David Lynch is sitting on a Perspex chair on the top floor of the Fondation Cartier in Paris. Giant floor-to-ceiling windows allow a peerless view of white Parisian rooftops, the Jardin du Lux- embourg and the towers of Montparnasse and Eiffel. A single cloud in a bright blue sky floats above the drapeau tricoloreflying on the gilded dome of Les Inval- ides. It is picture-postcard France, but then, in many ways, so is Lynch. In his customary style of formal white button- down shirt, black jacket and cigarette, Lynch, who is 61, could easily pass as a classic Frenchman. He certainly thrives here: French companies back his films, and the French public admires them. His latest, the three-hour Inland Empire, is on all over Paris, and people are queuing to see it. But then, the French have always loved an auteur.

“Oh, for sure,” says Lynch, “France is so good to me. So welcoming. They believe in the auteur. They fight for it.” On this basis, it’s understandable why the paintings, draw- ings and photographs he has been steadily creating for the past 40 years are to be put on show for the first time here in Paris, and not in his home town of Los Angeles. The story is that Hervé Chandãs, curator of the Fondation Cartier, went over to see Lynch and pulled out work Lynch had not seen for decades. He gave Chandãs free access to thousands of images, which, it appears, he created purely for the thrill of creating. “I did not do the work to be exhibited. You don’t. You just do it. Showing the work is not something I think about. You just find extreme enjoyment in doing it,” says Lynch, who studied fine art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. “It’s the same, even in film. I would rather not show my films, in a weird way.” He smiles. “But it was good to get stuff out of storage, to see old work, think about ideas that were started but not finished. Sometimes the past feeds the future, and it’s good.”

There is certainly a lot of food for thought at the show. It covers two floors: upstairs, huge frames support blue, orange and yellow curtains, a familiar Lynch leitmotif, on which hang giant pictures, some painted in heavy impasto. These depict frequently nightmarish action in a confident, primi- tive style: bodies fly out of storybook houses, skulls stride on long legs. One painting, of an agonised man, is captioned “This man was shot 0.9502 seconds ago”. His spirit, as well as his blood and guts, is flying out of his body.

Downstairs, Lynch fans will be busy ticking off more of the master’s signature motifs. A lyrical collection of colour nude photographs of women focuses on small elements of perfection — the curve of an eyebrow, the swell of a breast. There is nothing that makes a formal link to the coiffed teenage girls in his cult TV series Twin Peaks, or the strange beauty of his former fiancée, Isabella Rossellini, in Wild at Heart, but it is the same singular, artistic impetus behind both. “There are some things in the exhibition that specifically relate to Dune or The Elephant Man,” acknowledges Lynch, “some drawings that were ideas maybe for things in the films, but most of the work is not tied to the films.”

Drawings of dead insects, ephemera such as doodlings above phone numbers, or seemingly iconic phrases (“I Did Not Know the Gun Was Loaded”, or the show’s titular inspiration, “The Air Is on Fire”), lead to a wall of black- and-white photographs of industrial scenes: sewage pipes, shuttered door- ways, forbidding bridges, chance pieces of sugges- tive graffiti. Men- ace surrounds these as surely as it does the shadowy corridors down which Laura Dern runs screaming from one world to another in Inland Empire. “I think I am not alone in a fascination with a pull to the unknown,” says Lynch. “Transitions from one kind of reality to another. Doorways and curtains. Ingresses to different places.” People will not be able to resist putting some form of story to all this, I suggest. “Oh, many times a painting will start a narrative,” says Lynch. “People do it naturally. It’s the same in the cinema. The mind kicks in, the heart kicks in, intuition kicks in, and you are rolling. You come with interpretations. And conclusions.”

Interpretations and conclusions will be difficult to avoid with the Distorted Nudes series of pictures, where Lynch has digitally reworked 40 vintage erotic photographs to provide the sort of peepshow the Chapman brothers might be proud of. Amputees, heads within stomachs, people biting one another and multiple breast-growth are just some of the considerably creepy delights in this adults-only area of the exhibition. “Oh, I did that work a while ago,” says Lynch pleasantly. “That was my first experiment with Photoshop. It’s the greatest thing since Post Toasties.” Was he inspired by the likes of Dali, or maybe Francis Bacon? “No, no, I was just doing my own thing. Just taking photos and scanning them in and taking them apart,” he says. “The whole process is just a flow of ideas. That’s what it is all about.”

