Who is the best director ever?

The best director? Well for me of course it is David Lynch, and there's a country mile between him and anyone else. That's not to say there aren't other good directors. There are GREAT directors. Which makes my statement even more powerful; no one is playing in the same league as Mr. Lynch. He may disturb you, enlighten you, exuberate you in some undefined way, he may horrify you - but there is no-one like him, and I say that in a good way, an intellectual way. Where other directors take half-assed pretend jabs at challenging you (American Psycho, for example, which WAS admittedly quite intense), Lynch goes for the knockout, but never in an unsportsmanlike way. He plays fair. He doesn't bite your ear off like Mike Tyson.

If you survive, you do it with honor and a newfound possession of what it means to be one of these strange human beings we are, and he'll be the first to congratulate you. I don't believe there has been anyone quite like him, in the past, or at present. He plays games with your mind, but in a way such that he's really not playing any games at all, not like so many other directors that use "abstraction" as Art or only try to engage/provoke you at an emotional level. Or, even solely at an intellectual level. Lynch goes at you spiritually and philosophically, like an unforgiving Zen Master, like Joshu. He really believes in what he does, and his style is both dreamy, eerie, and yet familiar in a nagging way. As one journalist put it, "suddenly you are confronted with a red room and a dwarf and a blue cube and the direction you thought the story was going shifts entirely. The key to the entire puzzle is supposed to lie within that blue box, which you can't open, just like you can't run in a dream. You don't want to believe that the true universe, outside of the movie, is really like this, but you suspect increasingly strongly that it is, and henceforth the film ceases to be just a film." Powerful stuff coming from a 'mere' film director.

Here is what looks like an interesting, if somewhat academic, read on the man: http://tinyurl.com/dge5al

Still, might as well just get all his movies and watch them 10 times each, you'll have as much idea as anyone about them; but more importantly, you'll have a unique and plausible interpretation that is like no one else's. To a degree this is true with all good films (bad films spell out what they are about, sometimes hitting you rudely over the head more than once so you don't miss the point), but Lynch's films give new meaning to the phrase "open to interpretation." Though they are not, I repeat NOT, completely abstract, or weird just to be weird. That is the biggest mistake of all to make, thinking that. The more you watch, the more you truly do understand them, maybe in your own way in the details of the thing, but you begin to see things and interpret them in new ways that supercede your previous views. And there do seem to be universal, concrete elements in there - objective truths, as it were. But it takes a hell of a lot of effort on the part of the viewer to get to that kind of realization.

It's a bit like listening to your favorite music as you grow older and understand the world in a broader and deeper way; the songs (if they are good ones) will shift meanings coyly on you, and you will enjoy them for a different reason than you did before. You would never call them random or needlessly abstract or ambiguous, you'd just applaud and admire the artist for creating a framework in which you could construct your own interpretation, though still confined in the essentials by the artist's vision, which includes objective qualities. You can't simply interpret it "however you like," but there is leeway to allow for different human experiences. Thus, artist has not imposed his will on you per se; he has allowed you into his world to explore an idea or a situation with him. This is what a David Lynch film is like for me. Each viewing just takes me deeper, and doesn't invalidate my previous watchings, yet doesn't seem to ever bottom out to a point where I feel I've "gotten" all there is to get. I don't know what else you could ask for in a film-maker.