70 Fun Facts About David Lynch

In which Montana city was David Lynch born in January 1946?

Missoula was home for only two months: his father's government job took the family to Sandpoint, Idaho, and through four more moves by the time David was 14.

David Lynch's father Donald experimented on tree diseases as a research scientist for which federal agency?

The USDA's Forest Service had Donald Lynch running experiments in a research forest near Boise, and he would drop young David in the woods for the day while he worked.

Which Boy Scout rank did David Lynch say he reached 'so I could quit, and put it behind me'?

Eagle Scout is scouting's top rank. His father urged him to see it through, promising that one day he would be proud he had.

Which Robert Henri book inspired the teenage Lynch to dedicate himself to 'the art life'?

The Art Spirit was pressed on him by Bushnell Keeler, a friend's painter father who gave the teenager space in his studio; Lynch said the 1923 book 'sort of became my Bible'.

In which city did David Lynch attend the Academy of the Fine Arts and make his first short films?

Philadelphia frightened and thrilled him: he called the city 'the biggest influence in my whole life' and described Eraserhead as 'my Philadelphia Story', minus Jimmy Stewart.

Which one-minute animated loop of 1967, David Lynch's first film, was made to be projected onto a sculpted screen?

Six Men Getting Sick played on a loop to a wailing siren and shared first prize at his art school's year-end show; a fellow student then paid him to make another film.

Which newly founded institution financed David Lynch's 1970 short The Grandmother?

The American Film Institute put up $5,000 for his tale of a boy who grows a grandmother from a seed, then found the rest after an official took the train up to see the nearly finished film.

To keep Eraserhead going, Lynch took a paper route delivering which newspaper?

The Wall Street Journal: the route was at night, like the filming, so Lynch would stop the shoot, race round his deliveries and come back.

Which actor played Henry, the quiet young man left to care for a deformed baby, in Eraserhead?

Jack Nance's towering hair was a fluke: co-star Charlotte Stewart teased it up on the first night of shooting, and Lynch took one look and kept it.

Which legendary director named Eraserhead one of his all-time favorite films?

Stanley Kubrick showed it to visitors at home as 'my favourite film'; the news reached Lynch as he prepared The Elephant Man, and he called it the highest compliment.

Which comedy director's company produced The Elephant Man after he saw Eraserhead and declared 'You're a madman!'?

Mel Brooks kept his own name off the credits so that nobody would walk in expecting a comedy.

Which real Victorian, played by John Hurt, is the subject of The Elephant Man?

Joseph Merrick is called John in the film, a mistake that goes back to his own surgeon, Frederick Treves, who used the wrong first name in his writings.

Which blockbuster did George Lucas ask David Lynch to direct, only for Lynch to turn it down?

Return of the Jedi: by his own account Lynch, who called Star Wars 'not my cup of tea', turned Lucas down and urged him to direct it himself.

Which producer hired David Lynch to make Dune and went on to back Blue Velvet?

Dino De Laurentiis agreed to give Lynch final cut on Blue Velvet on one condition: that he halve both his salary and the budget.

Who made his film debut as Paul Atreides in Dune, beginning a lifelong collaboration with Lynch?

Kyle MacLachlan was an unknown acting in Molière's Tartuffe on a Seattle stage when a casting agent, hunting for a fresh face, was pointed his way.

Which rock band composed the soundtrack for Lynch's Dune?

Toto were told by Lynch to keep the music low and slow, and recorded it with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra; the one piece that isn't theirs, 'Prophecy Theme', came from Brian Eno.

Which pseudonym took David Lynch's screenwriting credit on the extended TV cut of Dune, which he disowned?

Judas Booth, a name that seems to splice Judas Iscariot with John Wilkes Booth, took his writing credit, while the directing credit went to the stock Hollywood alias Alan Smithee.

What does college student Jeffrey Beaumont find in a field at the start of Blue Velvet?

A severed ear: Lynch said it had to be an ear because he wanted an opening into the body, one that 'goes right into the mind'.

