David Lynch: The Art Life

The films of David Lynch seem to come from dark roads, dark rooms, or nightmares, or a combination of the three.
With the new documentary, David Lynch: The Art Life, we get layers of memory and testimony of how David Lynch sees how he became David Lynch. "I think every time you do something, like a painting or whatever, you go with ideas and sometimes the past can conjure those ideas and color them, even if they're new ideas, the past colors them," Lynch explains. The film is dedicated to Lynch’s youngest daughter.
Directors Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes and Olivia Neergard-Holm take us to Montana and Idaho, where Lynch grew up in the lands of an idyllic magic realism. We then move to the land of malevolent realism, Philadelphia, where Lynch, an aspiring painter, lived an urban horror that found its way into his films. Anyone who looks at Lynch’s paintings today can see the horror there, as well. Here, in his own words, the much-interpreted man is interpreting himself.
Jon Nguyen: David Lynch: The Art of Life is the third of three documentaries about Lynch by filmmaker Jon Nguyen, in collaboration on this project with Olivia Neergaard-Holm and Rick Barnes.