David Lynch on life, art and Eraserhead

Back in December of 1981 I had the remarkable experience of meeting David Lynch to interview him about the making of Eraserhead. I had been commissioned by a magazine called Cinefantastique because I’d written what appeared to be the first in-depth analysis of David’s debut feature and, having appreciated what I had written, he agreed to speak about the four-and-a-half year effort to create what would in many ways remain his signature film. We had two lengthy conversations in his office at Universal Studios, where he was in the early stages of developing Dune, and spoke again later that week by phone after I’d interviewed a number of his collaborators, raising more questions I wanted to put to him. A couple of months later, after I had returned home and transcribed all the interviews, there were other points which required clarification, so we spoke again by phone, with one final call a couple of months after that when I’d sent him a copy of the finished article.

Publication of that article was delayed until September 1984, almost three years after those conversations and a year after I finished my six-month tenure on the set of Dune in Mexico City. And there things remained until I decided to post all the transcripts here on my website in late 2010. I took them down in 2015 when I issued all the Eraserhead material as a self-published ebook, which in turn was given a proper publication by BearManor Media in 2020. So David’s words have been available for a long time – and yet something was undeniably missing: the particular, distinctive quality of his voice.

And so, after his death in January, it occurred to me that it might be a fitting tribute to make the original recordings available. Although he eventually turned the story of making Eraserhead into an engaging monologue to accompany the release of the film on disk, those conversations back in 1981 are more wide-ranging and less polished; they represent something like a first draft, prompted by my questions, and in some ways perhaps reflect a more open and unguarded expression of his personality. For me, listening again for the first time in many years, what comes across is a mixture of thoughtfulness and generosity – towards all the people who had helped him realize his creation, but also to me. His voice takes me back to that week I spent in Los Angeles, to my own younger self, naive, inexperienced, somewhat fearful and out of my depth, but immediately put at ease by David who treated me from the first moment we met as an equal. That meeting was a remarkable, transformative experience and four-and-a-half decades later I remain deeply grateful.

And so, here are the recordings of my conversations with David Lynch. The technical quality is less than stellar – they were recorded on a cheap cassette player running at half-speed to save tape – but David’s personality comes through strong and clear.

Part One: December 8, 1981

Part Two: December 8, 1981 cont.

Part Three: December 9, 1981

Part Four: December 15, 1981

Part Five: February 11, 1982

Part Six: Spring 1982