David Lynch. His name alone makes one squirm.

CAMBRIDGE -- I'd been warned about interviewing David Lynch.

He loves to talk in circles and riddles, the critics and critiques all said. He won't explain or illuminate anything, so your best bet is to throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and just hope something sticks. Think of him as Bob Dylan with poofier hair. Oh, and don't ask him about Transcendental Meditation unless you have a couple of hours to listen to him gush about the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace.

Beautiful, as Lynch would say. Whatever that means.

With my entire body still digesting the filmmaker's latest three-hour psychothriller stew called "Inland Empire" (opening Friday at the Brattle Theatre), I sat down with Lynch at a Harvard Square restaurant earlier this week, just before the movie's local sneak preview. He smelled of coffee and cigarette smoke that might as well be welded to the fibers of his loose-fitting black suit. I was surprised at how warm and engaged he was during our interview, though I wasn't at all surprised to find him engaging.

After all, how could anyone not be fascinated by Lynch, the writer-director who brought us such demented masterworks as "Eraserhead," "Blue Velvet," "Twin Peaks," and "Mulholland Dr."? He's the guy who gets people to pay to download "Dumbland," an absurdist cartoon that knows no bounds of ugly, and "Rabbits," a DavidLynch.com series where actors dressed as bunnies hang around waiting -- maybe for Godot, or maybe just to deliver their non sequiturs to canned laughter. Plus, if you pay any attention to celebrity news, you probably know that Lynch, who is self-distributing "Inland Empire," recently turned heads by sitting out on Sunset Boulevard with some signs and a cow (a real one) in an effort to get Laura Dern recognized for her multi tiered performance in his latest film.

Do you know another veteran director who would even think to be seen on the streets of Los Angeles with a bovine -- which, by the way, has absolutely nothing to do with the movie he's promoting -- and who could honestly pronounce the experience "beautiful"?

"I got the idea quite awhile ago," Lynch sort of explains. "But I pictured myself going into the center of small French cities with a cow. And then when distribution [of "Inland Empire"] came up, and awards, and Laura Dern, I thought, 'This is the place for it.' . . . People love cows."

Well, of course, they do. Just as many people adore a filmmaker who can terrify them without making movies that are terrible. At 60, Lynch certainly has had his misfires ("Dune") and his critics, but most will concede he's an artist of endless creativity and a unique perspective ("Lynchian," they call it) that often leaves the rest of us shaking our heads. His works don't present horror as much as stir it in viewers, and the dark recesses they crawl into are places that used to be unreachable even with a plumber's snake.

"Inland Empire" can be considered a symphony, made up of "movements" that spring from virtually every other project in the director's filmography. As with Wong Kar Wai's "2046," familiar characters and themes converge in ways that may or may not make much sense, but definitely make for a fascinating party of ideas. In Lynch's latest, you'll again find dreams, dualities, doorways, and lipstick lesbians, for example.

His brand of surrealistic logic continues to break all the rules of conventional narrative: In this case, the "story" involves an actress (Dern, the pulse of Lynch's "Wild at Heart") cast in a remake of a possibly cursed movie whose original stars were murdered. With a very loose grip on reality, Dern's troubled character moves through a crazy, adulterous world populated by many Lynch favorites (Justin Theroux, Diane Ladd, Harry Dean Stanton, Grace Zabriskie), carnies, Polish whores, and, of course, those odd-looking rabbits. While Lynch says that "no film is everything," he concedes that the symphony comparison may be accurate here, and he even admits to having had some guiding thoughts (not that he's sharing them) as the pieces of this script-less movie were coming together over the course of 2 1/2 years.

"Cinema is sound and picture flowing together in sequences, like movements in a piece of music," he says. "Always the individual movements could stand on their own, but they're part of a whole. I have to know what it means to me in order to be saying that I love this idea. But because some things are abstract, each person is going to get a different thing happening. . . . It's the viewer that makes the thing the final thing."

Indeed, says Ned Hinkle, the Brattle Film Foundation's creative director: "If you say that David Lynch doesn't like to answer questions about his films, it does him a disservice. He loves to answer questions and he has a lot to say, but he doesn't want to spoon-feed people, and he doesn't want to take away from somebody's experience. . . . An eternal conversation among people who like or dislike his films is, 'What the heck do they mean?' "

Even the titles are ambiguous. "Inland Empire" is another Lynchian riff labeled simply by its setting, an area east of Los Angeles that has seen better days. The work was shot on digital video, because Lynch says film is too heavy and slow and he'll never go back to it ("If I did, I would die," he says dramatically). He also claims to know nothing about a filmmaking mentality that seeks to construct horror from the outset.

"I'm not looking to go there. I'm getting the ideas, and I'm just translating them," he says, falling back on an old line about ideas being like fish that swim in randomly and act as bait for other ideas. "I like to go into the unknown and . . . it would be wrong, I think, if there's a cart and a horse.

"So people who say, 'Oh, I want to make a horror film,' I couldn't do that. If I got a horror idea, and I fell in love with it, then I'd go down that road."

Can you imagine a path both scarier than Lynch's "Lost Highway" and more circuitous than "Inland Empire"? Heaven help us all.

Janice Page can be reached at jpage@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.