David Lynch says we ‘have everything’ we need to understand Eraserhead was his ‘most spiritual’ film

David Lynch’s “most spiritual” film may have led to a fascinating moment from the director, but he elaborated on this later in the interview.

The legendary filmmaker, who died on January 16 at the age of 78, crafted some of the finest films and television the art field has ever seen. His uncompromising style split audiences and as time went on, brought them back together.

In an interview with BAFTA in 2007, Lynch claimed Eraserhead was his most spiritual film. The refusal to elaborate, which has since gone viral on social media as people celebrate the Blue Velvet director’s life, is one of his finest quotes.

Lynch said: “Believe it or not, Eraserhead is my most spiritual film,” before being asked to “elaborate on that.” “No,” was the reply. It is an interview that fans will remember forever, but in that same interview, Lynch shared we already have the tools at our disposal to understand why it was his most spiritual effort.

He said: “What I will say, the film is the thing. The film is the thing. You work so hard, after the idea’s come, to get this thing built, all the elements to feel correct, the whole to feel correct, in this beautiful language called cinema. The second it’s finished, people want you to change it back into words, and it’s very, very saddening.

“It’s torture. It’s the film, the language of cinema. When things are concrete there are very few variations in interpretation, but the more abstract the thing gets, the more varied the interpretations.

“But people still know inside what it is for them. Even if they don’t trust their intuition I always say if some girl named Sally comes out the theatre and says ‘I don’t have a clue what that means,’ she goes over with Bob and Jim to get a cup of coffee, Bob starts talking about what he thinks it is, because he knows exactly what it is, he starts talking.

“Five seconds later, Sally is saying ‘no, no, no, no, it’s not that’ and all these things come out of Sally. So Sally really did no, for herself.

“Because the beauty of life is seeing sort of the same things but you come up with so many different things as you go along with it.” When pressed further, Lynch continues and says people “have everything in the film” they need to make their own interpretation.

He added: “You have everything in the film. That’s the thing. It doesn’t matter what I say. Zip. It can only be a negative. The thing is built so you don’t want to keep anything away, and you don’t want to add anything to it. It’s complete. That’s it.

Lynch had spoken of Eraserhead and its abstract interpretations before, saying he turned to The Bible when trying to find inspiration for the film, which took him five years to make. Writing in his book, Catching the Big Fish, Lynch says a Bible passage was what helped him find a route through for Eraserhead.

He wrote: “Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. No one understands when I say that, but it is. Eraserhead was growing in a certain way, and I didn’t know what it meant. I was looking for a key to unlock what these sequences were saying. Of course, I understood some of it; but I didn’t know the thing that just pulled it all together. And it was a struggle. So I got out my Bible and I started reading. And one day, I read a sentence. And I closed the Bible, because that was it. And then I saw the thing as a whole. And it fulfilled this vision for me, 100%.

“I don’t think I’ll ever say what that sentence was.”