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During David Lynch’s deep interview with the Village Voice’s Nathan Lee, he spoke in the same terms as his movies: otherworldly, enigmatic, and elusive.

Lynch’s latest film, Inland Empire, due to be released on double-disc DVD this week and to be reviewed in depth by FSR as soon as we get our copy, was shot with “Sony PD-150, a low-grade digital-video camera considered obsolete for serious feature filmmaking,” says Lee. Inland Empire stars Laura Dern and, like Lynch’s previous Mulholland Drive, tells the story of a “Hollywood actress in the grip of an identity crisis.” Just our cup o’ tea.

Nathan Lee describes Inland Empire as “[resembling] nothing so much as YouTube having an epic nightmare.” Not even FSR can top that description. Lee also regards Inland Empire as maybe the “first movie masterpiece that doesn’t properly belong in movie theaters.”

Lynch does not go into details other than describing his film as being about a “woman in trouble,” and when pressed by Lee for details, replies ” “I just say it’s about a woman in trouble.” That’s it? “That’s it. I can’t really say, because it putrefies the experience. You see a thing, and that thing has been worked on for a long time until it feels correct as a whole. And then it needs to go out without any additional words. It doesn’t do any good for the director to say this or that—it doesn’t really change people’s opinion. They might come up with something far more interesting out of it.”

Who else would use a phrase like “putrefies the experience?” And yet we know exactly what he means.

In comparing his films with his cooking, Lynch goes on to say “The chef does not make the fish. The chef can prepare that fish and really make it a great meal—a beautiful, you know, thing—but the chef doesn’t make the fish. It’s like you are going along down the street and you get an idea, and it’s a thrilling thing, it’s the whole thing, and it might be a fragment, but that fragment is complete. So you go into this process where more ideas hook onto it, and the more ideas you have, the quicker the rest come to join it. They become like bait, and you just stay true to those ideas. And where intuition comes in is, you’re translating this idea to film and it’s not quite right. Like on a violin note—if you lean a little bit harder on that note, it feels correct, and if you back off a little bit, it doesn’t feel correct. And if you follow this thing, staying true to idea, intuition is your friend. You walk away when it feels correct.”

As recently revealed by a limousine driver in Santa Fe, “You’ve got to see Inland Empire. It’s amazing and will give you so much to think about, you could get a headache.” Between the Village Voice and the limo guy, this is sounding like another Lynch milestone.

Read Lee’s Entire Interview here.