It's always a struggle with small films to get people in the theater. I think I have a perverse contrarian streak that's always kind of aspired to make movies that are impossible to market.

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.

I don't want to take shots at professional actors, because obviously the great ones are great. But I do think that given the kind of stories I've been telling in my films, it's hard for me to imagine how professional actors would have done better. And it's easy for me to imagine how they would have done worse. Because I think a lot of what an actor is trained to do and a lot of what an actor's instincts point toward is clarification, is always making it clear what's happening in the story, how the character fits into the scene, what the character wants.

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 suppose it's nice that I've made films that some people have heard of and respect. That's great. And it's certainly helpful in some regards, but they're really tough economic prospects. They always have been, and that's not necessarily getting any better. And not just the films, but it's also been a rough 10 years for that independent film market. And so I have stumbled onto this point in the timeline where the kind of stuff that I'm trying to do is not... it was a lot easier to know what to do with it 20 years ago.

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.