When David Lynch tells you you’ve gone too far, it’s hard to know whether it’s a badge of honor or a sign that the bottom has fallen out.

That’s what director Jennifer Lynch had to decide after showing the script for her film “Surveillance” to her famous filmmaker father.

“I got a phone call from my father, who said, ‘That’s way too fucking sick. You can’t have dark win over light’,” Lynch says. “I don’t see it that way. He challenged me to find a different ending. I did and I shot it – and it will be on the DVD. Put it this way: I hadn’t seen a serial killer film that thrilled me in the way I wanted to be thrilled.”

And her father’s response when he saw the finished film? “My father said, ‘You’re the sickest bitch I know.’”

Which was shortly after he agreed to put his name on it as executive producer.

“Surveillance,” a tense and gruesome little thriller that opens Friday, stars Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond as a pair of FBI agents who arrive in a small town after a multiple murder. The killings appear to be the work of a team of serial killers they’ve been chasing – and they need to interrogate witnesses who may have seen the culprits.

But the truth proves elusive as the stakes escalate. That was the aspect that Lynch found most intriguing – that two people can witness the same event and come away with different versions of what happened, she said in a telephone interview.

“As a human being, it’s easy to be wrong,” Lynch, 41, says. “When something happens, people see things in the same way that they want to be seen. Very few witnesses are reliable. I love that about human beings. We’re all so completely fragile. That’s what fascinates me.”

The script, which she cowrote with Kent Harper, sprang from a script Harper had written, about three witches on a desolate highway: “Kent and I had been producing short films and he asked me to read a script he had,” Lynch says. “It triggered these memories of a cross-country trip with my mother and stepfather.”

Lynch, a single mother of a teen-age daughter, resisted the impulse to get her father’s imprimatur on the film as she developed it. But once the script was finished and financing wasn’t forthcoming, she showed it to him. Still, it was a hard decision, because Lynch doesn’t want people to think she’s riding on her father’s coattails.

“When he offered to put his name on as executive producer to get it made, I realized I had to put that bullet in my now-empty gun,” she says. “It’s what people have been accusing me of for years. Ultimately, it got me financing.

“I’m aware that making use of the fact that I’m related to him puts me in both a good and bad position. Who cares, as long as it’s a great movie?”

On the other hand, Lynch audibly stiffens when it is suggested that her chillingly tense film bears a resemblance to her father’s cinematic adventures in bad craziness.

“I don’t want to sound defensive,” she says. “I do tend to say, ‘That’s not fair.’ But my father is one of my favorite filmmakers. I try not to take it as a criticism. I don’t want to pretend that I didn’t have the childhood I had. I don’t apologize for anything.”

Including “Boxing Helena,” the controversial 1993 film she directed about an obsessive doctor who turns the woman he loves into a quadruple amputee in order to possess her. The film drew rabidly negative reactions, one reason Lynch took so long to make another movie: “It’s been a long time coming,” she says with a sigh.

She’s aware of how hazardous the landscape is for low-budget independent films, in terms of finding an audience: “I don’t get the luxury of hoping people will like it. I just have to hope people will see it,” she says.

But she believes “Surveillance” is a movie people will seek out.

“Put it this way: A lot of people out there are interested in dark things,” she offers. “I wanted to make a movie that I wasn’t apologetic about. And I did. I’m a lucky fucking bitch.”

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