More Wind

David Lynch on becoming a director

Q. : Why did you want to become A Director? 

David : I didn't really want to 

become A Director, I wanted to make films -- 

I knew next door to nothing about film; I wanted to be A Painter and I was A Painter, and I was in a studio working on a painting of a garden at night; and The Green was coming out of this Black and I heard a wind, and I saw The Green move; and I said, "Oh, that is interesting --"

and I thought it would be good to do a moving painting so there was an experimental painting and sculpture contest at the end of the year at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where I went to school and for that contest I did a sculptured screen with three heads out of polyester resin and some painting on the screen about six feet by eight feet the screen was and then I stop motion kind of animated but in a stop-motion fashion a uh thing that I called 'Six Men Getting Sick'; and that was my uh film in 16 millimeter a little tiny bell and howl camera that had single frame capabilities and it was so expensive to make that film relative to what I had that I thought that would be it that it was just an experiment but someone saw that and commissioned me to make one for him and that led to another whole thing falling in love with film and uh getting green lights I made um a short film called the alphabet and with the money I got from this gentleman who commissioned me and there's there's a whole bunch of things that happened but I ended up making not what he wanted but um something that combined animation and live action and then I wrote a script for a film called the grandmother and at that time the American Film Institute was starting and they were offering independent filmmaker grants and on a real long shot because they wanted previous work and a script and I had both those things so on this long shot I applied for an independent filmmakers Grant and the first group I wasn't in the first group but and I had to wait a long time but I got a phone call that changed my life completely because I won this grant to make the grandmother and I made the grandmother and on the strength of that I got accepted to the American Film Institute which was in Beverly Hills California in a mansion um and I thought I died and gone to heaven so I went out there and uh one thing led to another and I got the opportunity to make Eraserhead