You’re listening to Filmmaking Giants. This is a show about craft, but not craft as a checklist. Craft as a way of seeing. And today’s figure is one of the rare directors who didn’t just develop a style—he taught audiences to accept a different kind of reality. Not the reality of facts, not the reality of realism, but the reality of feeling: the way dread arrives before the reason, the way desire pulls you into a room you know you shouldn’t enter, the way a sound in the dark can change the meaning of a face.

David Lynch is often described with the easiest word available—surreal—but that word is too small for what he does. Surrealism can be decorative. It can be playful. It can be a museum of oddness. Lynch’s work is not primarily odd. It is intimate. It’s emotional. It is rooted in the way a normal day can suddenly split open and reveal something underneath that was always there, humming, waiting. He doesn’t make “weird” films. He makes films about the moment the familiar becomes unbearable.

Niklas Osterman