The idea — this has always been a fixation for Lynch, who was originally so fanatically driven to spend life as a painter that he secured himself a studio while still at high school. “I didn’t care about anything else — just painting.” It was apparently pure prag- matism that led him away from the canvas and towards the clapperboard. “I started getting green lights in the film world and falling in love with that medium. But it didn’t mean I fell out of love with painting. It’s just that this new thing came along. I’ve been painting all along. When I’ve had a chance to paint, I paint. I always say it’s about ideas. There are always ideas coming. Sometimes it’s painting and sometimes it’s film and sometimes it’s music.”

The show goes for all three: a Lynch soundtrack accompanies the paintings on the first floor, while in the basement, surrounded by the photographs and draw- ings, a small cinema will screen three of his short films. This is a man who has a finger in almost every artistic pie going. Does he still relish their differences? “There are big differences. Painting is its own thing, a special thing. It’s about so many different things, wordless things,” he enthuses. “There’s rules to it. The rules are not meant to be obeyed, but there are rules, and colours, and disturbances. All kinds of things going on. In film, there are a lot of those same rules, but way more. Way more, way more. There’s time. Like in music, you have time. Cinema brings all these art forms together, so it’s a bigger thing — in a way.”

Is Inland Empire, the new film, so long because he wanted it to become some kind of meditative painting? He laughs a lot at this sugges- tion. “No. A film wants to be a certain way. It doesn’t feel correct if it is shorter or longer. There is a way that it talks to you, and you follow that way. Though it is unfortunate it is so long, because the distributors get one less screening a day, which is a problem.”

He acknowledges, however, that the chance to shoot the movie himself (with a digital camera) gave him a greater sense of creativity, rather as if he were painting on canvas. “It gives you the opportunity to do things you couldn’t do if you had a focus puller and an operator and huge pieces of equipment. With a small digital camera, you have a feeling to move, or to drift. You are way more in there. Acting and reacting are real natural, and easy. As soon as the actors real- ise you have 40 minutes of uninterrupted time to sink in, andwe are sinking in there together, it’s beautiful.”

From pieces of cinema to doodles on Postit notes, via musical compositions, to photography, drawingand painting, this show willreveal, more than any onebig, dark, artistic secret,that Lynch is a compulsivecreator. He cannot helptransferring ideas that whirr around his head onto whatever medium he calls upon, be it paper, canvas, celluloid or computer pro- grammes. He acknowledges this, but generously so. “None of us stops creating. The thing that stops us is money. And equipment. You get an idea for a certain thing and you go work on it. That’s all it takes. You betcha.”

The Air Is on Fire is at the Fondation Cartier, Paris, from March 3 to May 27; Inland Empire is released on March 9

His dark material

In the second half of the 1980s, the film Blue Velvet and the television series Twin Peaks altered popular culture, narrative technique, American iconography — and the minds of audiences all over the world. So indelible was the impression they left that their influence now seems to function retrospectively: it’s hard to look at work that preceded them, such as the films of Frank Capra, without viewing it through the vision of warped small-town America presented by their creator, David Lynch, a quizzical surrealist described by one producer as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars”. Only now are we seeing clearly the effect Lynch has had on our visual culture. Without Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, there would now be gaping holes in modern cinema — no American Beauty, Donnie Darko, Happiness or Barton Fink, to name but a handful. The television schedules would be threadbare, too. You could kiss goodbye to Lost, The X Files, Desperate Housewives and Six Feet Under, for starters.

The dazzling opening montage of Blue Velvet shows red roses reaching toward blue skies in front of white picket fences, a man waving cheerfully from a passing fire engine and a line of contented schoolchildren trundling across a sun-dappled road. Then the camera burrows beneath the surface of one of the impeccably manicured lawns in this perfect neighbourhood, where it comes nose-to-nose with an orgy of gnashing, chomping, glistening creepy-crawlies. This discovery doesn’t disrupt the calm façade: life carries on as normal, no matter how repugnant society’s underbelly is shown to be — and with Dennis Hopper, in his career comeback, as a psychopath who abuses Isabella Rossellini while goody two-shoes Kyle MacLachlan (better known now for roles in Desperate Housewives and Sex and the City) watches from inside her closet, that’s pretty damn repugnant.

Similarly, the folksy town of Twin Peaks, where the corpse of the homecoming queen Laura Palmer is discovered, proceeds in its folksy rituals even as the FBI investigation heats up. Each spellbinding instalment uncovered new evidence in the hunt for the killer, though Agatha Christie would hardly have approved — Special Agent Dale Cooper (MacLachlan again) experienced many of his breakthroughs in coded dreams, while the proliferation of doughnuts and “damn fine coffee” mattered as much to fans as who killed Laura Palmer.

