About David Lynch
Born in precisely the kind of small-town American setting so familiar from his films, David Lynch spent his childhood being shunted from one state to another as his research scientist father kept getting relocated. He attended various art schools, married Peggy Lynch and then fathered future director Jennifer Lynch shortly after he turned 21. That experience, plus attending art school in a particularly violent and run-down area of Philadelphia, inspired Eraserhead (1977), a film that he began in the early 1970s (after a couple of shorts) and which he would work on obsessively for five years. The final film was initially judged to be almost unreleasable weird, but thanks to the efforts of distributor Ben Barenholtz, it secured a cult following and enabled Lynch to make his first mainstream film (in an unlikely alliance with Mel Brooks), though The Elephant Man (1980) was shot through with his unique sensibility. Its enormous critical and commercial success led to Dune (1984), a hugely expensive commercial disaster, but Lynch redeemed himself with the now classic Blue Velvet (1986), his most personal and original work since his debut. He subsequently won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival with the dark, violent road movie Wild at Heart (1990), and achieved a huge cult following with his surreal TV series Twin Peaks (1990), which he adapted for the big screen, though his comedy series On the Air (1992) was less successful. He also draws comic strips and has devised multimedia stage events with regular composer Angelo Badalamenti. He had a much-publicized affair with Isabella Rossellini in the late 1980s.::Michael Brooke
Born in 1946 in Missoula, Montana, David Lynch was raised in small-town America. After high school, he went to Boston to attend the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Shortly after that, he planned a three-year trip to Europe to work on his art, but didn't take to it and left after 15 days. In 1977, he released his first film Eraserhead (1977), which, although not critically acclaimed, was noticed by many people, including Francis Ford Coppola, who was rumored to have screenings of it for his cast and crew on the Apocalypse Now (1979) set. After a stream of visually striking films such as Blue Velvet (1986), Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Dr. (2001). These films and others, beginning with Blue Velvet (1986), and including his Twin Peaks (1990) T.V. series, feature what has now been added to signature Lynch features, such as vibrant colors, the use of dreams and montage to connect character thought and multiple emotions into one sequence. In addition to that, since Blue Velvet (1986), Lynch has gained the reputation of one of the foremost auteurs in the film industry, and one of the few living auteurs who continually defies cinematic convention. His films continually represent his ideal that films, representing life, should be complex, and in some cases, inexplicable. Due to his decisive innovation and the beautiful confusion of his films, he will always be recognized as if not one of the greatest film-makers, one of the most original. Lynch is an innovative director, and even if his films aren't necessarily realistic, they are real in their representation of what life is: a confusing, irrational series of events that have little purpose, and one makes one's own interpretation of each event, giving life one's own purpose. Lynch wants his films to resonate emotionally and instin...