Lynch grew up getting to know the rural America he portrays in his films and series. He was also an avid boy scout. When you know this, you can better understand how he kept going through the years of filming his debut ERASERHEAD, how he overcame the financial disaster of DUNE in the 1980s and how he managed to re-cut the pilot of the rejected TV series project MULHOLLAND DRIVE into an Oscar-nominated cinematic masterpiece. It goes to show, a boy scout is always prepared and never gives up, even when he's a grown-up film director. Today, his films such as THE ELEPHANT MAN, WILD AT HEART, BLUE VELVET or LOST HIGHWAY are all considered modern classics. He made television history in the early 1990s with TWIN PEAKS - but Lynch's cosmos is usually considered to have the mysteriousness and psychological depth of real dreams and nightmares.
Lynch favours three archetypal figures that run through his work in changing configurations. The femme fatale stems from Lynch's fondness for film noir, his male protagonists are mostly homages to anti-heroes like Humphrey Bogart, balancing on a fine line between morality and villainy. The "Mystery Men", on the other hand, are Lynch's own invention. Dream figures with Mephistophelian manipulativeness and animalistic bloodlust. Of course, all these characters would be mere staffage without Lynch's gifted staging, his painting-trained eye for light and darkness and Angelo Badalamenti's score. After the breathtaking INLAND EMPIRE, he returned to the universe of TWIN PEAKS for a sequel and has - since 2006 - been transporting audiences to his own world more realistically than ever with the daily WEATHER REPORT clips. Lynch was also a producer on Werner Herzog's family drama MY SON MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE, and is currently producing the series UNRECORDED NIGHT.
