its infancy, so you could pursue your interests and connect with like-minded people around the world, but streaming and social media were a long way off. Movies were still doing robust business. Both traditional Hollywood studios and a new generation of indies funded iconoclastic, artful, non-blockbuster fare. While Lynch was merely one of several auteurs of this era, he was perhaps the first since Alfred Hitchcock to see his name become an adjective. “Lynchian” became shorthand for a blend of macabre, madness and mundane: the surreal undercurrent of otherwise-normal everyday life.
Directors, Donuts, and Deja Vu

David Lynch didn’t normally invite young film journalists from small cities to his house in the Hollywood Hills. I had an inside connection. One of my college friends, Eli Roth, who later become a celebrated horror movie director (Cabin Fever, Hostel) and actor (co-starring in Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds), had spent six years working for Lynch. I was granted an interview, and though it could have been conducted over the phone, I decided to spend twice my writing fee traveling to Los Angeles.
Before I left Portland, Lynch’s assistant, Jay Aaseng (now an award-winning voice actor), invited me to participate in a group interview with the director for an upcoming DVD reissue of Eraserhead. But just hours after I landed at LAX, Aaseng called to say the interview was off. Lynch, when told of my involvement, said he didn’t want someone he hadn’t met participating in the DVD-extra recording. When I protested that I’d already flown to California, Aaseng promised to check with Lynch again. A few minutes later, he called back to say that Lynch would give me an hour to talk about Mulholland Drive and his career.
When I asked Eli Roth about a gift I could bring Lynch, he recommended Krispy Kreme donuts, the director’s favorite. So on the way to the interview, I stopped for a glazed dozen. Nearby, a car wash’s marquee caught my eye. Its marquee was supposed to read GOD BLESS AMERICA but the ‘B’ had fallen off. The resulting unintended message, GOD LESS AMERICA, was its own little Lynchian moment, and became the lead-in to my Lynch profile for Salon.
Lynch owned two houses next door to each other in the Hollywood Hills near Mulholland Drive: one his residence, the other his Asymmetrical Productions offices and a recording studio. Arriving by car, I recognized one of the houses from the opening scene of Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway. A character played by Bill Pullman, called Fred Madison, finds at this doorstep a videotape in an envelope. Menacingly, the tape contains footage of Fred and his wife (Patricia Arquette) asleep in their bedroom. Lynch had his own house as a character of sorts: an oasis that becomes violated. Which is sadly ironic to consider now, given that Lynch was evacuated from this compound days before his death, during the recent L.A. wildfires. As an emphysema sufferer, the fires may have hastened Lynch’s death. Coincidentally, in Lost Highway, Fred Madison begins having visions of a house burning down; the footage runs backwards.
Inside the Artist’s Studio

After I knocked on the door, Jay Aaseng led me through the house and the backyard to Lynch’s painting studio. With concrete floors, a work sink, and big windows, it has since been featured in the 2016 documentary David Lynch: The Art Life (by Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes, and Olivia Neergaard-Holm). This was the director’s happy place, where he could work creatively without interruption.
Although in these years I interviewed auteurs like Sofia Coppola, Gus Van Sant, Danny Boyle, Todd Haynes, Wim Wenders and Claire Denis, usually our talks occurred at hotels or over the phone. Before Lynch even entered this painting studio, I knew that being here made the moment vastly richer and more special.
I kneeled down to look at his paintings sitting on the concrete floor, propped against the walls. Lynch had studied at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Through his life, he never stopped painting. Each artwork I saw was like a single-frame narrative, depicting disturbing human scenes against red-orange backdrops. Layered paint and other materials protruded from the canvas physically like the topography of a raised map, and often were accompanied by scrawled handwriting, a la Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Then suddenly, there he was. With his lavishly messy silver pompadour and white collared shirt buttoned to the top, I remember thinking, “This guy looks exactly like David Lynch,” as if he had dressed the part of his persona, but maybe it meant the persona was real.
Two other familiar Lynchisms were immediately apparent. He was smoking a cigarette, and his voice sounded like small-town Boy Scout from the 1950s. When I explained my intent to talk about Mulholland Drive and a bit about his past work, he said, “Sounds great, Buddy,” as if an accompanying “gee-whiz” was implied.
Lynch showed me around the small studio, pointing out furniture he’d built, including the work sink, its basin made of wood. During our 90 minutes together, this is when he smiled the most.

