David Lynch, the filmmaker behind such dark and menacing excursions into sex and violence as Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks, might seem to be one of the least likely of directors to come up with a new movie so gentle and tender that it was described by the New York Times as "Disney's cleanest non-animated picture since Son of Flubber", a movie which dates back to 1963.
That's David Lynch for you. A filmmaker who has demonstrated a distinctive skill for taking audiences by surprise ever since his surreal and disturbing first feature, Eraserhead, emerged in 1976 and became one of the definitive cult movies, and he followed it with two brilliant, riveting dramas in The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet.
Of course, those surprises from Lynch have not always been welcome - the visual imagination behind his big-budget science-fiction epic, Dune, could not disguise its essentially incoherent structure, and the Twin Peaks spin-off movie, Fire Walk With Me, was a mess which undermined the strange and often fascinating TV series which spawned it.
Lynch's new movie is the ambiguously titled The Straight Story, which relates a tale that would seem unbelievable, if it hadn't been based on fact. It features Richard Farnsworth in a beautifully judged and dignified portrayal of Alvin Straight, an ailing 73-year-old from a small town in Iowa. Learning that his older brother (Harry Dean Stanton) has had a stroke at his Wisconsin home, he vows to visit him and patch up the feud which has kept them apart for 10 years.
Too weak-sighted to hold a driving licence any more and too proud to accept a lift, Alvin decides to travel aboard a 1966 John Deere lawnmower, hauling a makeshift trailer containing his supplies for the trip. The journey, which takes six weeks, involves encounters with disparate characters en route, bringing him through a changing landscape that's handsomely photographed by Freddie Francis in Lynch's philosophical and cherishable film.
That the material is handled with such affection and humanity by Lynch should not come as too great a surprise after his sensitive treatment of The Elephant Man. "Exactly," said Lynch when we met. "It's closer to that than any other of my films, for sure. You know, I think there is something in the air at the moment. This is very different for me. But The Winslow Boy is a very different film for David Mamet to do. Kitano has changed and done a tender film, and so has Almodovar. What's going on? Well, the world is different compared to when Wild at Heart was made.
"There was something happening then, I felt, that Wild at Heart was right for, and now violence has reached an absurd stage where you just don't even feel it any more. There's no way to swear more, although I'm sure there is, but it's like there's a wall there, a numb sort of thing."
But surely Lynch is not saying goodbye to his explorations of the dark side of the psyche? "Oh no," he says firmly. "Since it may be changing now, it will change again.
The Straight Story came right out of the blue - even though I was aware of the story itself since 1994, because I live with Mary Sweeney and she had a fixation on the story. I kept telling her I didn't think it was for me. Then, after she and John Roach finished the script, they gave it to me and it hit me and I said I really wanted to do it."
This particular subject demanded a realistic treatment, he believes: "It is a straight story. A very traditional story, but I felt that to get the emotions still entailed dealing with abstractions. That was the thing about this film that drew me - the feelings coming out of it and how to get those translated into the film."
The key towards reaching those feelings was the casting of Richard Farnsworth, a rodeo rider who worked as a stuntman in movies for 40 years before getting his first speaking part. He went on to deliver superb performances in Comes a Horseman, which earned him an Oscar nomination, and The Grey Fox.
"My film hangs on his performance," Lynch says. "There's nobody that could do it like he did it. He has a quality, which is in all the films he's been in, that just makes you instantly want to like this guy. And, you know, he is so much like Alvin. He wears a cowboy hat, as Alvin did, and they're both from the rodeo. Richard's a stuntman who came into acting and he doesn't consider himself an actor, which is completely absurd to me because he really makes the thing come alive. So much comes out in every word and every look from this man. He's just open, like a child. It's amazing what he does.
"It was very physically demanding for him, and he's going to have a hip operation shortly. It was really hard for him to sit in Alvin's chair and get up out of it. But he's a cowboy, you know. He kept going and never complained once."
Does Lynch see any parallels between Alvin Straight's journey and that of an independent film-maker like himself?
"For sure," he says. "Alvin's journey, to me, was about forgiveness and making something right. As for the logistics of it, in my mind he could have gone there in much easier ways, but these would not have meant the same to his brother. I don't think that, as a film-maker, you want to go the hardest route, but sometimes it is very hard and you have to keep your eye on the goal to get something done."
The results are not always so happy. Take Mulholland Drive, a pilot for a new television series which Lynch directed from another Mary Sweeney script. "It hasn't turned out well," he says with characteristic understatement. "It's set in Los Angeles where a mystery takes place and I hoped that Los Angeles would be a a character in it, too. It's very different from Twin Peaks, although it would have been a continuous story again. I liked the idea that television can allow you to do that.
"I loved it but I always shoot too much and the pace is not exactly television pace, so it was very rushed. I had to cut down a two-hours-and-five-minute thing to 88 minutes. Anyhow, ABC hated it, hated it, so I don't know what will happen with it."
The Straight Story is just Lynch's third film in the past eight years, after the commercial failure of the Twin Peaks spin-off and Lost Highway, and he laughs aloud at the suggestion that he might have been turning down offers from the Hollywood studios along the way.
"No way," he says. "My films, the last couple for sure, have hardly made a nickle. So the phone doesn't ring from the studios. Money kinda drags the boat in Hollywood." That lack of box-office success doesn't mean anything to him. "It's unfortunate in a way," he says. "But you just fall in love with something and it thrills you and you want to do it. And there's always this hope, even if it's a false hope, that people will relate to what you like. But that doesn't always happen, of course."
As it happened, the modest $9 million budget of The Straight Story was raised entirely from sources in France, Le Studio Canal and Les Films Alain Sarde. While Lynch is bemused that it has been picked up for release by Disney in the US, he finds it even stranger that the US ratings board, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) - which which he has many clashes in the past, notoriously in the case of Blue Velvet - has rated his new film G (for general audiences).
"That was pretty amazing," he says. "Mary, as the producer, would have taken the call from the MPAA. But she had to go out that afternoon and she asked me if I would mind taking the call. A man called and he said, `You have a G rating'. And I said, `You gotta tell me that one more time!"
The Straight Story opens next Friday