How They Write A Script: David Lynch

“If you want to make a feature film, you get ideas for 70 scenes. Put them on 3-by-5 cards. As soon as you have 70, you have a feature film.”

David Lynch is a unique storyteller. His movie credits include Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and TV series ‘Twin Peaks’. Given his unique cinematic sensibilities, it is not surprising that his approach to screenwriting has a distinctive flair.

“For seven years I ate at Bob’s Big Boy. I would go at 2:30, after the lunch rush. I ate a chocolate shake and four, five, six, seven cups of coffee — with lots of sugar. And there’s lots of sugar in that chocolate shake. It’s a thick shake. In a silver goblet. I would get a rush from all this sugar, and I would get so many ideas! I would write them on these napkins. It was like I had a desk with paper. All I had to do was remember to bring my pen, but a waitress would give me one if I remembered to return it at the end of my stay. I got a lot of ideas at Bob’s.”

It might surprise you to learn that Lynch is an index card guy:

“Accepted into the institute’s Center for Advanced Film Studies in 1970, Lynch studied with the Czechoslovak film maker Frank Daniel, whose course on film analysis shaped his writing and directing habits. ‘’It’s a simple thing he taught me,’’ says Lynch. ‘’If you want to make a feature film, you get ideas for 70 scenes. Put them on 3-by-5 cards. As soon as you have 70, you have a feature film.’’ Except that he now dictates to an assistant, Lynch still works this way.”

To learn more about David Lynch’s approach to creativity and storytelling, here’s a great article on him in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, January 14, 1990.

And here’s visual proof of the whole Bob’s Big Boy thing:

That’s Lynch on the right and writer-director John Waters on the left, Lynch’s pants inexplicably muddy.

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