Tod Lippy: When did you first come to New York?

Wes Anderson: Well, probably four years ago I started spending about half the year here. I’d wanted to live here since I was about fifteen or so. But only in the last year did I really move here permanently. We’re working on a movie that’s set here now, so part of the thing when we put together the movie was for me to come here and set up an office. And we arranged a travel thing, also, since Owen’s living in L.A. and I’m living in New York, and we both go back and forth. But there’s a lot of research stuff I wanted to do for the movie here, too.

What kind of research?

Well, the visual idea of the movie—the setting—is that it’s a kind of imaginary New York. Conceptualizing it at this point is a little shaky, so this will sound kind of vague, but the ideas are very specific. Basically, I would say that we’re using a historical New York, and combining things from a lot of different periods. Things that I’m just interested in about New York, kind of from a New York literary world. So it’s set in the present, and it’s set in New York, but we never say New York, and the street names are all changed, and there’s a lot of anachronism—not in a way that should be very self-conscious, but in a way that creates a slightly different world.
   Which is the same thing we did with the other movies. In Rushmore, the school itself is sort of a dream version of the school it was shot at, and when Max gets kicked out, he ends up at the public school which is kind of like a prison. It’s the same thing with New York in this film—it’s kind of exaggerated—you know, there’ll be phone booths on the streets, the kind they don’t have here anymore. Things like that. Rotary phones. So I’ve been visiting lots of places.

Where have you been going?

The one thing I’ve been trying to see is a lot of the clubs that are around. I went to Racquet and Tennis, and the National Arts Club, where I think they shot a little bit of Age of Innocence. Also, I want to see the Century Club, which I haven’t been to yet. The architecture here—it’s the only place in America, except maybe for Philadelphia and Boston and a few other places, that has this kind of history behind the architecture. The places where I grew up, it doesn’t exist like that. This is more like Europe.

What other kinds of research are you doing?

I guess it kind of depends on what happens in the script. There were certain places we wanted to visit, but I don’t even know if some of the stuff is going to be in the script. We’ve gone to certain places thinking that they’re going to be part of it and then dropped them again. One thing is Forest Hills—but I don’t really want to go into it too much. The script is so unwritten at this point.

This has been a fairly long writing process—I remember reading something well over a year ago about your having begun work on the screenplay.

l know. Rushmore came out about one year ago, and there was a lot of stuff to do through to the point when the movie came out. But I’ve definitely been working on the script for a solid year. Probably more intensely in the last couple of months.

Is Owen Wilson here now?

Owen was here until a few days ago—he was here for the last month. And I’m going to go out to L.A. for a short period of writing out there.

I’ve read that you do a lot of note-taking as you’re walking around, observing things. Do you find that those notes actually lead to ideas which drive the script, or are they simply embellishment for a storyline you’ve already come up with?

The former. It comes from a collection of ideas and characters. I had a whole history for this family that we’re writing about—we had all the characters, the setting, little episodes—but we had no story for a long time. It was really a backwards way to do it. But at a certain point, I’m just going with what I feel is automatic. And writing about this subject and this group of characters is what I keep wanting to put my energy into, even though it seems like it would sure be a lot easier if we just cooked up a plot or something. But apparently we don’t work that way.

Isn’t Salinger’s Glass family an inspiration for the family in the script?

Yeah, I guess so. Really more than being an inspiration, it was an easy way to communicate to people something more or less similar to what we’re doing. I don’t know how much it resembles the Glass family, but there’s stuff like that.

They’re all genius types?

Yeah, a family of geniuses. But they’re not geniuses in the same way as the Glass family was. They’re geniuses where you would probably think some of them were not so smart.

The Glasses always seemed so sad.

Sad and superior. And Buddhist. We don’t have that.

You talked about the literary angle. Are there particular things you’re reading? I see a set of bound volumes of The New Yorker over there—

For some reason, I’m completely obsessed by The New Yorker. Ever since high school; I started reading it in the library there. So a ton of the things I’ve been reading lately are from New Yorker writers like Liebling, Wolcott Gibbs, Joseph Mitchell—people who, you know, wrote about New York, And then, also, playwrights from the same period, particularly Kaufman and Hart. I read this Moss Hart autobiography, called Act One, which is a great one. I also just started this book about this theatrical producer named Jed Harris, which is interesting. I don’t know how all this stuff is tying in.

