VIDEO: ‘David Lynch on Creativity’ – by The Atlantic. Animated by illustrator Jackie Lay and produced by Raymond Schillinger & Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg
“ Everything we do starts with an idea. We don’t know what to do unless we have an idea” – David Lynch
When it comes to merging dreams with the conscious through the process of filmmaking, David Lynch is the master of it. Whether it’s music, writing, visual art or films, surrealism is a ubiquitous element in anything he creates. It’s not just the aesthetic aspect, but also the intuitive way he deploys this technique – unfolding daydreams or nightmarish stories of fragmented narratives and scattering meanings that are open to multiple interpretations.
Weird to the bone, Lynch’s films might not be everybody’s cup of tea. However, after watching one you wonder about what his ideas represent, where they came from and how they were formed.
As part of The Atlantic‘s online animated series, the American magazine turns Lynch’s perspective on the origin of great ideas into an elegant animation – inspired by an interview with the director back in 2008. The short helps us visualise how he sees ideas as small fragments of a whole – ”like fishes that we need to catch”. Hidden in the most unexpected places, we can ‘fish’ for them through travelling, daydreaming or by simply going out for a walk.
Lynch also explains that in a way there are no original ideas but sporadic ones which we cut and ‘edit’ into a much bigger thing, which slowly forms into the bigger idea. The Twin Peaks director expands more on his standpoint in an another interview with Paul Holdengräber, shot in NY two years ago. Watch it below: