David Lynch, who created Twin Peaks, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive, won a Cesar Award, a Palme d’Or, and a Golden Lion, has introduced in Kyiv the David Lynch Foundation which he founded.
Within three days, Lynch held a number of public meetings. Two other members of the foundation’s delegation, Bob Roth and Joanna Plafsky, took active part in all the events. Roth, whose maternal grandmother, incidentally, came from Kyiv, is the general director of the David Lynch Foundation and the teacher of transcendental meditation (TM) in the US, propagating which is, in fact, the foundation’s mission. Adherents of this technique include celebrities such as Katy Perry, Tom Hanks, Cameron Diaz, Jerry Seinfeld, Martin Scorsese, and Ray Dalio. Plafsky is a well-known international film producer and distributor.
Transcendental meditation (from Latin words “transcendere” (to step over, go beyond) and “meditatio” (reflection)) is a meditation technique, which, in the opinion of those who practice it, allows, through direct experience, to enter subtler states of thinking, going as far as beyond the limits of one’s own thinking and encountering the area of the least agitated consciousness, the so-called “pure consciousness.” The TM was founded by the Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He gained widespread fame in the West in the 1960s and for some time was even a personal spiritual teacher of the Beatles, with whom, however, he quickly split. At the moment, the Maharishi Movement is an international organization with a multimillion turnover and ambiguous reputation.
Lynch has been practicing the TM for more than 40 years, and his press conference at the Podil Theater was almost entirely devoted to propagating this technique. However, he is still globally better known as the creator of suggestive films which are filled with unusual, spellbinding, sometimes frightening images. While creating motion pictures which follow the logic of surrealistic visions, Lynch is nonetheless able to tell fascinating stories. This has brought him world-wide recognition; and in the end, for those who are involved in cinematography even as spectators in Ukraine, his visit is a real gift.
The Day’s reporter was among the journalists who asked questions of the director first at the press conference, and then during a group interview.
“I LOVE DREAM LOGIC”
MEDITATION
You want to raise seven billion dollars for your foundation. Where exactly did this figure come from?
“The David Lynch Foundation is a non-profit foundation, and we have to get funding so we can give Transcendental Meditation to any person in the world who wants it. For free, yes, so that people can get a scholarship to learn it for free.”
How have you manage to induce so many celebrities to your initiatives?
“Celebrities are human beings, and my feeling is that people do not like to suffer, nobody likes to suffer. So, if you learn about TM, this allows you to dive within and experience this field of unbounded intelligence creating happiness, love, energy, and peace within each one of the human beings. Come and sense it. I have been doing it and enjoying it for 44 years, meditating every day for these 44 years, and never missed my meditations. It can help every human being, not only people who are really suffering, as we always want more and more and more of life.”
Meditation requires a certain concentration and calmness of consciousness. On the other hand, the creative mind is a restless mind, it is looking for images, themes, conflicts, and so on. How do you manage to combine these two types of consciousness?
“First of all, the Transcendental Meditation is not a concentration form of meditation, it’s not a contemplation form of meditation, which keep you on the surface. In Transcendental Meditation, you are given a mantra. A mantra is a very specific sound vibration thought. And this mantra is designed to turn the awareness from out 180 degrees to within. Once you are pointed within, you will naturally, easily, and effortlessly dive through subtler levels of mind and intellect, and at the border of intellect, transcend. ‘Transcend’ is the key word. You will experience the unbounded consciousness, modern science’s Unified Field, Atma, meaning the Self, with a capital ‘S.’ There’s a line ‘Know thyself.’ This is the Self they’re talking about. And that consciousness within is unbounded intelligence, unbounded creativity, unbounded happiness, love, energy, peace, power, all-positive within each one of us human beings. And you know, negativity is the enemy of creativity. If you are super angry, you are poisoning yourself, poisoning your environment, and that anger is controlling your mind. You feel depressed, you can then hardly do anything. I call negativity the ‘Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity.’ So many of us live in that stinking rubber suit, a clown suit of negativity. You start transcending every day, that suit starts to dissolve. Automatically, it spurs the work, you get more of an edge, ideas start flowing, you start expanding consciousness as you get ideas at a deeper level. If you are diving into that field of unbounded creativity, you can be more creative. If you are diving into an unbounded field of intelligence, you can get more intelligence, more understanding of life, a bigger picture can then emerge. That’s been my experience.”
A somewhat unexpected question: what is your attitude to artificial intelligence?
“The science is on the move, new inventions are coming fast and furious, and so many inventions can be used for negative things while they can be used for positive things. I am interested in getting this world happy and positive, so they will use these new inventions for good things for human beings.”
CINEMA
Which heroes or characters get you most interested as a director?
“I am interested in every single one of them. All of them together are part of the story, and they interact, and when you know that a character is a certain way, and another character is this way, and you think of them getting together, things happen in the brain. It is a beautiful thing – stories, characters interacting with one another, so you end up liking all of them, they are all very important.”
Dreams are an important motive for your films. Do you use your own dreams for scripts?
“I hardly ever get ideas from dreams. Two times maybe it has happened that I got ideas in a dream, but I always say I love dream logic. Dream logic and abstractions that cinema can say get a feeling that is difficult to say in words. Abstractions, like in dreams, dream logic I love.”
A SHOT FROM THE FILM TWIN PEAKS / Photo from the website IMDB.COM
Your films are sometimes not very successful, commercially speaking. How do you find the money for new projects?
“In life, I go by ideas, and I sometimes get ideas that I fall in love with, and these ideas then can be translated to one medium or another. In cinema, you try to translate these ideas to cinema, and along the way, have a great time working and making something. There is a line: ‘man has control of action alone, not the fruits of the action.’ We don’t know what happens when we finish the film, release it into the world. So, sometimes it doesn’t go well in the box office, but if you have done the best job you can, you loved what you did, you had fun doing it, you feel good. If you do something for living, for money as the end of the world, and it doesn’t do well, you feel like you died.”
Are you familiar with Ukrainian cinema?
“I am not familiar with much of anything, being in the world of film, I do not see so many films. I love to make films, and I am not really a film buff. My friend Martin Scorsese is a film buff, he will tell you all about the Ukrainian cinema. But I can’t do it.”
Is it true that you are going to leave the cinema? Your fans are very worried.
“I say as an example: if Federico Fellini released 8 ? today, it would play in big cities for about a week, and then end up on pay-per-view. It is a tough time for what they call arthouse cinema. And yet there is this cable television, and I have been thinking that the cable television is the new arthouse because you have freedom to make a short or a long film, and this is kind of the new arthouse.”
Your films are open for interpretation. What are the most extravagant reviews of your works that you have heard about?
“I haven’t even heard some, but this is what I believe. One works on a film a very long time, and tries to get it as good as you can get it. And when it is finished, it is finished. Nothing should be added to it, nothing should be subtracted from it. When you run a film in a theater, for instance, every frame of the film, screening after screening is the same, but the audience is different. And everyone in the audience is different, we are all different on the surface. Many different interpretations, but they are all valid.”
Do you consider someone to be your successor in cinema?
“There is no successor to me (laughter).”
