When I worked in an electrical warehouse in Dublin. I got £60 a week wiring plugs.

I don’t think there’s a single moment. Every day that you wake up and your family is healthy and OK is a daily gratitude and happiness for me.

When I'm with my daughter.

My college years when I was 17 to 19, before the responsibilities of adulthood, just doing the things that I was good at and liked – computers, maths, further maths (I was a geek).

There are so many people I’ve loved working with, but you’ve got to get the right person for the project.

I’ve had this fear…the fear of being restricted—in every way.

On October 13, 2020, David Lynch rose and did what he had typically been doing each morning when he awoke during a long-term Covid isolation in his house and work studio just off Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills. First, while filming himself for his YouTube channel, he swirled ten numbered balls in a large glass jar, his eyes averted, then picked one. “Today’s number is ten,” he declared.

An idea comes. Scripts are organised ideas. When you read a script, it comes alive in your head. And that aliveness in the head is like seeing it and hearing it and knowing it. Or if an idea comes from outside, boom, you catch it in your brain and you see it and you hear it, and you know it. You sometimes fall in love with these things. All you do in cinema is translate those ideas. They talk to you, so you just stay true to the idea and translate it as good as you can.

Be true to yourself. Find your own voice and be true to that voice. Never take a bad idea, but never turn down a good idea. And, of course, have final cut. And be true to the ideas.

On my film Dune, that experience could have finished me. It was so horrible. I identify so much with my films – and I knew I sold out – and meditation kept me from jumping off the cliff.