7. He kept dead mice in his freezer
David Lynch was an artist first, and a film-maker second (later, he’d also be a photographer, a songwriter and musician, a furniture designer and many other things). He would create works of visual art right up to his final days, but the most infamous would remain his “kits” – a pair of pieces he made in the late 1970s and early 80s, in which parts of a real, dissected animal (first a fish, then a chicken) were pinned to a board, along with kid-friendly instructions on how to reassemble and play with it.
Later he would tell an interviewer that he was in the early stages of planning a mouse kit, with the requisite parts bagged up in his freezer. Sadly, this never came to pass, but Lynch would continue to use unusual objects – from dead bees to cigarette ashes – in his artworks over the coming decades.
6. He adopted, befriended and then ghosted five Woody Woodpeckers
In 1981, Lynch was driving past a gas station on Sunset Boulevard when he noticed five stuffed Woody Woodpecker dolls hanging from a hook in the window. Executing a sharp U-turn, he went in to buy them. Naming them Bob, Dan, Pete, Buster and Chucko, he would keep them in his office, to make him happy.
“These guys aren’t just a bunch of goofballs,” he would insist. “They know there is plenty of suffering in the world … But they tell me there’s a pervading happiness underneath everything, and the more time I spend with them, the more I believe it.” Sadly, the friendship couldn’t last – when the dolls began exhibiting “certain traits” that were “not so nice”, Lynch and his boys had to part ways.
5. He very nearly directed the third Star Wars movie
The list of unproduced David Lynch projects is long and varied, but perhaps the most infamous is the film that came to be titled Return of the Jedi. After The Elephant Man and its eight Oscar nominations, Lynch was suddenly the hot new director on the block, with offers coming in from, among others, Star Wars mastermind George Lucas. They had a meeting to discuss the project, and Lynch always said that he called Lucas right away to say a firm no, and urge him to direct the movie himself. However, writer Max Evry recently revealed that, in fact, the discussions continued for some time, and Lynch remained Lucas’s top choice for several weeks after their meeting, only turning him down when the contracts came through for another sandy space saga – the ill-fated Dune. And it’s probably for the best – the thought of Lynch let loose in Jabba the Hutt’s palace is deeply unsettling.
4. He gave himself a hernia laughing at Angelo Badalamenti trying to sing
During a recording session for a track featured on the soundtrack of his 1992 masterpiece Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lynch laughed so hard at his close friend and musical partner, composer Angelo Badalamenti, that he ended up in hospital with a severe hernia. The track they were working on – pounding jazz-funk droner “A Real Indication” – required Badalamenti to speak-sing Lynch’s lyrics in a growling, booming, wildly over-enunciated pseudo-Midwestern accent, which the director found so hysterical he did himself a serious injury. It was worth it, though – the soundtrack is regularly voted among the best of all time.
3. He produced a whole album of 12th century religious music
In the mid-1990s, despite the aforementioned hernia, Lynch was becoming ever more involved in writing, playing and producing music. It would be 2011 before Lynch would finally release an album of self-penned tracks under his own name, but in the meantime he’d embark on a number of musical explorations, from electric blues outfit BlueBOB, to the records he made with Texas-born chanteuse Chrystabell. But perhaps the oddest is Lux Vivens, or Living Light, an album credited to Lynch and Jocelyn Montgomery, formerly of Britain’s own sultry goth madrigal outfit, Miranda Sex Garden. Obsessed with the music of 12th-century German nun Hildegard Von Bingen, Montgomery persuaded Lynch to collaborate with her on an LP of Von Bingen’s spiritual songs, crafting a series of choral hymns backed by drones built from violin, guitar and manipulated “found sounds”, including swords and bulls.
2. He was totally obsessed with Mad Men
Having been suspicious of television when he was younger (except for legal drama Perry Mason, which he loved) in the last decades of his life Lynch became a big fan of TV drama. It may have helped that he basically reinvented the format with Twin Peaks, and every show that came after it – from The Sopranos to Lost to Breaking Bad – owed him a huge debt. But his favourite show in this period was 60s-set ad-exec drama Mad Men. Lynch became so emotionally engaged with it that when he met series stars Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss, he was unable to call them by their names, and instead simply referred to them as their characters, Don and Peggy. “We went with it,” Moss would reveal later, though it seems Lynch didn’t give them much choice.
1. He hated big tables
Lynch was a builder – of worlds, of dreams, of furniture. As a kid he would undertake construction projects with his dad, learning how to use tools and mend fences, and in later life he would find employment as a house-builder, interior decorator and plumber. (“It’s a very satisfying thing,” he would say, “to direct water succesfully.”)
Having built most of the props for his early, experimental films – including the mutant baby in his debut feature Eraserhead, whose precise components remain a mystery, though everything from umbilical cords to rabbit foetuses have been suggested – Lynch would later turn to crafting his own furniture, sometimes for a film shoot (several of his pieces appear in Lost Highway) and sometimes just for fun. He did, however, have strong opinions about what did and didn’t make an acceptable item of furniture. “Most tables are too big,” he would complain, “and they’re too high. They shrink the size of the room … and cause unpleasant mental activity.”
