It was a cold autumn day when I interviewed David Lynch inside his Paris art studio. The film-maker sat at an ink-splattered table while I ran through my questions with a sense of mounting desperation. “Well, yes and no,” Lynch would reply with a smile. “No, well, maybe,” he’d say, beaming at the far wall. He lit one cigarette from the butt of another and asked Mindy, his assistant, to keep him supplied with hot coffee. The tobacco smoke mingled with the steam from his mug. It felt as though he were kicking up clouds to hide himself from view.
Lynch’s cigarette was his magic wand, his familiar, conceivably his paintbrush as well. It allowed him to draw pretty circles in the air to illustrate a point he was making, or to throw up a smokescreen like the Wizard of Oz. Without a cigarette in his hand, the man resembled a wholesome small-town pharmacist. With it, he looked like a hardboiled noir detective. Maybe both men were Lynch; maybe neither was Lynch. He liked being mutable and fiendishly hard to pin down. His sister, he told me, used to be scared of garden peas – and he said that he understood why, because peas are confounding. The outer shell splits to reveal a soft centre, just as people can switch from lightness to darkness in the blink of an eye.