Who played Frank, the gas-huffing psychopath, in Blue Velvet?

Dennis Hopper rang Lynch to say he had to play Frank because he was Frank, which the director called good news and bad news.

Lynch said Blue Velvet was 'sparked' by which singer's 1963 recording of the title song?

Bobby Vinton's hit did nothing for Lynch at first, he said, until one night it called up dark lawns and a woman's red lips in a car.

Which composer scored Blue Velvet and most of Lynch's later work, including Twin Peaks?

Angelo Badalamenti was called in only to coach the film's leading lady through the song 'Blue Velvet'; Lynch had not planned to hire him as composer at all.

With which writer-producer did Lynch create Twin Peaks after a failed Marilyn Monroe biopic?

Mark Frost and Lynch were talking in a Los Angeles diner when they pictured a body washing up on the shore of a lake, the image the whole series grew from.

What was the working title of Twin Peaks before it took its final name?

Northwest Passage is still the title of the pilot episode; in its earliest form the story was set in a small town in North Dakota.

Whose murder brings FBI agent Dale Cooper to the town of Twin Peaks?

Laura Palmer was Sheryl Lee, hired to play a corpse wrapped in plastic; one home-video scene so impressed Lynch that he gave her a second part as the dead girl's lookalike cousin.

Which hard-of-hearing FBI chief did Lynch himself play in Twin Peaks?

Gordon Cole borrows his name from Sunset Boulevard, a Lynch favourite, where a Paramount man called Gordon Cole keeps phoning Norma Desmond about her car.

What did its network make Twin Peaks do in season two, to David Lynch's regret?

Reveal the killer's identity early: Lynch and his co-creator had meant the mystery to run for years, and he said that solving it killed the goose that laid the golden eggs.

Which Twin Peaks villain was played by a set dresser whom David Lynch cast on the spot while filming the pilot?

Killer Bob was born when set dresser Frank Silva boxed himself into a bedroom while moving furniture; Lynch asked if he could act and filmed him crouching by the bed.

The Twin Peaks pilot was shot largely in and around which small town in Washington state?

Snoqualmie's waterfall became the show's emblem, and the town now celebrates Twin Peaks Day every 24 February, the date Agent Cooper gives in the pilot.

Wild at Heart was adapted from a novel by which writer, who later co-wrote Lost Highway?

Barry Gifford's novel ends with the lovers parting; Lynch said that 'didn't seem real' and wrote them a happy ending instead.

Which classic film does Wild at Heart repeatedly reference?

The Wizard of Oz keeps breaking in: the heroine clicks the heels of her red shoes, and at the end the Good Witch floats down to tell the hero not to turn away from love.

Which prize did Wild at Heart win at Cannes in 1990, to boos as well as cheers?

The Palme d'Or went to a film finished only the day before its screening; Lynch first watched the final print right through on the night before the premiere.

What was the subtitle of the 1992 Twin Peaks film, a US flop that critic Mark Kermode calls his favourite Lynch film?

Fire Walk with Me opened first in Japan, where the series had a devoted following and the film did well, three months before it sank in America.

Which two actors starred in Lynch's non-linear 1997 noir Lost Highway?

Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette star in a film that opens on a real event: a stranger once buzzed Lynch's own intercom to say 'Dick Laurent is dead', and he never learned why.

In The Straight Story, Alvin Straight travels from Iowa to Wisconsin to see his sick brother on what vehicle?

A riding lawnmower was the real Alvin Straight's only option: at 73 his eyes were too poor for a driving licence, so he made the 240-mile trip at about five miles an hour.

Which studio, unusually for a Lynch film, released the G-rated The Straight Story in the U.S.?

Disney's film chief Peter Schneider watched it in Lynch's own screening room before Cannes and said, 'As soon as I saw it, I knew it was a Walt Disney film.'

Which network rejected the TV pilot that David Lynch later turned into Mulholland Drive?

ABC shelved the pilot in 1999; Lynch shot new scenes with French money, and the finished feature won him the best director prize at Cannes.

