When watching the films of David Lynch, one can’t help but wonder what it would be like to see the world through his eyes. From seminal masterpieces like The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet to contemporary classics like Mulholland Drive and last year’s jaw-dropping Inland Empire, the director’s work is infused with bizarre imagery and absurdist fantasy. In fact, the very concept of a documentary film about Lynch is hard to accept — for a man so utterly devoted to the medium to allow his life to be chronicled through anyone’s lens but his own seems absurd. Somehow, a team of Danish filmmakers, led by enigmatically-named director blackANDwhite, managed to embed themselves in his world, gathering 700 hours of footage over a two-year period.

In offering such unprecedented access to his personal space, Lynch infuses the documentary with his own unmistakable artistic style. Individual scenes showcase the director’s bizarre sense of esthetic, featuring rambling anecdotes that blur the lines between fact and fantasy. From an encounter with a rabbit the size of a horse to a failed attempt to use pick-axes to “pop” a dead, bloated cow found while clearing brush, Lynch recounts each tale with rabid enthusiasm and vivid detail. The filmmakers add to the abstract nature of the film by splicing scenes together in a disjointed manner, drawing from footage of Lynch in various stages of the creative process as well as snippets of his more esoteric work.

While this results in an often-frustrating lack of narrative flow, the film manages to keep itself moored to reality through interactions with Lynch during his downtime, most frequently by eavesdropping on phone calls made from his home office. In one conversation, he speaks of his passion for transcendental meditation, which he has been practicing for well over three decades, and describes how it allows him to tap into an “ocean of creativity.” Farther along, the director confesses that he never believed it was possible for him to be an artist in the modern world until he realized that the process of creating and experiencing a film is more important than the end result itself.

If Lynch were composed solely of the director’s rambling tales and artistic pontificating, it would be a bit of a disappointment. Fortunately, the documentary was filmed during the production of Inland Empire, which allows viewers the rare opportunity to see the director in his element. Nothing can compare to observing the interactions between Lynch and his cast and crew: he swears at them mercilessly; he barks orders at cameramen standing in the wrong place; he comes up with ridiculous pet names like “tidbit” for his actresses. In spite of it all, his minions express nothing short of reverence for him — his masterful artistic vision more than compensates for his acidic edge. Towards the end of the film, we have a chance to observe an on-set conversation between Lynch and Laura Dern in which the director’s words paint an incredibly vivid picture, like a painter standing back from the canvas and telling the brushes exactly where to go.