Catching the Big Fish — David Lynch on Creativity and Cinema

AuthorAthenarium / Posted on

Catching the Big Fish — David Lynch on Creativity and Cinema

Death and Eraserhead

The American filmmaker David Lynch remembers the despair and melancholia he felt during the five years it took him to complete Eraserhead—the surrealist horror film that would eventually propel the former painter’s career into Hollywood stardom. “I thought I was dead”, he recalls. “Here I am, locked in this thing. I can’t finish it. The world is leaving me behind.”

By this point, he had stopped paying attention to music, television, and stories from the outside world. “Hearing these things”, he says, “felt like dying.” Was filmmaking worth it? Even his brother and father told him to give up and get a proper job, for he had a daughter to care for. Hearing that “almost broke my heart”, Lynch repines.

He recalls those early struggles, delivering the Wall Street Journal on his paper route, and borrowing money from his father just to scrounge up enough funds to shoot his next scene. Money was so tight back then that a scene of his lead actor walking through a door took Lynch nearly a year and a half to shoot from both sides and angles. 

On reflection, Lynch himself is surprised that the film survived intact. But he is reminded of the expression: “Keep your eye on the doughnut, not on the hole.” And that hole, mind you, stared at him like an abyss, threatening to swallow him and his dreams. True, we cannot guarantee our own success in life, for it is forever full of good and bad luck. But with focus and intent, we can improve our odds and how we feel during the moment. In the end, “the world isn’t going to pass [us] by”, Lynch writes. 

Living the art life

Artistic creation is a difficult endeavour, of course. What the artist seeks and what society wants are often in opposition. And rarely is there an easy compromise. The only advice the filmmaker has for us here is to find balance in a vocation that gives us enough time and funds to pursue the passions that we find truly fulfilling.

Originally, Lynch believed that living the art life demanded absolute dedication to one’s craft—that nothing should distract us from painting or filming or composing. But “really, [living] the art life means freedom”, he writes. It is the time and space to experience and explore. Lynch is reminded likewise of another expression: “If you want to get one hour of good painting in, you have to have four hours of uninterrupted time.”

Indeed, creation is more than just the time you spend putting pen to paper or brush to canvas. It is the way in which you carry and cogitate yourself and your ideas. Masterpieces rarely emerge fully-formed through a linear process. It is an act of trial and error, “action and reaction”, “building and destroying”, experimenting and discovering.

“So the art life”, Lynch reminds, “means a freedom to have time for the good things to happen… If you know that you’ve got to be somewhere in half an hour, there’s no way you can achieve that.” Lynch recalls, for example, his daily patronage to Bob’s Big Boy restaurant during the 70’s. There in the safety of his diner and milkshakes, he would sit by himself and ruminate. And it was there, in the interiors of his mind, that the strange, the dark and the wonderful would surface.

Ideas are like fish

Ideation, Lynch says, comes to him in bits and bobs. Each fragment is like a piece of a very special puzzle, for every piece that has been laid affects everything that follows. The American author Joan Didion describes a similar experience with writing. “What’s so hard about the first sentence”, she says, “is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence.” But it can help, Lynch adds, to have some bait for ideas. And that lure or snare rests ultimately in one’s desire. That is, the desire and patience to find that first fragment and to follow its clues and trails to the very end.

As the filmmaker writes:

“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”

David Lynch. (2006). Catching the Big Fish.

Contemplating cinema

“Cinema is a language”, says Lynch. A view that is common to many filmmakers. But it is also a special kind of language. One that goes beyond words. Indeed, you may not always be able to describe a good song or scene in sentences. But that experience is nonetheless moving. Filmmaking, after all, is a polyphony of story, visuals, dialogue, music and sound. One that reaches the many regions of our brains. And cinema especially is an exercise in the making of life and the birthing of worlds.

This is why “a sense of place” is so important to the artform, Lynch observes. “Every story has its own world, and its own feel, and its own mood.” This is also why texture is of great interest to him. The ever curious filmmaker loves to inspect everything, from pies and coffees, to small bugs and tree barks, and even to that of a rotting animal. “You get in close and the textures are wonderful”, he says. 

Rage and torment

To catch the big fish, however, the artist must be in control of his or her own temperament, emotions and motivations. While it is true that anger, stress, depression, and fear are important aspects of psychology and storytelling, “they’re like poison to the filmmaker”, Lynch writes. A studio that runs on extreme pressure and anxiety will generate crippling  resentment, and disengagement. “They’re like a vice-grip on creativity… and there would be no fun… And it should be fun.”

The Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Donald Murray would agree. On writing, he reminds us that it “is too serious a business to be taken seriously… Many writers whimper and whine about how hard it is to write. They should go into real estate. Writing—and any other craft that presumes to be art—should be more play than work.”

But what about Vincent van Gogh, you ask? Did he not paint through pain and sorrow, and paint brilliantly at that? In Lynch’s assessment, van Gogh’s achievement was not a product of his inner turmoil, but in spite of it. The filmmaker suspects that “van Gogh would have been even more prolific… if he wasn’t so restricted by the things tormenting him”, for it was in painting that van Gogh found happiness and reprieve.

Common creative sense

It is also for this reason that Lynch dislikes the artist’s proclivity for recreational drugs. True, the artist is right to want to expand his or her own mind and horizons. But un-prescribed hallucinogens and psychedelics may harm our brains and bodies over the long run, and inhibit our ability to experience the interior and natural world for ourselves.

All things considered, we must remember that living “the art life means freedom to have time for good things to happen.” So when it comes to sustaining creativity in one’s life, Lynch prefers meditation and a good night’s rest. In the end, as Lynch writes, “most of [art and] filmmaking is common sense. If you stay on your toes and think about how to do a thing, it’s right there.”

“It would be easier to roll up the entire sky into a small cloth than it would be to obtain true happiness without knowing the Self... Know that all of Nature is but a magic theater, that the great Mother is the master magician, and that this whole world is peopled by her many parts... We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe.”

Excerpts from The Upanishads in David Lynch. (2006). Catching the Big Fish.

Sources and further reading