Who plays Betty, the aspiring actress newly arrived in Los Angeles, in Mulholland Drive?

Naomi Watts had spent ten years auditioning without a real break when Lynch cast her as Betty, and the film became her breakthrough.

A 2016 BBC poll of 177 critics named Mulholland Drive the best film of what?

The 21st century: even Roger Ebert, long dismissive of Lynch, gave it four stars and wrote that he now forgave him Wild at Heart and Lost Highway.

What kind of characters live in the surreal 'sitcom' David Lynch made for his website in 2002?

Humanoid rabbits, played by actors in life-size rabbit suits, swap non-sequiturs to bursts of canned laughter; Lynch later worked the footage into Inland Empire.

To promote Inland Empire, his three-hour final feature, Lynch made public appearances with what animal?

A cow stood beside him on Hollywood Boulevard with a big picture of Laura Dern: it was his way of lobbying for her to get a best actress Oscar nomination, which never came.

Lynch voiced Gus the bartender on which animated series from 2010 to 2013?

The Cleveland Show owes something to Lynch: co-creator Mike Henry quit advertising after seeing Wild at Heart, and had Gus drawn to look just like his hero.

Which legendary director did Lynch play in Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans (2022)?

John Ford turns up in the film's last scene, eyepatch on and cigar lit; Lynch said no to the part at first, and Spielberg kept after him until he gave in.

Twin Peaks returned in 2017 with 18 episodes, all directed by Lynch, on which network?

Showtime had ordered only nine episodes, and Lynch quit over the budget in April 2015; six weeks later he was back, with a new deal and twice the episodes.

Which film journal named Twin Peaks: The Return the best film of the 2010s?

Cahiers du Cinéma had already named it best film of 2017. Lynch shot all 18 parts from one long script before cutting them into episodes, and critics had argued since 2017 over whether it is film or television.

In his daily online series Today's Number Is..., what did David Lynch pull from a jar each morning?

A ping-pong ball, one of ten numbered ones: for weeks no seven came up, and a viewer called Wes posted the same plea under every video. When it finally appeared, Lynch giggled, 'Today's number, Wes, is seven.'

What was David Lynch's long-running comic strip about a chained dog called?

The Angriest Dog in the World ran weekly for nine years without the drawing ever changing: the same four panels of a dog rigid with rage, with only the speech balloons rewritten.

Which singer, whose first two albums David Lynch co-wrote, hung suspended above the stage in his Industrial Symphony No. 1?

Julee Cruise came in by default: Lynch could not afford 'Song to the Siren' for Blue Velvet, so he and his composer wrote 'Mysteries of Love' and needed an ethereal voice to sing it.

Which practice did Lynch take up in 1973 and keep at twice a day for the rest of his life?

Transcendental Meditation came to him through his sister Martha, who had just learned it herself; three decades later he launched a foundation to pay for lessons in schools.

What is the title of Lynch's 2006 book on creativity and meditation?

Catching the Big Fish takes its title from his line that ideas are like fish: the little ones swim in the shallows, but for the big ones 'you've got to go deeper'.

Which singer's breakthrough hit took off after a radio programmer heard the song in Wild at Heart?

Chris Isaak's 'Wicked Game' had gone nowhere as a single until an Atlanta station's music director, a Lynch fan, heard it in the film and put it on air; Lynch also directed a video for it.

In which city is Silencio, the members' club Lynch designed and named after a Mulholland Drive nightclub?

Paris was already a second workplace for Lynch, who came regularly to make lithographs at a Montparnasse studio once used by Picasso; his club followed in 2011, six flights below the street.

Lynch sold organic blends of what under the tagline 'It's all in the beans ... and I'm just full of beans'?

Coffee: a friend told Lynch he drank so much of it, at one time twenty cups a day, that he ought to have his own line, and its slogan is also a line spoken in Inland Empire.

With which actress, star of Blue Velvet, did Lynch live between 1986 and 1991?

His four marriages were to Peggy Reavey, Mary Fisk, Mary Sweeney and Emily Stofle.