Re-Routing to Mulholland Drive
In 2022, British magazine Sight and Sound released its once-a-decade international poll of critics and directors ranking the 100 greatest movies of all time. Though both top ten rankings still featured venerable cinematic landmarks such as Citizen Kane and Vertigo, each of which had topped previous polls, atop the critics’ list this time (quite surprisingly) was Chantal Ackerman’s 1975 domestic opus Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Also ranked highly were three turn-of-the-21st-century films: Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love (number five), Claire Denis’s Beau Travail (number seven), and Lynch’s Mulholland Drive at number eight.
Mulholland Drive stars Laura Elena Harring and Naomi Watts as Rita and Betty, a post-car-crash amnesiac and the wholesome aspiring actress who gives her shelter. Seeking to solve Rita’s identity, they grow closer and (as in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona) their identities begin to merge, before a third-act plot twist changes everything. Mulholland Drive was conceived as a network TV series. Most of what became the theatrical movie was shot in 1999 as a pilot for ABC.

By this time, TV was entering a new era. Prestige dramas like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and The Wire rose to the level of award-winning movies and foreshadowed today’s streaming age. Lynch’s original Twin Peaks prefigured these shows by a decade, so returning to the small screen made sense. But ABC cancelled the Drive series before the pilot even aired.
Undeterred, Lynch turned the pilot’s footage into a theatrical film, with a new ending shot the following year. This wasn’t just recycling or rescuing his work. Lynch believed the indirect route aided his creativity.
“It’s like having a child who had to have a serious operation that made it OK, and maybe even a little bit better because of the operation,” he said as we sipped coffee, with sun rays illuminating the cigarette smoke. “Maybe some strange thing even happened in the operation where the child has a higher IQ. There’s something to that, because it looked like this project was dead for a while. Then I got really lucky as these ideas came to me, and now it feels like this was the way it was always meant to be.”
“If Mulholland Drive started out as a feature,” Lynch added, “it would be a completely different film. When it switched into a feature and I got the ideas of how to make that happen, those ideas changed the viewpoint.”
All About the Ideas
As Lynch fans know, the word “ideas” is fundamental. Everybody has ideas, of course, but whether it’s because he practices transcendental meditation or due to his training as a fine artist, Lynch always devoted substantial time to cultivating new ideas. “If you sit in a chair, and you have a desire for ideas, you begin to daydream, and you’ll see that daydreams will take you to different places,” he told me that afternoon. “There’s a lot of mundane places it takes you, but if you have a desire for ideas, as you’re daydreaming you’re sinking deeper in. And all of a sudden you can catch one.”
In my 3,941-word interview transcript, Lynch uses the word “ideas” 31 times. In 2006, he published an entire book about harnessing ideas, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity.
“Discoveries don’t necessarily need a lot of time to occur. But when you have time, you sink deeper into the world,” he added. “And the way you translate the ideas is key: staying true to them … so that at the end you can say, ‘It feels correct.’ If you’ve done that, then it doesn’t really hurt as bad if people don’t go for it. If you haven’t done that, and people don’t go for it, that I always say is doom. It’s really a negative. You could do yourself a favor by staying true to the ideas.”

