Take a suf­fi­cient­ly long road trip across Amer­i­ca, and you’re bound to encounter some­thing or some­one Lynchi­an. Whether or not that idea lay behind Inter­view Project, the under­tak­ing had the endorse­ment of David Lynch him­self. Not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, it was con­ceived by his son Austin, who along with film­mak­er Jason S. (known for the doc­u­men­tary David Lynch: The Art Life), drove 20,000 miles through the U.S. in search of what it’s tempt­ing to call the real Amer­i­ca, a nation pop­u­lat­ed by col­or­ful, some­times des­per­ate, often uncon­ven­tion­al­ly elo­quent char­ac­ters, 121 of whom Inter­view Project finds pass­ing the day in bars, work­ing at stores, or just sit­ting on the road­side.

Pro­fil­ing David Lynch in the nineties, David Fos­ter Wal­lace observed that “a good 65 per­cent of the peo­ple in met­ro­pol­i­tan bus ter­mi­nals between the hours of mid­night and 6 A.M. tend to qual­i­fy as Lynchi­an fig­ures — grotesque, enfee­bled, flam­boy­ant­ly unap­peal­ing, freight­ed with a woe out of all pro­por­tion to evi­dent cir­cum­stances.”

Inter­view Project sticks to small-town or rur­al set­tings — Camp Hill, Penn­syl­va­nia; Pigeon Forge, Ten­nessee; Tuba City, Ari­zona — but still encoun­ters peo­ple who may at first glance strike view­ers as dis­turb­ing, men­ac­ing, sad­den­ing, for­bid­ding, or some com­bi­na­tion there­of. But they all have com­pelling sto­ries to tell, and can do so with­in five min­utes.

Being the sub­ject of an Inter­view Project video requires a degree of forth­right open­ness that those who’ve spent their lives in the U.S. may not rec­og­nize as char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly Amer­i­can. Though often beset by a host of crises, ail­ments, and griev­ances (imposed from with­out or with­in), they don’t hes­i­tate to assert them­selves and their world­views. Though there’s obvi­ous curios­i­ty val­ue in all these eccen­tric con­vic­tions, region­al twangs, and some­times har­row­ing mis­for­tunes, what emerges above all from these inter­views is an impres­sive resilience. Young or old, coher­ent or oth­er­wise, with or with­out a place to live, these peo­ple all come off as sur­vivors.

When Inter­view Project first went online in 2009, it was­n’t view­able on Youtube. Now, for its fif­teenth anniver­sary, all of its videos have been uploaded to that plat­form, and in high def­i­n­i­tion at that. Seen in this new con­text, Inter­view Project looks like an antecedent to cer­tain Youtube chan­nels that have risen to pop­u­lar­i­ty in the decade and a half since: Soft White Under­bel­ly, for instance, which devotes itself to inter­vie­wees at the extreme mar­gins of soci­ety. Extrem­i­ty isn’t the sig­nal char­ac­ter­is­tic of Inter­view Project’s sub­jects, depart dra­mat­i­cal­ly though their expe­ri­ences may from the mod­ern mid­dle-class tem­plate. One could pity how short their lives fall of the “Amer­i­can Dream” — or one could con­sid­er the pos­si­bil­i­ty that they’re all liv­ing that dream in their own way.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Brief His­to­ry of the Great Amer­i­can Road Trip

Real Inter­views with Peo­ple Who Lived in the 1800s

The New Studs Terkel Radio Archive Will Let You Hear 5,000+ Record­ings Fea­tur­ing the Great Amer­i­can Broad­cast­er & Inter­view­er

What Makes a David Lynch Film Lynchi­an: A Video Essay

David Lynch Explains Why Depres­sion Is the Ene­my of Cre­ativ­i­ty — and Why Med­i­ta­tion Is the Solu­tion

David Lynch Teach­es You to Cook His Quinoa Recipe in a Strange, Sur­re­al­ist Video

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.