Unlike most directors working in film today, David Lynch did not grow up idolizing the cinema. No endless hours upon hours spent staring in awe at his favorite masterpiece. No 8mm high school films of electric trains crashing into one another. No UCLA or USC film degree.

David Lynch went to art school. He is first and foremost a painter, and brings his own unique artistic sensibilities to each new film. He attended the Corcoran School of Art in Boston and the Boston Museum School. But it was at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts that he made his first film, The Grandmother, a 16mm experimental work about a kid who grows his own grandmother from a seed. He combined both film and paint by filming his still paintings and editing them in with bold colors and black background sets....