David Lynch and Stella McCartney, Curtains Up
In 2018, Stella McCartney teamed up with David Lynch and his son Austin Lynch to create Curtains Up, a short film meditating on the director’s vision of filmmaking as an extension of the unified field of consciousness. The film begins in a dark room; the click of a projector incrementally escalates as a lightbeam’s spectral glow carves out Lynch’s face from the pitch black of an empty movie theater. Moving through a carousel of natural environments, atmospheric abstractions, and human gestures, Lynch narrates his philosophy on cinema and meditation. He frames the creative impulse as an act of release—an experience mirrored in his pursuit of enlightenment. The film features cameos from Børns, Petra Cortright, Tommy Dorfman, Carolyn Funk, Sky H1, Jenni Hensler, Lola Kirke, Sasha Lane, Stella McCartney, Bobby Roth, Ashton Sanders, and Immad Wasif, each captured in an instance of pause, tranquility, focus, or transcendence.
Describing his theory of the big fish from a passage in his book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity, Lynch explains “An idea is a thought. It’s a thought that holds more than you think it does when you receive it. But in that first moment there’s a spark. Desire for an idea is like bait. You bait your hook and then you wait. The desire is the bait that pulls those fish in, those ideas. Little fish swim on the surface, but the big ones swim down below. If you can expand the container you’re fishing in—your consciousness—you can catch bigger fish.” Curtains Up was directed by Austin Lynch, the co-founder of Tête-à-Tête—a Los Angeles-based creative agency that Lynch founded with the artist Case Simmons. Austin Lynch is a renowned filmmaker, known for directing Gray House (2017) and the television series Interview Project (2009). This film was created in collaboration with the David Lynch Foundation.
Find David Lynch’s complete narration from Curtains Up here:
“Cinema is a language. It can say things—big abstract things—and I love that about it. Some people are poets and have a beautiful way of saying things with words, but cinema is its own language. And so you can express a feeling and a thought that can’t be conveyed any other way. It’s a magical medium.
For me, it’s so beautiful to think about these pictures and sounds flowing together in time and in sequence, making something that can only be done through cinema. It’s so magical—I don’t know why—to go into a theater and have the lights go down. It’s very quiet and then the curtains start to open and you go into a world.
Although the frames of a film are always the same—the same number and the same sequence and with the same sounds—every screening is different. There is a circle that goes from the audience to the film and back. Each person is looking and thinking and feeling and coming up with their own sense of things. I like a story that holds abstractions and that’s what cinema can do.
I was a painter. I painted, and I went to art school. I had no interest in film. One day I was sitting in a big studio room and I had a painting going which was of a garden at night. It had a lot of black with green plants emerging out of the darkness. All of a sudden these plants started to move and I heard a wind, and I thought oh, how fantastic this is. And I began to wonder if film could be a way to make paintings move.
An idea is a thought; it’s a thought that holds more than you think it does when you receive it. But in that first moment there’s a spark. Desire for an idea is like bait. You bait your hook and then you wait. The desire is the bait that pulls those fish in, those ideas. Little fish swim on the surface, but the big ones swim down below. If you can expand the container you’re fishing in—your consciousness—you can catch bigger fish.
When I started meditating I was filled with anxieties and fears. I felt a sense of depression and anger. Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a story, but they’re like poison to the filmmaker or artist. You must have clarity to create. You have to be able to catch ideas.
Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way we make heads or tails of it is through intuition. Intuition is seeing the solution. It’s emotion and intellect going together. Personally, I think intuition can be sharpened and expanded through meditation—diving into the self. There’s an ocean of consciousness inside each of us, and it’s an ocean of solutions. When you dive into that ocean—that consciousness—you enliven it. It grows, and the final outcome of this growth of consciousness is called enlightenment, which is the full potential for us all.
There are many, many dark things flowing around in this world now, and most films reflect the world in which we live. In stories, in the worlds that we go into, there’s suffering, confusion, darkness, tension, and anger. But the filmmaker doesn’t have to be suffering to show suffering.
Negativity is like darkness, you turn on the light and darkness goes. We’re like lightbulbs. If bliss starts growing inside you, it's like a light. You enjoy that light inside, and if you ramp it up brighter and brighter you enjoy more and more of it. And that light will extend out farther and farther.
Maybe enlightenment is far away, but it’s said that when you walk toward the light with every step things get brighter. Every day for me gets better and better, and I believe that enlivening unity in the world will bring peace on earth. So I say: peace to all of you.
Big Fish is a recurring series on David Lynch’s personal voyages into creative expression and transcendental meditation—centering collaborative, consciousness-based projects spanning art, film, music, and writing.