Routine vs. Disruption

David Lynch’s daily life is as paradoxical as his art. In his work, he plucks the abstract from the ordinary and creates chaos from order; he zooms in on the mundane yet illuminates the underbelly. This approach came early for him. Lynch remembers his childhood as one of picket fences, blue skies, red flowers and cherry trees – yet he’d find himself focusing on the millions of little ants swarming beneath that surface. From the twisted exploration of domesticity depicted in his cult 1977 film Eraserhead to the genre-busting TV show Twin Peaks, the director’s work has confounded expectation and flipped worlds upside down, inside-out, back-to-front and back again.

Once Lynch’s day is under way, it remains grounded in routine. He meditates twice a day. He wears the same clothes. He eats the same lunch: one piece of bread with mayonnaise and chicken. He eats the same dinner: the same as lunch, plus vegetable soup. For seven years, he went to Bob’s Big Boy Burgers every day to drink the same milkshake until he decided to climb into the dumpster out back to discover what ingredients they contained.

“David’s work ethic comes from someone who spent their formative years in the 1950s,” says Dean Hurley, who’s worked as Lynch’s in-house engineer since 2005. “He has that kind of button-down professional mentality. He’s very punctual, so you really have to make a point to be there and ready to work by 9am.”

In 1997, Lynch admitted that he had questioned the rigidity of his own routine: “I considered psychoanalysis to talk about these cycles of things like [repetitive] lunches. I asked [the therapist], ‘Could meeting with you affect my creativity?’ And he said, ‘I have to be honest, it could.’ And I said, ‘Thank you very much, goodbye.’” Today this bordering-on-obsessive approach to the rhythm of daily life is to ensure an uninterrupted flow of ideas. By now Lynch knows that keeping things simple, predictable and controllable is the 73-year-old’s best chance to tap into an endless well of creativity.

“You Gotta Have a Set-up”

This is a phrase that Lynch is fond of. “For him, a set-up means a multifaceted one,” says Hurley. “The recording studio is the same as his wood shop: somewhere that he can walk into, turn on the saw and get to work.” The dynamic extends to people, too, so tasks that interfere with creativity can be taken care of by someone else. PAs deal with emails and schedules; the runner gets groceries; Alfredo will take Lynch’s hand-drawn napkin designs of furniture to secure materials.

“It’s like an organised tornado,” says Hurley. “Some days he may just come into the studio and be like, ‘I had this idea last night: I was thinking about Van Morrison and the horns from ‘Into the Mystic’. I love those horns; we need to do something that has that feeling.’ Then he goes off to do something else and returns a couple of hours later.” Sometimes, though, these visions can feel a little too big to pull off. “He sends runners on wild-goose chases,” Hurley adds with a chuckle. “He gets these real pie-in-the-sky ideas like, ‘What would it take for me to drill for oil in my backyard?’ Then somebody has to look all that up and make a report.”

Lynch doesn’t like to leave his complex unless it’s work-related, in which case he’s simply substituting one work environment for another. He doesn’t take vacations and weekends are an obstacle because it means his routine is on pause. “He gets super pained when nobody is in the office,” says Hurley. Lynch’s set-up is all about self-sufficiency – an insular world he never has to leave unless necessary; a place where he can indulge any creative whim: be it painting, building furniture, editing a film, making a record, taking meetings or drinking coffee.

“The goal was to create a home where he could do anything,” Hurley says. “Film is a really cumbersome beast that involves doing your work at a variety of multi-million dollar facilities and David has managed to build this for himself. It’s all about creating and maintaining his freedom.”