But for me, it feels like a natural extension of what I've been doing: exploring relationships. Here you have two relationships and we can explore how difficult it is for people to be together.

People have perhaps gotten to the point where for the most part movies are a just bit of escape.

First I would probably place men at the bottom of the food chain. On a grander scale, I would say they're reacting to change. Feminism has got to be part of that.

Just in the past few years - since I've been making movies, which isn't a very long time - you now have a culture that is fascinated and informed about the box office in a way that sometimes filmmakers weren't even.

I was always looking for the most dramatic emphasis. One example would be the letter writing, or the reading of the letters. If you remember from the book, they find the letters and then in the most undramatic way they take them downstairs, they get approval, they sit at a table during the day with their own author, across from each other.

But even with a character like Cary who is relatively outlandish, at the end of the movie he's in a place where I wouldn't have expected him to be - taking on the responsibility of a woman who is pregnant and who used to be his best friend's wife.

Without In The Company of Men, I could still be teaching, so who knows if this would've existed.