David Lynch Trivia: 55 amazing facts about the film director!

David Lynch is an American director, screenwriter, visual artist, musician, actor, and author. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed a unique cinematic style. The surreal and, in many cases, violent elements contained within his films have been known to “disturb, offend or mystify” audiences.

Let’s read some more facts about this mysterious artist!

1.David Keith Lynch was born on the 20th of January, 1946

2. He was raised by a middle-class family in Missoula, Montana.

3. Lynch spent his childhood traveling around the United States, before going on to study painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where he first made the transition to producing short films.

4.He moved to Los Angeles, where he produced his first motion picture, the surrealist horror film Eraserhead (1977).

5.After Eraserhead became a cult classic on the midnight moviecircuit, Lynch was employed to direct a biographical film about a deformed man, Joseph Merrick, titled The Elephant Man (1980), from which he gained mainstream success.

6.He was then employed by the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, and proceeded to make two films: the science-fiction epic Dune (1984), which proved to be a critical and commercial failure, and then a neo-noir crime film, Blue Velvet (1986), which was critically acclaimed.

7. Lynch created his own television series with Mark Frost, the popular murder mystery Twin Peaks (1990–1991; 2017): he also created a cinematic prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992); a road movie, Wild at Heart (1990); and a family film, The Straight Story (1999); in the same period.

8.His turn towards surrealist filmmaking began with three films which operated on a “dream logic”, non-linear narrative structures: the psychological thriller Lost Highway (1997), the neo-noir mystery film Mulholland Drive (2001) and the mystery film Inland Empire (2006).

9.At the same time, Lynch embraced the Internet as a medium, producing several web-based shows, such as the animated DumbLand (2002) and the surreal sitcom Rabbits (2002).

10. Lynch has many talents. He has worked as a singer-songwriter, having released two solo albums—Crazy Clown Time (2011) and The Big Dream (2013).

11.Lynch found this transitory early life relatively easy to adjust to, noting that he found it fairly easy to meet new friends whenever he started attending a new school.

12.By the time he was 14, David Lynch had already lived in six different cities and five different states: Montana, Idaho, Washington, North Carolina, and Virginia.

13.On his 15th birthday, Lynch worked with his fellow Virginia Eagle Scouts seating VIPs in the bleachers outside the White House at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration.

14.The David Lynch Foundation, which he founded to fund the teaching of Transcendental Meditation in schools.

15.He enjoys painting and photography.

16.He initially studied to be a painter.

17.He has written two books—Images (1994) and Catching the Big Fish (2006) and directed several music videos and commercials.

18.Scripts are generally a page per minute of onscreen action, but the script forEraserhead (which is 89 minutes long) is only 21 pages.

19.David Lynch has more IMDb credits than God. only has 11 full features under his belt, but on those films he’s taken on a variety of jobs from composer to construction crew.

20.From 1983 to 1992, Lynch wrote and drew a comic strip featured in theVillage Voice and LA Reader, among others, called The Angriest Dog in the World.

21.One of the key themes that critics noted in Lynch’s work was the usage of dreams and dreamlike imagery and structure within his works, something they related to the “surrealist ethos” of relying “on the subconscious to provide visual drive”

22.Another of Lynch’s prominent themes include industry, with repeated imagery of “the clunk of machinery, the power of pistons, shadows of oil drills pumping, screaming woodmills and smoke billowing factories”, as can be seen with the industrial wasteland in Eraserhead, the factories in The Elephant Man, the sawmill in Twin Peaks and the lawn mower in The Straight Story.

23.Lynch has had several long-term relationships.

24.In 1967, he married Peggy Lentz in Chicago, Illinois.

25.They had one child, Jennifer Chambers Lynch, born in 1968, who is a film director.

26.They filed for divorce in 1974.

27.On June 21, 1977, Lynch married Mary Fisk, and the couple had one child, Austin Jack Lynch, born in 1982.

28.They divorced in 1987, and Lynch began dating Isabella Rossellini after filming Blue Velvet.

29.Lynch and Rossellini broke up in 1991, and Lynch developed a relationship with Mary Sweeney, with whom he had one son.

30.Sweeney also worked as Lynch’s longtime film editor/producer and co-wrote and produced The Straight Story.

31.The two married in May 2006, but divorced that July.

32.Lynch married actress Emily Stofle, who appeared in his 2006 film Inland Empire, in February 2009. They have a daughter.

33.The first half of his 2001 film Mulholland Drive was originally made as a pilot for ABC, before later being completed as a film.

34.Lynch has directed a number commercials, including ones for Calvin Klein, Giorgio Armani, Playstation 2, and a Japanese coffee company.

35.He served as Grand Jury President for the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.

36.He always buttons the top button of his shirt, because he feels too vulnerable with the top button open.

37.He had lunch every day at Bob’s Big Boy in Los Angeles for seven years, ordering a chocolate milkshake and up to seven cups of coffee with sugar.

38.His favorite painter is Francis Bacon.

39.He supported himself during the 5-year-long Eraserhead shoot by delivering the Wall Street Journal on a paper route.

40.He started smoking when he was five-years-old.

41.The coffee aficionado has his own brand of organic coffee called “David Lynch Signature Cup.”

42.In 1980’s Heart Beat, a film about Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady that starred Nick Nolte and Sissy Spacek, Lynch had an uncredited role as a painter. He provided his own paintings for the film.

43.His daughter, Jennifer Lynch, directed the 1993 film Boxing Helena, andSurveillance, which had a limited theatrical release in 2009.

44.Lynch was originally offered the chance to direct Fast Times at Ridgemont High. He didn’t feel he was the right fit for the job.

45.He is a fan of the Bourne trilogy. He likes the first one the best.

46.He planned on making two more films about Twin Peaks, but since the first was unsuccessful, plans for followups were scrapped.

47.George Lucas asked Lynch to direct Return of the Jedi. Lynch passed, telling him, “You should direct this. It’s your thing! It’s not my thing.” Instead, he directed Dune.

48.Lynch wrote half of a script for a second Dune film, but never finished it, since “Dune was a fiasco and there weren’t any more wanted.”

49.In the early ’70s, after marrying his first wife Peggy, they bought a 12-room house in a horrible Philadelphia neighborhood. It cost only $3,500.

50.Childhood friend Toby Keeler once asked Lynch, famous for his refusal to discuss the meanings of his movies, what Wild at Heart is about. Lynch responded, “It’s about an hour and forty-five minutes.”

51.He dissected a cat during the making of Eraserhead to help give him ideas for textures for the film.

52.Lynch has a finished script for a film adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. He says, “Unfortunately, it’s expensive and it won’t make any money.” In Lynch’s script, the story is set in 1950s America.

53.Woody Allen cited Blue Velvet as his favorite film of 1986.

54.He refuses to disclose how the baby for Eraserhead was created and what it’s made out of. When asked about it, his responses include, “It was born nearby” and “Maybe it was found.” In general, he says, “Talking about how certain things happened in a film, to me, takes a lot away from the film.”

55.Lynch on the real life inspiration for the opening of Lost Highway: “I woke up one morning and the intercom rang, and a man says, ‘Dave!’ and I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he says, ‘Dick Laurent is dead.’ And I said, ‘What?’ And there was no one there… I don’t know who Dick Laurent is. All I do know is he’s dead!”