You're dealing with the body, and you're dealing with bodily functions. We romanticize everything about people in movies.

If I were doing somebody else's script or I adapted a book by Philip Roth, on set there could be a million different interpretations of the material and people could argue with me. Certainly on Synecdoche, New York we had discussions and arguments, but I felt like I had authority because I'm a writer.

Meet me in Montauk.

And also the idea of not making it apparent that it's different from the rest of the film, even though there are visual differences, the audience is supposed to think that they are with him when he wakes up in the morning.

I'm old enough, by a long shot, to remember going to the library and spending days researching. If I was looking for a line from a poem or something else I needed, that would be the trip I would have to take.

If you ever got me, you wouldn't have a clue what to do with me.

It occurred to me that every work of art is a synecdoche, there's no way around it. Every creative work that someone does can only represent an aspect of the whole of something. I can't think of an exception to that.