INTERVIEWS > David Lynch Wades Into Deep Waters

The director talks about business, meditation, happiness, and how to make a good movie that withstands the test of time. Lend an ear.

David Lynch has never broken box office records, but that's fine with him. Since 1978, the iconoclastic director of such films as The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive, and TV series Twin Peaks, has persuaded studios, networks, and investors to provide backing for over 15 very un-Hollywood projects -- and come back for more.

Along the way, he has earned three Academy Award nominations for best director, a Palme d'Or from the Cannes Film Festival, worldwide critical acclaim, and a devoted following. In 1990, Time magazine proclaimed him a genius on its cover. Artistically uncompromising, Lynch, 60, is one of the few Hollywood directors who insist on -- and receive -- final cut on all films. He has developed one of the most unique and recognizable styles in world cinema.

To get his projects financed and distributed, Lynch has had to innovate in business as well as in filmmaking. As a graduate student at the American Film Institute in the late 1970s, he took a paper route delivering the Wall Street Journal to help fund the completion of his first feature film, Eraserhead. During that period, he discovered transcendental meditation, which has become integral to his creative process.

In 2005 he founded the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-based Education & World Peace, which is dedicated to teaching transcendental meditation in U.S. classrooms. Lynch frequently lectures on using meditation to enhance creativity and decision-making in business. BusinessWeek correspondent Justin Hibbard spoke with Lynch at the TiEcon 2006 conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

Most people don't associate meditation with business. Why are you talking to businesspeople about meditation?
For business, you need ideas. If your consciousness starts expanding, you've got a better chance of catching more ideas, bigger ideas. The analogy is fishing. The little fish are on the surface. Then you go deeper, and they get bigger and bigger down there. Big fish, big ideas.

You recommend that businesses offer meditation to employees in the workplace. Why would a company invest in that?
There are businesses that are run on fear. And then on the other side, there are businesses that are run in a much more humane way. Businesses that are run on fear are the theater of the absurd. You go to an office filled with fear, you begin to hate your work, hate turns to anger, you begin to be angry at your work, and your life is like a hell. You don't go the extra mile for that business. And it affects your home life, it affects everything.

Now, if I was running a big business, I would say to every employee, "You have a chance to learn to dive within." And within a couple of months, you start seeing people come to work brighter, happier, with way more eagerness to go the extra mile for you. It would become like a family. And the ideas would flow. For businesses, it's money in the bank.

How has meditation helped your ideas flow?
I'll give you an example from [my 2001 film] Mulholland Drive. It was built for an open-ended TV pilot. ABC hated it. So I got the opportunity to make it into a feature. Now an open-ended pilot needed to be closed suddenly. I sat down to meditate one night, and literally, like a string of pearls, all the ideas came. Normally, you meditate, and then you think after meditation. But this just happened to zip up, and I wrote those bad boys down as soon as I finished meditating, and that was it.

Is it unusual for ideas to come during meditation like that?
Yeah, it is. Your meditation is to go within, transcend, and experience pure consciousness. You come out refreshed, wide awake, and energetic. You can now focus on those problems, focus on your business, focus on your film. It's easier to focus, and it's a more intense focus.

Do ideas often come to you completely developed as they did in the Mulholland Drive example?
Yes, a lot of times they do. But a lot of other times you get a fragment. You get like a Rosetta Stone idea. And you fall in love with this fragment, and it is now the little idea that attracts all the other ideas to it. It's like bait at the end of the hook. It may end up being part of one scene, or it sets a tone for the whole film. Then you begin to focus on that, and more fish swim in and connect to it, and now you've got two or three scenes.

The more you have, the more easily the rest swim in. It's like there's more bait. And then one day, it's complete in script form. Then you go out and make the film, being true to those ideas.Now some other fish can swim in. You never turn down a good idea, or a good fish, but you don't want to take a bad idea, or a bad fish. So you go back and see how everything is progressing based on those original ideas. And if new ideas come in, you see if they really and truly marry to what has gone before.

How do you know whether an idea is good or bad?
Intuition. There's emotion and intellect, and then there's intuition, which is kind of emotion and intellect together. In business, you might not be able to explain an intuitive feeling to others, but you say, "I know that is the right way to go for me. I know that feels right. That is intuitively right." And you go that way. And maybe everybody else is telling you you're crazy, but you've got to take a risk.

You also say meditation helps with making decisions. Can you give an example from your work?
One night while we were making Lost Highway, we had a scene underneath a covering at an indoor-outdoor '50s kind of diner with a parking lot in the background. Everyone in the scene was dressed in dry clothes and didn't have wet hair. We came there and it started raining. We had already established a dry look. Now the parking lot in the back was wet.

There was a real indication that we were going to all go home. We would have lost a night and lost a lot of money. I decided to continue to shoot. I pictured the scene shot by shot and thought, what would make that parking lot wet other than rain? And so I put kids in the background shooting garden hoses, and therefore the rain looked like it came from that. The hoses idea saved the day.

So you used visualization?
Yeah, a lot of times it's that. You needed a solution, and solutions come more easily with the more consciousness you have. If consciousness is pure gold, all you need is the key to open up that big vault door, and all that gold is yours.

Your films have a unique and recognizable style. Do you do anything deliberate to avoid the obvious and clichéd?
No, because that's a false overlay. I'm just true to those ideas that thrill me. There is some thought to the audience toward the end of the process. You see a film with many people and you can learn a lot. You just sit with them. You can feel all the places where it's slow or there's no understanding or a reaction you didn't expect.

That's fine-tuning the whole thing near the end. But to do some false thing that's not really part of the idea is wrong. A film will live throughout time, and a lot of these false things are done for today's audience right now to make money, and they don't hold up. If you're true to the idea, then it will hold up.