I want the pleasures of the real exploitation movie, and exploitation has changed so much in 40 years. Plenty of people grow up with this fantasy of, "We're going to do it like Roger Corman did it," as that sounds so fun. If you make something small, goofy and exploitative, it's nowhere near the guaranteed moneymaker it might have been 40 years ago. If you look at the way the world works now and money is made, it doesn't seem that fun. Maybe that's just a mental block I have and I need to get over that and find that corner where you can make money and still have a good movie.

Writing a story starts out as a puzzle in your mind, of "What is it I'm fantasizing about right now that makes me think this is going to be worth years of work?" And you just keep pushing and trying to figure it out, and once you've hit on these resonances... Then as a screenwriter, it can be dangerous if you get too hooked on just finding things that resonate with each other, because then you risk getting into stuff that's too neat, and becomes stifled as storytelling. But you do feel like you're on the right track when you start to have a sense of what goes with what.

I've always spent a lot of time in movie theaters, kind of absorbing anything I can. I just love sitting in the dark, and watching the flickering image up there. Just sitting in a movie theater alone is inspiring to me. It takes a pretty bad movie to drain the magic out of that - but Lord knows, those movies exist.

It just kind of continues to be strange and interesting to me to try to understand what other people are looking for. And this also just comes from getting older. You look at the stuff certainly that's coming out of Hollywood these days, and you go, "Did what came out of Hollywood when I was a kid make more sense, or was it just that I was in the demographic then?" But I certainly feel increasingly confused and disconnected from it.

I want the pleasures of the real exploitation movie, and exploitation has changed so much in 40 years. Plenty of people grow up with this fantasy of, "We're going to do it like Roger Corman did it," as that sounds so fun. If you make something small, goofy and exploitative, it's nowhere near the guaranteed moneymaker it might have been 40 years ago. If you look at the way the world works now and money is made, it doesn't seem that fun. Maybe that's just a mental block I have and I need to get over that and find that corner where you can make money and still have a good movie.

What will always be possible is for someone to walk into a dark room and experience a film and connect to it. And that's why I make my films - for people to go and have that experience. That's really the whole dream for me, so that hasn't gone anywhere. What has gone somewhere is making the numbers add up on each side of it. And who knows? I've had all kinds of freak-outs. I got married recently, and my wife listened to me go off the other day on this fear that maybe our culture has just moved beyond art entirely. Maybe we don't need it anymore.

Sometimes you meet someone, and they seem great, they seem exactly what you're thinking of for the role, and then you put a camera on them, and they freeze. And other people come to life with the camera on them. I haven't discovered any reliable predictor for that; I think you just have to try it and see what happens. And, you know, sometimes the people who freeze, if you find the right magic word to say to them, you can unlock them.