“It’s so freeing, it’s beautiful in a way, to have a great failure. There’s nowhere to go but up.”

“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.”

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.

Just bychanging something, the desire often gets fulfilled.

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.

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.

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.

Because these religions are old, though, and they’vebeen fiddled with, possibly, I feel some of the original keys from themasters have been lost.

You’ve got to be able to catch ideas.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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! (

I haven’t caughtthe next idea, either through a book or from theocean of ideas.

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.

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.

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.

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.

LYNCH: Well, I think it’s everyone’s experience thatno matter what, things come to us in fragments.

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.

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

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.