This tightrope walk between good and evil, banal and bizarre, may be the closest thing to araison d’êtreyou’ll find in Lynch’s films. In both Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, he completes his expedition into the unsavoury unknown without disturbing the surface of normality or leaving behind any footprints. “I’ve always liked both sides,” he has said, “and believe that to appreciate one, you have to know the other — the more darkness you can gather up, the more light you can see, too.”

His films since the commercial and creative peak of Blue Velvet, with the exception of the gentle road movie The Straight Story (1999), have only got weirder. There was the Palme d’Or-winning Wild at Heart (1990), which can be credited with inventing Nicolas Cage’s persona; the punishing 1992 Twin Peaks prequel, Fire Walk

With Me, which was booed at Cannes; Lost Highway (1997), in which a man awaiting trial for murder simply metamorphoses into someone else in his cell; and the heady Mulholland Dr (2001), about an amnesiac and a would-be actress whose identities blur in a haunted Hollywood.

However, the new Inland Empire is arguably his most inscrutable film yet. It feels as though the bare bones of the plot — about a movie star (Laura Dern) who merges with her latest role, and with her Polish predecessor, who was murdered while playing it — are being offered to us as a mere formality. What Lynch is really interested in is stranding us in a hostile dreamscape where we can never be sure who the characters are, let alone what they’re doing. Why does it keep cutting to an eerie suburban living room in which three people with rabbit heads have their every utterance greeted with canned laughter? Where did that chorus line of prostitutes come from? Can someone pass me an aspirin?

Lynch’s films have usually provided cosmetic comforts for anyone left foxed by the Möbius-strip narratives or outraged by the displays of depravity. Blue Velvet, for instance, filtered its images of perversity and degradation through an operatic sensibility — it may have been sick, but it looked gorgeous, and thanks to the lushness of the score by Angelo Badalamenti, the ears could be soothed even when the eyes were screwed shut in terror.

With Inland Empire, Lynch has withdrawn even those compensatory pleasures. The movie, shot on fuzzy digital video, is deliberately ugly; if you expunged all the tracking shots along dank passageways and corridors, which play like excerpts from a dimly lit computer game, it would shave half an hour off the running time. And Badalamenti has been relieved of his duties, too. In fact, the sole consolation we can derive from the visual and verbal non sequiturs, and the disjointed editing, is that only one director could have made this film — a few minutes in, and you know you’ve been Lynched.

Yet while Inland Empire may not be a pretty picture, I think that’s partly the point. Without our usual cinematic comforts to buffer any bewilderment, we are forced more than ever to confront the stark horrors of Lynch’s imagination, and to work to assemble the pieces of the film’s jigsaw puzzle in our own mind. Dissenters may carp that Lynch “doesn’t give answers”, but it is precisely his insistence on our intellectual and emotional participation that makes his films so fiercely prized.

Anyone imagining that Lynch would mellow with age will be startled to find that the morbid mystery tour of Inland Empire represents his most experimental w o r k since 1977’s Eraserhead. That haunting cult hit, much admired by Stanley Kubrick, was completed over five years using cash from the various part-time jobs Lynch racked up after graduating from art school. In it, the elements that would become known as “Lynchian” were already in evidence. It show-cased his knack for rooting around in the collective subconscious and dredging up unspeakable images, like a police frogman dragging a lake for morbid trophies. I remember seeing the film for the first time and feeling chilled to the bone that someone had managed to replicate on screen the exact textures and rhythms of my nightmares. How best to describe that ground-breaking movie? A man with an outrageous pompadour, who lives in an industrial hellhole, is left to care for his mewing, limbless, duck-like baby and ends up slaughtering the infant and finding true love with a puff-cheeked woman living in his central heating. A simple tale, then, of boy meets girl-behind-the-radiator.

In the past, journalists have made the mistake of asking him to explain what’s going on, perhaps not realising that he reacts to such inquiries like a lactose-intolerant man being chased by a giant wheel of edam. An interviewer once asked what Lost Highway was about. “It’s about 120 minutes,” Lynch deadpanned. And given the myriad interpretations available, the interviewer continued, what would be a bad way to emerge from the cinema? “On a gurney,” came the reply.

There’s a serious point behind Lynch’s tendency to duck questions, however. His films, like any examples of undiluted surrealism, obey only the logic of dreams. To impose rational explanations on them would be as futile as attempting to dig a hole with a length of spaghetti. Better by far to surrender wholesale to a film such as Inland Empire and let it lead you where you thought you didn’t want to go. Dream on.

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