Are you reading any plays?

Yeah, reading plays. I don’t know how all of this stuff is feeding into it, but somehow it is, I think.

Any stuff from the Algonquin Round Table?

We screened some Robert Benchley shorts. A movie like Twentieth Century kind of ties in, and that’s Ben Hecht. I don’t know, it all overlaps, anyway—Harold Ross was part of that. So it’s definitely all that period—but a long period, like forty years or something.
   It also has to do with the seventies—especially visually. I don’t know, it will all be distilled into something, hopefully.

Are you looking at other New York–based films? Everyone Says I Love You sounds sort of vaguely up the alley of what you’re doing...

Well, we’ve done some screenings over at Disney, and the stuff we’ve screened is kind of tying into it. One thing in particular was this Lubitsch movie I’d never seen before, Cluny Brown, with Jennifer Jones—I think it’s the last movie that he completed. There’s something about Lubitsch that definitely ties into all of this. And we screened Murmur of the Heart, the Louis Malle movie. There’s another one by him I want to screen over there, too, that fits into all of this, called Le feu follet. And then that ties into Fitzgerald and other things. And then we screened Hannah and Her Sisters, which I love, and which has got something to do with this movie, as well.

I always thought of that as Woody Allen’s take on the Glasses.

In a way, yeah. I have no idea how that movie makes any sense, really, because it’s got so many different little threads which connect for a while and then don’t connect for a while, and somehow it hangs together. Like, Woody Allen’s story really has nothing else to do with the rest of the movie. I mean, they tied him in: he was married to Mia Farrow, be becomes involved with Wiest at the end. In the movie, it just works, but if you start to talk about it...

When you say you’re “screening” things, does that mean Disney locates and projects the prints for you?

Well, we took a cheaper office in order to be able to screen movies. This office, a sublet, costs less so that we can do these kinds of things.

Where are you living? I remember you saying at one point that you wanted to live in Nick Nolte’s character’s loft in Life Lessons.

Right. I ultimately was unable go with a 10,000 square foot loft. I mean, he’s got a whole building in that film. Somewhere along the line I switched from wanting to be in Tribeca, or whatever’s the one that’s beyond that, to wanting to be in, like, the Dakota or something. Anyway, I’m living on the Upper East Side, which I didn’t plan to move to. But I knew a guy whose brother had moved out of a place across the street from him, and it was a great apartment for me. I guess that’s the way people get places in New York.

Do you and Owen Wilson always write together?

We try to figure things out together, and then sometimes we write scenes on our own that we show to each other. And then, sometimes, we kind of make up the scene while we’re together. We don’t necessarily put it on paper together, but we’ll “talk” the scene together. Sometimes we’ll just have this conversation. But really, it’s never with a plan.

Do you find that one of you is stronger, say, at dialogue?

It’s probably pretty meshed in together. It all kind of overlaps. It could just as eas­ily be that one of us writes a scene, gives it to the other one and he says, “Oh, that’s good.”

How many drafts do you tend to write?

Well, we don’t really work normally in drafts. We focus on a part of the movie for a period of time, reworking it. There’s a million versions of twelve pages, and then that’s kind of set aside for a while and we go with another segment. So there aren’t really finished drafts.

When do you show something to the studio? Do you have a deadline with Disney for this next script?

I don’t know what the deadline is. We’re probably pretty close to it, though, I would think. We’re not tied into a release date or anything, and I don’t think the shareholders are counting on the returns on this project. Hopefully we’ll finish it soon.

Do you write with actors, or at least specific individuals, in mind?

Quite a lot. I just like to get a cast, mentally, because it makes me feel closer to making the movie. But then there are some parts for which you have absolutely no idea. There was a kid for Max I always thought of, but he was much, much older than the character.

You said you imagined him being a very young Mick Jagger.

Yeah, that was what we really thought of. Unavailable, in this instance.

Can you talk about having Jim Brooks as a mentor during your rewrites of the Bottle Rocket script?

