The Guardian recently sent two writers on different expeditions to track down David Lynch, currently camping out as Gaby Wood discovered, in "a steep, strange, snake of a street and sheer, straight steps is a set of concrete buildings clinging onto the side of the Hollywood Hills", and his daughter Jennifer, who's been busy clearing the ground for the U.K. release of her own second feature as a director, Surveillance. Wood's own feature is short on terrific new quotes from the great man, which probably reflects less on her journalistic abilities than on where Lynch's head is at these days: he's still deep in that "Film and me are quits!" space he's been promoting ever since he discovered digital video and made Inland Empire. Wood describes that work, accurately, as "a three-hour ode to impenetrability.") " 'I just love this camera,' Lynch says, in his nasal, deliberate, almost robotically enthusiastic voice. We are looking at a large chiaroscuro nude, which has been printed in two parts and hung on the wall, and Lynch is telling me about his Hasselblad digital. Unbelievable. Thirty-nine million pixels. The camera remembers something like 4,000 pieces of information per photograph. It is machine. It's a machine.' A look of delight passes across his face. 'It's just a glorious world,' he says.

It's nice to know that he's happy. Those who saw the documentary Lynch know that the director now spends a lot of time in his own "bunker", which includes offices and studios and recording equipment, piling up cigarette ashes while waiting for inspiration to hit. Word has apparently reached Lynch that he has nothing left to prove, and his attitude towards his future movie career seems to be that if he has a reason to make another film, he supposes he will. "Sometimes I get an idea for cinema. And when you get an idea that you fall in love with, this is a glorious day. That idea may just be 1a fragment, but it holds something. It might be a scene, or a part of a scene, or a character, or a way the character talks, a light or a feel ... You write that idea down. And thinking about that idea will bring other ideas in – there's a hook to it. And things start to emerge. And then you see, one day, a script. A script is just words to remind you of the ideas. And you follow that, but always staying on guard, in case other ideas come in, because a thing isn't finished till it's finished. And one day, it's finished." But if he never gets the money to make another movie, "I don't care. See, a painting is much cheaper than making a film. And photography is, you know, way cheap. So if I get an idea for a film, there are many ways to get it together and go realize that film. There's really nothing to be afraid of." In the meantime, he's returned to his first love, painting, and he also makes two-dimensional art works, and shoots photographs. He has a special fondness for nudes in factories--decaying factories, "factories [that] are defunct, celebrated for their decay and decomposition in a way that renders them organic," like the pencil factory in Eraserhead if it had spent a few decades under water.

Wood writes that "In the course of our interview Lynch had made (I felt) a series of didactic yet meaningless speeches of varying length, none of which lent itself to illustrating any particular point. But afterwards I found myself laughing, because I realised he was not so much unforthcoming as bordering on the Delphic. He is – unbudgingly, impenetrably, but nevertheless magnificently – a character of his own making. In his movies the characters who talk like this – a sort of scattershot guru-speak, in which sayings are either wise or total rubbish, depending on what sticks – are fortune-tellers, random ciphers or mysterious orchestrators of strange plots (the dancing dwarf in Twin Peaks, the Cowboy in Mulholland Drive, the witchy neighbour in Inland Empire). In other words, the most unnatural among the dramatis personae. But when you listen to Lynch you realise they are (in their delivery at least) the most natural, the most like him." It turns out that the Oracle of Missoula, Montana recently got married, for the fourth time. The new Missus Lynch is Emily Stofle, a 26-year-old actress who was in Inland Empire. (Before that, she played one of the victims of the title character in 2002's Ted Bundy.) Says Wood, "I'm not the first to wonder how someone who is so evangelically "blissed out" can live through the un-bliss of three divorces (he has a child from each marriage) and a well-publicised break up with Isabella Rossellini. To this Lynch will only say: 'We live in the field of relativity. Things change.' "

Visiting Jennifer Lynch, who's now 40, John Patterson failed to ask what she thinks of her new mommy. When Jennifer Lynch was 24, she was busy being raked over the coals for her ill-fated debut film, Boxing Helena. Bad as that movie was, it seems likely that the reaction to it would have been considerably less intense had its auteur's name been Ratskywatsky or something. "It had no chance to be seen through unbiased eyes. Did I know what I was doing? I knew what I was trying to do. And I think it's OK to fail at things. But it was the astonishing rage and, in particular, the suggestion that as a human being I didn't deserve to be loved ever again - something the National Organisation of Women actually said about me. Like, are you fucking kidding me? C'mon, even Hitler deserved to be loved - in fact a little love might have made him a way better guy. I had to retreat and wonder why the reaction to a movie could be so violent and so vitriolic. And there was hostility all over the world - there was no safe place. Whatever I got, I got in a personal way, directed right at me. I would have welcomed a serious discussion of the flaws and intentions of that film, but not a debate about whether I deserved to be alive."

Fortunately, Lynch--who Patterson describes as "rowdy, bawdy, sick-in-the-head funny and very fast with a quip"--was able to use the connection to her father to her benefit this time. "My father called me after he read the script a couple of years ago and he said, 'You're the sickest bitch I know!'" Thanks, Pop! But after Jennifer was unable to get funding for Surveillance, "he called ages later and said, 'What's happening with your movie?' and I said 'Zilch.' I told him I don't know if it's the material, if it's the 15 years raising a kid, if it's Boxing Helena, but nobody's interested. And he said, 'What if I put my name on it?' I'm like, 'C'mon Dad, you know how I feel about it.' Because, believe me, it's a big issue for me. But that day I typed: 'Executive producer: David Lynch', and within 48 hours I had more offers than I knew what to do with. I swear, any screenwriter wanting a little attention should just write 'Steven Spielberg' on their script. Who's checking?" The movie stars two veterans of her father's films, Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond, as investigators on the trail of a serial killer, and involves the viewpoint of an eight-year-old girl who picks up on things that the adults around her miss. "I wanted to play with the wisdom and clarity of a child's perception," says Lynch. "And also I like the idea of the serial killer movie in a way that's not just 'cut 'em up, kill all the sluts'. Although, God knows, I did some of that too. But I wanted terror in broad daylight, in a place that outwardly seems so safe...The second you start being brave about something that terrifies you and start really digging into it, confronting it head on, that's great; it's the cowards who say, 'Nah, not a problem.' And that's a real way in which - as bumper-stickerish as it sounds - art can save your fucking life. You need a place to put all that stuff."