There are two aspects to making movies: One is the feeling of wanting to push myself into stuff that I don't know how to do. Then there's the other impulse to try and earn a living. I want to be careful about not confusing those too much - not that those things can't have a healthy overlap. Plenty of people start out making work that isn't terribly commercial, and then make work that's more commercial but still good. You just want to watch out for that thing where you tell yourself that you're doing your best work when you're not.

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.

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'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.

On one hand, I kind of feel like I have unlimited options right now, and obviously that's not technically true, but when you're at this place where you're just kind of dreaming up stuff, your imagination is your limit. That's where I'm at, which is great, but ultimately I think you have to make these decisions to close off some options to yourself. I think things only get done when you say, "This is the one thing I'm doing," and you kind of kill the other ones in the meantime. So I haven't done that yet, I've got to figure that out.

I'd love to do a really cheap action movie. I'd love to do stunts. I mean, not myself. I'd hurt myself, but I'd love to direct others doing stunts. I think that would be a blast. The funny thing is, if I really think through this fantasy, I know that the way I conceive of doing an action movie would still lose money. No matter how far I think I'm getting away from myself, it always comes back to something that's not terribly commercial.

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.