Most of your movies are full of negativity, violence—the more shadowy things in life. And yet you promote Transcendental Meditation, which seems to give you so much bliss. How are these opposites reconciled in your mind?

There are many, many dark things flowing around in this world now, and most films reflect the world in which we live. They’re stories. Stories are always going to have conflict.

You speak a lot about spirituality, and I heard that you were raised Christian. Did the Bible ever inspire you?

Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. No one understands when I say that, but it is.

Eraserhead was growing in a certain way, and I didn’t know what it meant. I was looking for a key to unlock what these sequences were saying. Of course, I understood some of it; but I didn’t know the

It’s easy to speak about success through Transcendental Meditation when you are a successful movie director. Do you mean to say that people who practice TM never fail?

You have to learn to find balance in success and failure. Success can kill you just as failure can. And the only way to have balance in success and failure is to function on that Unified Field level. There’s your friend. You can’t

You sound like a very responsible person, socially involved and aware of the needs of others. But you speak a lot about meditation, and I used to think that meditation is a way to achieve personal peace by withdrawing from the world, from other people, by dodging our responsibility towards each other and the society. I’d like to hear your point of view on that.

Meditation is not a selfish thing.

The David Lynch Foundation advocates “world peace,” and it seems you are planning to achieve it through Transcendental Meditation. I know so many people who would find the very idea of world peace ridiculous. What would you say to them?

People are so convinced we can’t have peace that it’s s joke now. Somebody wins a beauty pageant, and the joke is, she wants world peace. And everybody has a big