36 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2024
    1. David Lynch In Conversation<br /> by [[QAGOMA]]

    2. When you catch and idea, you see it in your mind's eye, and you feel it, and you can hear it. And then you write that idea down on a piece of paper, and you write it down in such a way that when you read it, the idea comes back in full.<br /> —David Lynch 3:05

    1. When you catch and idea, you see it in your mind's eye, and you feel it, and you can hear it. And then you write that idea down on a piece of paper, and you write it down in such a way that when you read it, the idea comes back in full.

      David Lynch Interview supposedly... source? (asking mrtnj at https://discord.com/channels/992400632390615070/992400632776507447)

      Interesting with respect to orality almost more than literacy.

    1. “Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”

      —David Lynch

      This is from his book: see: https://hypothes.is/a/Swp61GITEe6dmD-RxxFY4w

  2. Oct 2023
    1. The whispered name "Shia LaBeouf" becomes the kernel of the song "Shia LaBeouf".

      David Lynch would be proud how the resultant product stayed true to the kernel of the idea.

    1. There is an interesting theme of staying true to a center or core of a story which is broadly similar to David Lynch's staying true to the original idea. The difference may be that Lynch is staying true to his own original idea which started the process whereas Coppola is distilling out a core from an original source and then focusing on that rather than having Puzo's own original core.

      Which core is the "true" one?

    1. Lynch, David. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. New York, NY: Tarcher Perigee, 2006.

      annotation URL: urn:x-pdf:7d3165882b27dc69918cc2de97baab96

    2. I just try to catch ideas—andsometimes I fall in love with one and then I know what I want to do. Ithas nothing to do with money; just with translating that idea.
    3. Just bychanging something, the desire often gets fulfilled.
    4. You become familiar with the process of catching an idea andtranslating that idea. You understand the tools and the lighting. Youunderstand the whole process—you’ve been through it before.

      He's talking about movie making, but it applies to almost anything.

    5. It’s interesting to seehow these unrelated things live together. And it gets your mindworking. How do these things relate when they seem so far apart? Itconjures up a third thing that almost unifies those first two. It’s astruggle to see how this unity in the midst of diversity could go towork.The ocean is the unity and these things float on it.
    6. If you don’t have a setup, there are many times when you get theinspiration, the idea, but you have no tools, no place to put ittogether. And the idea just sits there and festers. Over time, it will goaway. You didn’t fulfill it—and that’s just a heartache.
    7. Because these religions are old, though, and they’vebeen fiddled with, possibly, I feel some of the original keys from themasters have been lost.
    8. You’ve got to be able to catch ideas.
    9. The idea is the whole thing. If you stay true to the idea, it tells youeverything you need to know, really. You just keep working to make itlook like that idea looked, feel like it felt, sound like it sounded, andbe the way it was. And it’s weird, because when you veer off, yousort of know it. You know when you’re doing something that is notcorrect because it feels incorrect. It says, “No, no; this isn’t like theidea said it was.” And when you’re getting into it the correct way, itfeels correct. It’s an intuition: You feel-think your way through. Youstart one place, and as you go, it gets more and more finely tuned.But all along it’s the idea talking. At some point, it feels correct toyou. And you hope that it feels somewhat correct to others.
    10. But it wasn’t always that way. When I made Dune, I didn’t havefinal cut. It was a huge, huge sadness, because I felt I had sold out,and on top of that, the film was a failure at the box office. If you dowhat you believe in and have a failure, that’s one thing: you can stilllive with yourself. But if you don’t, it’s like dying twice. It’s very, verypainful.

      Being an author is having the final cut on a string of ideas placed in a particular order.

