There is a new 9 minute video profile about David Lynch. The text that goes with it is beautiful. I just made a transcript out of it. Enjoy.

Cinema is a language

It can say things

Big abstract things

And I love that about it

 

Some people are poets

And have a beautiful way of saying things with words

But cinema is its own language

And so you can express a feeling and a thought

That can’t be conveyed any other way

 

It’s a magical medium

 

For me it is so beautiful

To think about these pictures and sounds

Flowing together in time and in sequence

Making something

That can be done only through cinema

 

It’s so magical

I don’t know why

To go into a theater

And have the lights go down

It’s very quiet

And then the curtain starts to open

And you go into a world

 

Although the frames of a film are always the same

The same number in the same sequence and with the same sounds

Every screening is different

 

There is a circle

That goes from the audience to the film and back

Each person is looking and thinking

And feeling and coming up with their own sense of things

 

I like a story that holds abstractions

And that’s what cinema can do

 

I was a painter

I painted and went to art school

I had no interest in film

 

One day I was sitting in a big studio room

And I had a painting going

Which was of a garden at night

It had a lot of black with green plants

Emerging out of the darkness

 

All of a sudden these plants started to move

And I heard a wind

And I thought “Oh, how fantastic this is”

And I began to wonder

If film could be a way to make paintings move

 

An idea is a thought

It’s a thought that holds more

Than you think it does when you receive it

 

But in that first moment there is a spark

 

Desire for an idea is like bait

You bait your hook and then you wait

The desire is the bait

That pulls those fish in

Those ideas

 

Little fish swim on the surface

But the big ones swim down below

If you can expand the container you are fishing in

Your consciousness

You can catch bigger fish

 

When I started meditating

I was filled with anxieties and fears

I felt a sense of depression and anger

Anger and depression and sorrow

Are beautiful things in a story

But they are like poison

To the film maker or artist

 

You must have clarity to create

 

You have to be able to catch ideas

 

Life is filled with abstractions

And the only way me make heads or tails of it

Is through intuition

 

Intuition is seeing the solution

It’s emotion and intellect going together

 

Personally, I think intuition can be sharpened

And expanded through meditation

Diving into the self

 

There is an ocean of consciousness

Inside each of us

And it is an ocean of solutions

 

When you dive into that ocean

That consciousness

You enliven it

It grows

 

And the final outcome of this growth of consciousness

Is called enlightenment

Which is the full potential for us all

 

There are many many dark things

Flowing around in this world now

And most films reflect the world in which we live

 

In stories, in the worlds that we go into

There is suffering, confusion, darkness, tension, and anger

 

But the filmmaker does not have to be suffering

To show suffering

 

Negativity is like darkness

You turn on the light and darkness goes

 

We’re like light bulbs

 

If bliss starts growing inside you

It’s like a light

 

You enjoy that light inside

And if you ramp it up brighter and brighter

You enjoy more and more of it

And that light will extend farther and farther

 

Maybe enlightenment is far away

But it is said that

If you walk toward the light

With every step things get brighter

 

Every day for me gets better and better

And I believe that enlivening unity in the world

Will bring peace on earth

 

So I say “Peace to all of you”

 

UPDATE: most quotes in the video are taken directly from his book “Catching The Big Fish”. I started re-reading the book after having seen/listened to this video.