A few questions into an interview with New York Magazine, David Lynch clarifies what his next film is going to be about:

I went on IMDb.com to see what you were up to next …
Most of it is lies …

Well, it listed Snootworld as your next directing project. Is that true?
No. [Laughs] Snootworld is a kind of children’s film, and it’s not happening yet.

What is your next project?
I’m going to make a film on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It won’t be a so-called David Lynch film, really; it will be about Maharishi and the knowledge he brought out. It’ll hold a lot of abstractions. We’re on our way to India in December to start the India part of it.

Will it be a narrative feature?
It’ll have to go in the documentary department, I think. I don’t think it’ll be a talking heads kind of thing, but we’re going to do a lot of interviews with people. We’ll interview — I hope — in India, a 97-year-old man who was with Maharishi from the beginning and get stories of times that weren’t so well recorded.

The auteur of such storied films such as Mulholland Drive, Elephant Man and Blue Velvet,  is currently busy with a Twitter account and an online video series, and this documentary will be just his third film in the last 10 or so years. Lynch has been a proponent of Transcendental Meditation for some time and Mahesh Yogi, of course, took TM global by teaching it to the Beatles, Clint Eastwood and David Lynch himself.

Lounge last year extensively covered the Beatles trip to Rishikesh in 1968, including this interview with Paul Saltzman who spent time with the Beatles, Mia Farrow and Mahesh Yogi:

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi took his brand of spritiualism global in the 50s and 60s thanks to a steady stream of celebrity TM aficionados. His legacy in literature and music is pretty impressive and when he died in February last year politicans and celebs from all over paid tributes. The Yogi’s Wikipedia page drips names:

During the 60’s and 70’s a number of celebrities such as The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones, Deepak Chopra, Jane Fonda, Mia Farrow, Shirley MacLaine, Joe Namath, Stevie Wonder, and Howard Stern, as well as author Kurt Vonnegut and Major-General Franklin M. Davis, Jr reported using the technique. Singer-songwriter Donovan (who befriended the Maharishi and put his picture on the back cover of his A Gift from a Flower to a Garden album) also learned the technique. Comedian Andy Kaufman and magician Doug Henning were also students of the Maharishi. Howard Stern interviewed the Maharishi twice and credits Transcendental Meditation with saving his mother from depression. Clint Eastwood and David Lynch are two notable film directors who practice the Transcendental Meditation technique. Republican Party politician William Scranton, another student of the Maharishi, lost his 1986 bid for the Pennsylvania governorship when political consultant James Carville ran a television spot about Mr. Scranton’s affiliation with the “guru”. In October 1975, the Maharishi was pictured on the front cover of the Time magazine.

In 2002 the Yogi appeared on TV on CNN’s Larry King Live for his first televised interview in almost 3 decades. King was a little more reverential than usual:

KING: What is transcendental meditation?

MAHARISHI: Transcendental meditation is something that can be defined as a means to do what one wants to do in a better way, in a right way, for maximum results. It’s a program that the mind begins to experience its own finer impressions, finer thoughts, and then finally transcends the finest thought. And that is the level of what they call self-referral pure consciousness, which is the ultimate reality of life, pure intelligence from where the creation emerges, from where the administration of life is maintained, from where physical expression of the universe has its basis.

So transcendental meditation brings about transcendental consciousness, which is self-referral consciousness, the source of all intelligence.

KING: Why…

MAHARISHI: That level of intelligence becomes creative intelligence.

But Lynch, it appears, is going to make a straight documentary on the Maharishi’s life. So expect none of those quirks and unorthoxy that sets apart Lynch’s filmography. But at least, as some people online seemed to comment, it won’t be another Slumdog.

Or will it?