    11. Ideas are like fish.If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water.But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure.They’rehuge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.I look for a certain kind of fish that is important to me, one that cantranslate to cinema. But there are all kinds of fish swimming downthere. There are fish for business, fish for sports.There are fish foreverything.
    1. LYNCH: Well, for me, ideas—even a fragment—convey everything. In a spark you see images, youhear sounds, you feel a mood. And it becomescomplete, even if it is a fragment. The original ideacomes with a lot of power, and you have to keepchecking back all the way through the process tosee if you are being true to it.
    2. LYNCH: Well, I could say that Dino De Laurentiis cutmy salary and cut the budget, and then gave mefinal cut. So he was into cutting! (
    3. I haven’t caughtthe next idea, either through a book or from theocean of ideas.
    4. LYNCH: No. The whole thing has to make sense toyou, and it has to feel correct. And—but again, it’sbased on these ideas that have been forming andarranging and finally showing you what it is. Andit’s just focusing on those through the process.And if it makes sense, no matter how abstract asense, again it goes back to intuition rather thanjust pure intellect, and something that can be soeasily translated into words by, you know,everyone. Those are beautiful things to me,abstractions. And life is filled with them, andcinema can do abstractions.
    5. LYNCH: No. I think a film is digested ideas andprocesses. If you take from things that have gonethrough that process, you’re further away from thesource. Ideas are the most important things. Andthey seem to be lying there in an ocean andavailable. So if you could go in and get your ownidea—now, it may have similarities to many thingsthat have gone before, but you feel it’s yours, andyou fall in love with it. And that’s a very goodfeeling.
    6. YNCH: No. What happens is, when you getfragments, the whole is not revealed. It’s just thefragments. And then the fragments seem to want toarrange themselves. And a little bit further down theline you begin to see what is forming. And it’s asmuch a surprise to you as to anybody else.
    7. LYNCH: I know we were doing that, but lookingback, it’s a magical process because you can’t tellwhere ideas come from, and it seems like it’s justboth of us focusing on something. And it was acouple of ideas that were fragments, and thosefragments focus you. And it seems that theyrelease a little lock on a door and the door opensand more fragments start coming in—drawn by thefirst fragments. It’s strange, because if any of youhave ever written anything, you know that one dayit’s not there and then a month later or two monthslater it’s there. And it’s two people tuning into thesame place, I think.
    8. LYNCH: Well, I think it’s everyone’s experience thatno matter what, things come to us in fragments.
    9. SCHWARTZ: You’ve said that Frank Daniel at AFIwas one of your first film teachers—he said that inorder to make a feature film you should takeseventy index cards and have a scene for eachindex card, and then you have a feature film.
    1. frank danielle at the 1:29 american film institute 1:30 who was dean of the school uh center for 1:33 advanced film studies 1:34 and he taught a way to do it 1:39 um you get yourself a pack of three by 1:42 five cards 1:44 and you write a scene 1:47 on each card and when you have 70 scenes 1:52 you have uh a feature film 1:56 so on each card you write the heading of 1:58 the scene 1:59 and then the next card the second scene 2:00 the third scene four scenes so you have 2:03 70 cards 2:04 each with the name of the scene then you 2:07 flesh out each of the cards 2:09 and walk away you got a script

      David Lynch described the method from Frank Daniel (1926-1996) of the American Film Institute and Dean of advanced film studies who taught students to plot out their screenplays using 3 x 5" index cards. One would write out a total of 70 cards each with scene headings. Once fleshed out, one would have a complete screenplay.

      via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yngWNmouhP0

    2. Try to make the words say what the idea is.<br/> —David Lynch on screenwriting


      This is the problem of having experts attempt to teach their "method". This is so simple as to be risable.

  3. Feb 2017
    1. They arc deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and sec "forms." Their senses nowhere lead to truth; on the contrary, they are content to receive stimuli and, as it were, lo en-gage in a groping game on the backs of things. Moreover, man permits himself to be deceived in f I his dreams every night of his life.

      So much of this piece reminds me of the films of David Lynch, specifically Mulholland Drive. Much as Nietzsche is fascinated by language as a sign of something rather than something in itself, Mulholland Drive is a film that is more interested in exploring the vapid nature of cinema and the nothingness of film. Throughout the film, Lynch pulls the rug out from under his audience repeatedly, bluntly drawing attention to the fact that film is only the representation of genuine experience or emotion, leaving viewers alone with the nothingness that film actually is. Everything in Mulholland Drive is a "surface of things" (as Nietzsche would put it) rather than an actual thing. The best example of this is the "Club Silencio" scene in which the club's emcee repeatedly yells "No Hay Banda." However, when a number of musicians emerge on stage immediately after this proclamation, viewers still are surprised when these acts are revealed to be nothing but hollow, fraudulent performances, merely a "surface of things."

      The deception of dreams that Nietzsche touches on here is also another central theme of Mulholland Drive as Lynch explores the disorientation and terror of nightmares.

      The moral of this annotation is Mulholland Drive is a brilliant film that you absolutely must watch.