With Jim Brooks, we went through what seemed at the time to be a year of work, which in fact when I look back on it was only three or four months. But three or four months of really intense scrutiny, which we weren’t prepared for, and which forced us to learn how to make a screenplay. We were really overconfident about the material—we were set in our ways after having written one screenplay. Sometimes I really don’t understand how Jim saw that we could make a movie out of it. The first thing he heard was a five-hour reading. For a caper-comedy, That’s something that probably shouldn’t be so epic.
   But he was a combination of patient and properly aggressive to get us to figure stuff out. Especially with me. And now, when we’re writing, that’s what we think of, this stuff we learned from Jim. He’ll often say, “Well, the way I learned it was like this”—I mean, he probably invented the way he says he learned it—but that’s kind of the thing we do now, we often think of the kind of “rules” that we learned from Jim. How to make the story work, and what you need to do as far as the audience is concerned.

Do you think of an audience when you write?

Well, maybe not so much. But at a certain point, you think of communicating. You know, making something clear, and engaging somebody about certain things. Our whole approach to that stuff came from working with Jim.

Do you still go to him for advice, send him pages, that kind of thing?

Well, with Rushmore, once we had our script he was the first person we showed it to, and then he gave us some notes. We actually added a scene based on our conversation with him.

Which scene?

Well, it’s a scene where Max has a big confrontation with Miss Cross. It came out of something he felt we needed. And then he was the first person I showed the fin­ished movie to. He told me to work on pace, which I did. I took out several minutes. As long as he’s available to us, he’s our best first audience. I mean, you can show it to a friend who’s kind of tuned in to everything you’re doing in the movie, and they may or may not know how to critique it —it’s hard to be the first person watching something. Jim knows how to be the first person watching something, because he’s looked at so many things in progress. His experience with that is broad, because of all that he’s produced, as well as directed and written.

I noticed when I was reading the Rushmore script recently that there were a few scenes there that didn’t end up in the film. It was mostly expository stuff­—

Yeah. What did we cut? The scene with Miss Cross and Mrs. Guggenheim?

Yeah, exactly, where they discuss how each of them finds Max intriguing, and we get some backstory about Miss Cross’s late husband.

That scene we cut on the day we were going to shoot it. I was never sure whether we needed it or not, and assumed we’d probably end up cutting it. The day we were shooting it I basically got obsessed with a certain part of a shot—which I ended up not even using in the movie—so I dropped the scene.

One of the great strengths of the movie is that you don’t need a lot of explanation; you’re compelled from very early on just to accept its logic.

Whatever explanation you give is probably not going to be sufficient, really. So you’ve got to just get on with it. But I think most of the other stuff we cut was pretty minor. There’s one little thing of Bill Murray talking to his wife on the telephone and one thing of Max taking his books out of a locker after he’s been kicked out. He’s throwing them in the trash when Bill Murray appears. Those were the only other scenes we cut, and two of them were non-dialogue scenes. That locker scene we cut because it made for a more dramatic transition from his getting screamed at by the headmaster to a curtain that says, “October,” and he’s suddenly in the public school.
   Other than that stuff, it’s mostly just bits of dialogue that are pulled, basically to make it faster.

There’s some significant dialogue cut from the kite-flying scene—

“The child’s become the father of the man.” Right, that’s gone. Couldn’t get it right, in a way. I’m not sure I knew how he needed to say it, and it somehow had to be exactly perfect. Also, it’s a long scene, and a lot of that stuff you’ve just got to get through so you can save the scene. But with Bottle Rocket there was tons of material that we cut.

If the first draft engendered a five-hour reading, I’m almost afraid to ask how long your first assembly was.

Not long. The first cut was probably an hour and forty-five minutes. Maybe 100 minutes. The movie that we released was just under ninety. But we also added a whole new opening scene, so the actual thing we had was probably cut down to eighty-five minutes or something. The script was not a long script. On the set of that movie, I was sort of thinking of myself as a Cassavetes-style director. So even though we had our scenes and stuff, I would never let the scenes stop. We would always add more stuff and extend it at the end.

All improvised?

Some of it. Also, the thing is, we rehearsed that movie for two years. So when we rehearsed it we would work out lots of business and things that became part of the scenes. Also, it had lots of scenes that were pretty repetitive—I mean, every possible variation on a certain scene was done, because there aren’t that many events happening but there’s lots of stuff among the characters. Also, the struc­ture of the movie is kind of peculiar—it reaches a certain point and then goes into something completely different, and then reaches another point and goes somewhere else. So it was looser, I guess.

How much rehearsal did you do for Rushmore?

