The Insatiables

I was 15, and someone lent me Blue Velvet while my parents were away. I watched it practically on rotation for an entire summer. It completely blew my mind. I felt that, emotionally, I understood it, poetically, I understood it – but I couldn’t rationally understand how such an extraordinary piece of work was made. That was the beginning of my love affair with David Lynch.

He works from his subconscious. If you read his wonderful book Catching the Big Fish, which is about meditation and filmmaking, he goes to a very personal place to find his treasures.

He is also one of the most interesting directors of actors. I often feel as though the craft of acting hasn’t really moved on since the naturalism of Marlon Brando and Lee Strasberg in the Fifties and Sixties. But Lynch’s actors create a kind of heightened sensibility and performance that gets to the essence of the truth.

I think you’re not necessarily supposed to understand the films straight away; you’re supposed to understand them on a different level. His films are poetry, and, for me, they act as a catalyst for my own imagination. He respects the audience and allows them to project their own feelings and life experience on to the screen.

Blue Velvet isn’t really a dark film. There are very dark characters in it, as there are in a fairy tale, but there’s an innocence to it and a wonder and a beauty. Eventually, it’s about the power of love.

There’s something very optimistic about it. It goes through the darkness and comes out the other side into a great white shining light of beautiful cinema .

-Joe Wright