David Lynch had a knack for creating surreal dreamscapes in his films. Often strangely-lit, doorless rooms were suffused with a sense of unease. The bizarre cabaret at the Club Silencio in his 2001 film Mulholland Drive is one such place that teeters between reality and dream. Ten years later, a real-life Silencio nightclub opened in Paris’s 2nd arrondissement – created by none other than Lynch himself.

The rue Montmartre looks nothing like the windswept, dismal parking lot where, in the film, a taxi drops off two characters. Plus, the Paris club’s matte-black façade is missing the looping cursive of the film’s baby-blue ‘Silencio’ sign. In fact, there’s nothing to indicate that you’re in the right place, apart from an elegant posse of black-shirted bouncers at the door, and a narrow sliver of sidewalk cordoned off with a black velvet rope, reserved for the inevitable late-night queue.

You enter at the top of a black staircase, lit only by strips of light running horizontally along the wall. A series of photographs in a feverish night-time palette line the staircase, depicting strange landscapes: a tunnel of gold, white trees forking up from the ground, blurred by bolts of lightning. It is only once you have descended into the club that you realize, in a most Lynchian self-referential twist, that these photos, taken by the director, are of the club’s interior.

The first space you enter is the tunnel, where the walls and ceiling are made of uneven, rough blocks of gold-painted wood like ingots, giving you the sensation of walking into a vortex. The club is six meters underground, with low ceilings, and mirrors throughout increase the sense of depth. Lynch designed the decor, right down to every last detail of the furniture. His touch is particularly apparent in the lighting, with floor lights casting devilish shadows across people’s faces and spotlights creating small pools of color along the corridor that dissolve into pockets of darkness. The club is deceptively small and strangely homelike – coffee-table books about art and fashion can be found in the salon. At the same time, you have the sensation that you’re walking onto the set of a Hollywood thriller.

‘Lynch was really the only person we thought of working with on this project,’ admits Arnaud Frisch, the co-founder of Silencio and a doyen of Parisian nightlife. Frisch is the creative force behind other iconic venues of the French capital’s club scene, like Wanderlust, and the now-closed Social Club, which used to occupy the space above Silencio. ‘He was obviously one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century, but also someone who embodied the cross-disciplinarity that we wanted to create.’

Indeed, Silencio is not just a nightclub: it’s a hybrid space that doubles as a sort of literary salon and intellectual gathering place, with a cultural program that includes talks, film screenings, exhibitions, and concerts. It’s located in the former printing press of the newspaper L’Aurore, and it was here that Emile Zola’s famous article ‘J’accuse…!’ was printed. In more contemporary history, and in its current incarnation, Lana Del Rey gave her first ever concert in Paris at Silencio in 2011, Virgil Abloh did his first DJ set here, and the stage has also seen concerts by Pharrell Williams, Kendrick Lamar, Dua Lipa, and Beth Ditto. Ai Weiwei and Martin Parr have shown their work here. One of the club’s stated aims is to generate serendipitous meetings between creatives.

‘It’s an intimate club because it’s made up of lots of different rooms,’ explains Frisch. ‘That enables you to meet people more easily in the corridors, between the spaces. You can get a bit lost, particularly the first time you come.’

It has a membership program – and feels doubly exclusive once on the inside. The dancefloor, bathed in blood-red light, is small and quickly becomes packed. It’s made even more narrow because of private tables on each side that are cordoned off by velvet ropes. You need a special wristband to dance in the relatively airy space behind the DJ booth. A nest of plump beige armchairs arranged invitingly in front of the bar are off-limits for those without a reservation. Bar staff push through the crowd with champagne buckets. A VIP room is guarded zealously by a bouncer.

Especially during important cultural moments in the Paris calendar such as Fashion Week and Art Basel Paris Silencio draws a crowd. The branding has also gone international. There’s now El Silencio in Ibiza and Silencio in New York, and pop-ups at the Cannes Film Festival and Art Basel Miami Beach. ‘Silencio is a living project,’ says Frisch. ‘It ties together the links between music, cinema, and fashion.’ The team is thinking of opening new outposts elsewhere in Europe, or possibly Tokyo, as well as a Silencio-branded hotel. Frisch concludes, ‘That’s part of Silencio’s DNA – creating a space where people can meet and come together.’