Well, I rehearsed with Jason Schwartzman, because I had him. But not a ton with other people. Seymour Cassel came to visit us, and we spent a couple of days rehearsing with him, and Brian Cox came to visit and we did a couple of days with him. We had little sessions with different people, very informal. Then we would sometimes rehearse at our hotel, things like that.
   I feel, though, that you don’t need a lot of rehearsal for some of the stuff. When you’re doing a play, you want to rehearse a lot because you need to get it set, and then duplicate that over and over. With a movie, you work on it a little bit, then all you have to do is get it right once, and then that’s it. Also, with a movie, when you’re close on someone’s face, you’re obviously looking to capture a different kind of moment from what you get on stage. A kind of documentary accident, whatever it is.

Do you figure out your shot lists well in advance of shooting?

With Bottle Rocket, some stuff was worked out way in advance, like the robbery where they’re in their yellow jumpsuits, or the one where they rob the bookstore—certain scenes where there was this strong idea, visually, with lots of staging and all that stuff. And I always felt like those were the scenes which worked the best; the stuff I didn’t really have a great plan for was where I felt like I didn’t do as well as I could have. So with Rushmore, I just tried to make sure, if I didn’t have an idea that I’d spontaneously gotten for a scene, to spend time and figure out some approach to the scene where the staging and the shots were going to add something to it, and help the actors to play it and put some extra spark into it.

I would think that would be particularly important when you’re shooting in widescreen.

Yeah. We wanted to do Bottle Rocket in widescreen, too. It’s great just for photo­graphing actors, I think, because you can have three guys in the frame in close-up and you don’t have to cut between them to see the moments that happen on each person’s face. You’re there for it, and the other guy’s there, too. I really prefer that.

Do you do a lot of takes?

I guess I would have to say yes. The thing is, thirty takes of a master with moves and several pages of dialogue is a lot; that’s a big deal, and the better part of a day, and I’ve done that, and I don’t enjoy it. I feel that if you’ve done a certain number and it’s not happening, then it’s probably not going to happen.
   But, sometimes fifteen or something is good, and it’s what it takes. Maybe twelve; somewhere in there. The best is where you do four or five takes, and you have a range of choices from that. It’s different if it’s a scene where cutting is pos­sible, like the scene where Bill Murray has gone to see Miss Cross and he’s stand­ing on her step. It’s a shot of him and then a shot of her, going back and forth. A scene like that, I feel like I want to have quite a bit of stuff, because we’ll use stuff from eight different takes since they’ll be different moments, especially with someone like Bill Murray—you never know what he’s going to surprise you with, If you’re going to take the time in the editing room, and study the material look­ing for little moments, you know, then you want to have a variety.
   But on the other hand, a lot of stuff in the movie are scenes which are going to play in the master, in which case you do the twelve or fourteen takes and get it perfect, because once you’ve got it, that’s it. I know I got very obsessed with time—the script supervisor would give me little readings on it. I wanted to get all the lines, all the material in there, because I knew when we were cutting I was going to be very aggressive about it, and if it wasn’t happening at the right pace, we’d have to cut off that whole part of the scene and possibly lose something that might have been good in the movie.

You didn’t go to film school, did you?

I almost went to film school, but I didn’t. It would have set me back two years, I think, if l’d gone. But I think I would’ve liked it, too. Probably quite a bit.

Your use of the frame really rewards careful viewers—like the scene in Rushmore where Max orders the dynamite, and in the foreground you see the wooden box with just “DY-” written on it.

Well, it’s really just getting the right tone for it. Or the right little flavor. With that, I just didn’t want to read the whole word “dynamite”—I thought it was too much of a cartoon. This way, it’s something that you kind of pick upon the edge. I mean, it’s right there, but at least it’s obscured. By the way, that’s my editor, the guy who’s selling him dynamite.
   You know, there’s a kind of simplicity to the shots in a way. It will sound ridiculous, but with this movie, I tried harder. I’ve said this to people before, and they tell me it sounds crazy. But with Bottle Rocket, you know, you’re in the mid­dle of the shoot, you get really tired, and you’ve really got to finish some stuff, and the movie suffers for it. Not often, but a few things. With Rushmore, I never permitted myself to do that. There’s one chance for everything.
   Also, I draw the shots. A thing like that, we’ve kind of constructed a setting—you know, half the shot is inside, half of it outside, and here’s where the box of dynamite goes. And if you know what you want, then everything can be built for it. This might sound like overkill as a description of a shot of a kid buying a box of dynamite, but maybe it says something about the whole approach of the movie. How “undocumentary” it is in some ways.