Lynch’s works are known for being difficult to interpret, but he resists explaining them. “It robs people of their right to figure things out for themselves,” he said. I asked what he thought of viewers interpreting the work differently than he did, bringing ideas of their own. “I would say, ‘Very good.’ Every translation is valid,” Lynch added.
“Some people, for some reason, love intuiting: thinking and feeling together. They love getting lost, and in a sense love not knowing, and feeling their way out. Other people have more literal minds, and get angry when things are not very specific. A Hollywood studio is a big business, and therefore has to think about attracting a majority, because it’s about getting people into the theaters. But if you’re making films for a different reason, then you don’t have to worry about that, or at least not as much.
“In the back of your mind you just hope that people get the same thrill that you got getting those original ideas. And that’s what it’s all about. When you’re painting, you’re not thinking about an audience. You’re in a thrilling world, and then you have a show and hope that thrilling world will thrill other human beings.”
A Wee and a New Lunch
Then something surprising happened. Mid-conversation, Lynch said, “Brian, could I get you to walk down that pathway, because I’ve got to urinate.” There was no bathroom in the little studio. After I complied, walking through the open doorway and about 15 feet down a garden pathway, Lynch proceeded to urinate into his hand-built work sink. Because the sink was beside the doorway, and there was a window above the sink, he kept talking while peeing. “I drink a lot of coffee,” he explained.
Once back at his desk resuming the interview, I suggested we open the box of donuts. Though Eli Roth had insisted Lynch loved Krispy Kreme, he politely declined to eat one. “I can’t because I’m on this new lunch,” he said, which seemed cryptic and perplexing at the time. But I later learned Lynch always ate the same exact lunch. For years he visited Bob’s Big Boy daily. Later he switched to tuna on lettuce with cottage cheese. Then it became tuna with feta cheese, olive oil, vinegar and tomatoes. He planned lunch to fuel idea-generation.
Hungry, I asked if Lynch would mind my eating one of the gifted donuts, which in retrospect makes me cringe. But his answer brought out his boyish enthusiasm again, saying, “Not one bit, Buster! You dig in!”
At this point, Lynch also apologized for vetoing my participation in the Eraserhead DVD-extra recording. He said he simply hadn’t known me, but now that he did, I was worthy, adding, “You’re a good guy, Brian.” I almost felt tempted to print out that five-word quote and have it framed.
Harnessing the Fear
As the interview wound down, I made a point of asking Lynch about being a young artist in 1970s Philadelphia. I knew that although he’d been intimidated by the city’s rough edges and threats of violence, these feelings had fueled his creativity. I was curious, because having similarly left bucolic McMinnville, Oregon for college in New York City sight-unseen, I’d been overwhelmed with culture-shock, and continued to struggle with anxiety.
“I found myself living under this blanket of fear,” he said of Philadelphia. “It took a year after I got to California for the fear to lift off. It was a very heavy place.” Yet Philadelphia, he added, “was my greatest influence.”
Part of why I identified so strongly with Twin Peaks was its evocation of the opposite fear, which I’d known as a child in McMinnville or during my family’s backpacking trips into the Cascades wilderness: that of the immense forest, away from civilization.
“For sure,” Lynch said. “When you live in a remote place in the country, you could say that’s very peaceful and beautiful — until man appears in the distance, walking slowly toward you home. If anybody shows up at your house in the country, chances are they’re going to be there for some time. From the distance you can’t tell if they’re friendly or not. So there’s a different kind of fear in the country.”
When I shared with Lynch my fearfulness over flying to Los Angeles amid an ongoing terrorist threat, he offered a wise perspective. “It’s like fresh air after a storm,” he said of the 9/11 attacks. “It lasts for a certain number of years and then it begins to putrefy again. Many things can come out of that time. … The sickness is getting light put on it. I think maybe that’s kind of a good thing. You’re shocked at first, but … it can lead to something really good.” After our conversation, the flight back to Portland was actually serene.
Early in the Mourning

In the days since Lynch’s death, it’s been heartening what a wide swath of people have lamented the loss. Though Lynch was a legendary director and one-of-a-kind iconoclast, except for a relatively brief moment at the beginning of the nineties when Twin Peaks was a pop-cultural phenomenon, he was never mainstream-popular. Or so I thought.
Not only was that 2001 interview the most treasured moment of my career, but Lynch has been meaningful all of my adult life. I’ll never forget the chorus of screams in my entire NYU dorm during the 1991 Twin Peaks episode in which Laura Palmer’s killer is finally revealed. When I met my partner four years later at a party, we bonded over mutual Lynch fandom. When I mentioned to Lynch that I’d begun making experimental short films from video footage captured randomly over time, he encouraged the approach.
“It’s a process of action and reaction. It’s funny: you can prepare for a happy accident, but you can’t set them up. That’s the nature of them. They surprise you, albeit in a positive way. There’s something about just staying on guard and watching: the strangest, smallest things can lead to big, beautiful things.”
A decade after this interview, my partner and I traveled to Snoqualmie and North Bend, Washington, where Twin Peaks had been filmed. We ate breakfast at Twede’s Café, known as the Double R diner on the show. We drove to a bend in the highway outside town where the opening credits had been shot. We stayed at the Salish Lodge and Spa, its exteriors filmed as the show’s Great Northern Hotel.

Most impactful of all was seeing the 268-foot Snoqualmie Falls from Twin Peaks’ opening credits, with its roar of white noise and the feel of its mist on our faces. I later made a not-very-interesting film based entirely on close-ups of that waterfall called So Calm Me, just because I wanted to keep experiencing its meditative power.
As we collectively mourn David Lynch, I suspect my mind will return to Snoqualmie Falls repeatedly.
It’s neither darkness that ultimately defines his work nor quirkiness. It’s that Lynch was in tune with deeper, elemental forces, beyond everyday comprehension and somehow represented by that waterfall: a dialogue between the conscious and unconscious self, with a deeply rooted sense of place, whether an urban jungle or a secluded forest.
As we grieve not only for Lynch but also over the catastrophic wildfires that have devastated Los Angeles, hopefully a little of his post-9/11 wisdom can apply here too: that from the ashes of trauma and loss can eventually flow new inspirations and ideas.
Thank you for the wonderful read, Brian. It somehow feels like David is still with us, through the vast outpouring of love and deep appreciation from so many. If anyone can reach us from the beyond, it’s him.
Thank you so much, Grace! I so appreciate the kind words, especially from such a great photographer like you, who creates very cinematic little worlds. Plus I love the idea that Lynch would be uniquely able to speak to us from the great beyond. Cheers.