I love working with actors. I do.

In particular, people have trouble understanding where I stand in relation to my characters, and very often this gets reduced to me making vicious fun of them.

I mean, there are many other directors who are probably both more skilled and excited to adapt novels or work within certain genre conventions. I'd like to do that kind of work someday, but for better or worse I'm too drawn by my own material.

Like everything, what compels one to put pen to paper is a great question.

I love working with actors. I do.

I think, in fact, there's a plus and a minus to knowing my prior work, Happiness and so forth. The plus is of course you can see how I play with the characters, the storylines, and the way things play off each other. And the minus is that it makes you a little bit more self-conscious, that you're not able to enter the movie as it exists and lives and breathes, because you're so busy making references, connections that you're not able to release yourself from and take the film on your own terms.

There are a lot of ideas I have that I think would be very marketable and commercial, but they're not as compelling to me as the ones that are unmarketable, uncommercial, and unprofitable.