You are taking us back 25 years to the original world of Twin Peaks. How much have you changed in the past two decades?
I am the same person. Just like you. When we talk to ourselves, we are always the same. I love a lot of things. I love working on wood, I like painting, I like music and I like cinema. And so getting back into the world of Twin Peaks is really thrilling to me. I've worked on this now for the past five years and it was very good to get back with a crew and the cameras and the sound and build this thing with a lot of great people.
TV is very different these days. How do you feel about it?
The delivery system is television but it's exactly like making a feature film. It's telling a story with motion picture and sound. And so it's always the way it is.
You seem to have a special relationship to telephones.
I don't like phones. I like old phones, the ring of old phones. It's a disturbance, a telephone, and every time the phone rings and you know it's for you, it's a torment. [he laughs]. I don't like email [more laughing], so it's a world of disturbances, it's what it is.
What was it about Twin Peaks that struck a chord with audiences?
It's kind of a mystery why it travelled so well. And people have said that they don't really know how a small town in the northwest of America appealed to the Japanese, or the French, whatever, it just was an interesting, fantastic phenomenon. But it was just a magical combination of things.
You use a lot of moments of silence in your work. Can you elaborate on what silence means to you?
They say that in the transcendent, in the unified field, there is infinite silence alongside infinite dynamism. These two opposites exist. They co-exist. I have a recording studio and so when you close the doors and even when the machines are off, it's so well sound-proofed that you experience it really, really quiet. But to dive within and experience that silence, that is an unbelievable experience. It's very blissful but it's absolute silence. Silence is so powerful and it's so missing in the world. It's a really noisy world. So it's very interesting to think about silence.
There was a documentary about you recently that revealed you are not only a director but a painter. Do you see both these artistic forms as separate or do they work together?
They say cinema takes several arts: writing, music and painting but I came into the world of cinema through painting. I was at the Pennsylvania Academy of fine arts, sitting in a small cubicle working on a painting in a garden at night. I was watching the painting, and I heard from the painting a wind and I saw the painting start to move. And I said, "Oh, a moving painting." And that experience was what started it going.
Do you practise meditation?
Yes. I practise transcendental meditation, which is a technique brought back for this time by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It's a technique to effortlessly dive in and experience the internal level of life. It is so blissful to transcend and it's an all-positive area within every one of us human beings, and when we transcend and experience that, we infuse some of that all-positive. The result is that negativity starts to lift away and it's like bringing in the gold and saying goodbye to garbage. Life gets better and better. And then we are on our way to unfolding our true potential as human beings, which is enlightenment, and total fulfillment and liberation. It's a beautiful thing for the human being. Everybody should be meditating, everybody should be transcending and diving within every day. The key to peace is within that as well. So it's a beautiful thing and that is silence within, and it's blissful and powerful.
Lowdown
Twin Peaks: new episodes every Monday at 8.30pm on SoHo - encore screening is Sunday 9.30pm.