Which illness, brought on by a lifetime of smoking, left David Lynch housebound in his final years?

Emphysema left him, he said, hardly able to walk across a room: 'It's like you're walking around with a plastic bag around your head.' He had quit smoking two years earlier.

Announcing David Lynch's death, his family quoted his advice to keep your eye on what, 'and not on the hole'?

Donut: 'There's a big hole in the world now that he's no longer with us,' the family wrote, before turning his old motto on their own grief.

Outcry over an Oscar snub for The Elephant Man led the Academy to create which award category?

Best Makeup came a year too late for the film itself: an industry letter asking for a special award for its prosthetics was turned down, and the new category began the next year.

Which painter did Lynch call his 'number one kinda hero painter'?

Francis Bacon's 1968 show at a New York gallery was, Lynch said, one of the most powerful things he ever saw, and a classmate could see Bacon's influence on his paintings at the time.

In a 2017 short later released on Netflix, David Lynch plays a detective grilling what kind of murder suspect?

A monkey, a capuchin named Jack, talks back to Lynch's detective and even breaks into song in What Did Jack Do?, which Netflix released in 2020 on Lynch's 74th birthday.

As a Boy Scout, David Lynch helped seat VIPs at which president's inauguration, held on his own 15th birthday?

John F. Kennedy's: posted by a White House gate in the snow, Lynch watched two limousines glide past carrying Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, four presidents past and future.

Which Oscar-winning actress, who worked the clapperboard on Eraserhead, later played Alvin's daughter Rose in The Straight Story?

Sissy Spacek married Lynch's best friend, and the couple helped keep Eraserhead afloat, yet Lynch took more than twenty years to cast her in one of his films.

In Twin Peaks, what is the name of the unseen assistant to whom Agent Cooper dictates his taped notes?

Diane never appears in the original series, only as a name spoken into Cooper's recorder; when the show returned in 2017, Lynch finally gave her a face, Laura Dern's.

In Wild at Heart, what does Sailor call 'a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom'?

His snakeskin jacket was Nicolas Cage's own idea: the actor asked if he could wear one, and Lynch liked it enough to write it into the script.

Which dessert at the Double R Diner does Agent Cooper rave about in Twin Peaks?

Cherry pie put the real diner in North Bend on the map: by Lynch's account its owner went from baking six pies a day to sixty as busloads of fans turned up.

Fans left flowers for Lynch beneath which restaurant mascot's statue in Burbank?

Bob's Big Boy was where Lynch went at 2.30 every afternoon for years, ordering a chocolate milkshake and scribbling ideas on the napkins; fans laid roses and unsmoked cigarettes at the statue.

Which Roy Orbison song does Dean Stockwell lip-sync in a famous scene from Blue Velvet?

In Dreams was dear to Roy Orbison, who was upset at first by how the film used it; he came round, and in 1987 recorded a new version with Lynch as co-producer.

Which rock star played the long-missing FBI agent Phillip Jeffries in the 1992 Twin Peaks prequel film?

David Bowie. He let Lynch reuse the footage in 2017 on one condition: his Louisiana accent had to be dubbed over by an actor who really came from Louisiana.

Which Twin Peaks character did Lynch dream up for Catherine Coulson while she was working on the Eraserhead crew?

The Log Lady. On the Eraserhead set Lynch told Coulson he pictured her holding a large log, and more than a decade later he wrote the part into Twin Peaks for her.

Which world leader did Lynch warn 'what you sow you shall reap' in one of his daily weather reports?

Vladimir Putin. The day after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Lynch used his report to tell him there was 'no room for this kind of absurdity anymore'.

Whose cause did Lynch back by signing a 2009 film-industry petition?

Roman Polanski's. The petition demanded his release after his arrest in Zurich; Lynch's daughter Jennifer said in 2025 that he came to regret signing it after she confronted him.

Which president did Lynch tell The Guardian 'could go down as one of the greatest'?

Donald Trump. After Trump read the line aloud at a rally, Lynch replied on Facebook, telling him 'You are causing suffering and division'.