"Let’s go with Elephant Man — no, I’m going to go with Blue Velvet, for my David Lynch pick. I’m going to go with Blue Velvet because I love Roy Orbison so much. He was a great influence on me musically, and still is. That’s when I kind of put two and two together — with Blue Velvet — and thought, film is a great way for your music to be heard, without radio. It’s a great way for your music to be heard."

"I had my cinematic awakening in the late ’90s, and my understanding at the time was David Lynch didn’t want the film commercially released on VHS due to perceived inferior audiovisual quality. As a result, Screen Slate contributor Patrick Dahl and I first saw Eraserhead on an nth generation VHS bootleg with burned-in Japanese subtitles that we purchased at a horror convention in a Holiday Inn near Cleveland. I understood the movie completely differently when I finally saw and heard it in a theater, but this tape has its own vibe."

"I sometimes hear films described as “Lynchian,” which, I take it, means that they deal with a certain space between light and darkness (or perhaps it’s just a more sophisticated way of saying that something is flat-out creepy). The Scarlet Empress is David Lynch for 1934 . . . and by that I mean that the lighting design is crucial. I love the scene where the freaky Grand Duke Peter (whom I recognized as the crotchety book salesman from my childhood favorite—the ever-so-slightly psychedelically tinged—Bedknobs and Broomsticks) emerges from the shadows to meet his new bride, the Princess Sophia Frederica (played by Marlene Dietrich) for the first time"

"I love Blue Velvet. Put that in there. Alright, this’ll take forever if we talk about what I love about David Lynch. I love that guy. He’s one of the people out there that I just can’t get enough of. I just love everything. I love the way he does it. I love that at first you think it’s weird. [But] it’s actually not weird at all. It makes total f—g sense to me. And you know what I love about it? It seems like it should be pretentious, but there’s nothing pretentious about it. That story creeps you out, it’s fascinating, it’s funny. And [it’s got] dialogue like, “Heineken? F— that s—. Pabst Blue Ribbon!” That’s poetry."

"I was completely unprepared when I saw Mulholland Dr. in a small art-house cinema in Stockholm, and it blew my mind. I came out of the movie and just felt like I needed to talk to people and ask questions, like, did you see what I saw? It was huge for me, and it almost felt like, you can’t mess with people like this and get away with it, somebody should do something about it. Usually when American cinema tries to be surreal or nonlinear or non-narrative, it turns either really pretentious or really Hollywood. But David Lynch, in this film but also in general, is probably the only person I know who has succeeded in making his own version of American surrealism."

"Robert Mitchum stars in his signature role as the demonic preacher Harry Powell. The great actor Charles Laughton’s only work as a director is a horrifying fable about the loss of innocence and the darkness barely contained beneath the veneer of American pastoral life. It’s a one-of-a-kind movie. There’s nothing like it. Powerful, beautiful, darkly funny. Visually stunning. Both expressionistic and harshly realistic. It’s an American fever dream that I don’t think was equaled until David Lynch launched Blue Velvet into an unsuspecting Reagan-era public three decades later. The disc features Charles Laughton Directs “The Night of the Hunter,” a deconstruction of the film featuring outtakes and behind-the-scenes footage that enhances the experience of an already perfect film in ways unimaginable. Compiled by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, it’s a special feature as good as the film itself."

"Dune, directed by David Lynch. I just love that movie. It’s so weird. It’s such a great combination of the book that Frank Herbert wrote, and then David Lynch’s sort of take on that and spin on that. It’s so otherworldly, but you know, so human obviously. I love Kyle MacLachlan, Patrick Stewart; it’s an amazing cast. I love science fiction, and it’s just so weird in so many ways. It’s so different than any other science fiction film that I know. I saw it (in the theater), I can’t even remember how old I was. I was a teenager maybe. But I remember when you went in to see it, they gave you a one-page glossary of terms used in the movie, because I guess they felt like that was going to be necessary for you to get what was going on. Of course, you get in there, it’s kind of hard to read this in the dark. But I enjoyed it. And I kind of rediscovered it. Later on at some point I watched it and I was like, “Oh my God, this really is so good.” I mean, there’s a few cheesy aspects to it, but it’s just awesome to me."