You also show a lot of restraint, particularly where it involves the withholding of information until the last possible—and most rewarding—moment. Like the scene in the library, where we start with a shot of Miss Cross reading, and Max’s hand suddenly comes into frame with the lemonade.

I like that thing of withholding something in a narrative way, which is kind of almost a theatrical device, when you reveal something after the fact through dia­logue. Like in Bottle Rocket, the way you learn that he actually robbed his own house is over the course of several scenes. You sort of puzzle out what’s happening, and then you understand. And I’m not sure you fully understand the movie until that point, especially in the short that we made. At that point you realize that these guys are not serious criminals.

Withholding is good, then.

Withholding is good. Isn’t that a Hemingway thing? Or is it omitting? “As long as you know what you’re omitting.”

As far as directing actors, do you prefer to give direction privately to each person?

I usually just talk to one person at a time. I mean, there’s some stuff, when you stage it and everything, you’re all together. But when it comes to adjusting things, the thing I’m more comfortable with is having it be very private. I don’t even really like to have people around when we’re rehearsing; I don’t like to have any­body watch us as we figure it out; I prefer to wait until it’s all done, and we can show them, like, a rehearsed scene from a play. But that’s not really the way people are accustomed to being on a movie set. I don’t know if crews love it; I think they like to be there for that stuff. Maybe that’s something that will change over time; maybe I won’t feel so protective or uptight about that stuff after doing a couple of movies.
   But I think most actors prefer it. Although some don’t care. Like Bill Murray; he has fun with the crew. But at the same time, when you’re figuring it out, I think he’d just as soon it was quiet.

You got a wonderfully restrained, nuanced performance from him—something you don’t always see in other films of his. Did that involve any wrangling on your part?

No, it wasn’t wrangling. I think a lot of the movies he does, he knows that’s what he’s there for; that’s what they’re paying him to do. With this, he just believed in the script, and believed in what we were doing, and there wasn’t really a struggle to find what kind of performance he was going to do, because he knew what kind of performance it ought to be.

I’m struck by the agelessness of your characters—the sense of “equality” between the older and younger characters in your films. For instance, Grace in Bottle Rocket, who, while sitting in her school’s playground, gives very adult advice, in very adult language, to her older brother. And then obviously the relationship between Max and Blume, and even Max and Dirk, in Rushmore.

The Grace thing is probably not so hard to spot as being a little bit of a Phoebe Caulfield thing. In that case, the borrowing probably verges on stealing. But I don’t really know where that theme comes from. I don’t know why we do that. For some reason, it seems to appeal to us. Like with Max and Blume—them being equal, and Max being slightly the dominant one in some ways—was one of the ideas behind that whole relationship in the movie.

You really puncture that bubble for a moment in Rushmore, though, when Miss Cross, out of exasperation with Max, finally “pulls rank” on him with her line about him “never having fucked before.”

Right.

Rushmore is a “high-school movie” in the same way Election was a high-school movie—in other words, not really for the broad population of high-schoolers.

Right. Both of those movies might fall into the category where they can’t find a “demographic” for the movie: it doesn’t exist, because it’s a personality type rather than an age group or anything else. There’s no way for the marketing people to break it down, except that if they go to a certain bookstore, or comic-book place or something, they might find a bunch of people who would respond to it. So I don’t know. There are high-school kids who do get into that stuff, but it’s a little sliver of the high school. So I guess it makes a problem for whoever’s going to release the movie, because they’ve got to find the audience. There’s not something preset.
   But, you know, with the Coen Brothers, they can say, “Well, we’ll just sell it to the people who like the Coen Brothers,” because it’s kind of like a brand name at this point. If we can ever get to that, we’ll be in pretty good shape. But then the Coen Brothers are not going to make a 100-million-dollar movie. But we’ve never even broken twenty.

Do you get impatient with people who don’t “get it?”

No, no, no. I don’t feel surprised. Sometimes when we’re writing the thing I think, “God, what are people going to make of this.” The only thing that bugs me is when people think something is really stupid, or not funny—because there’s no way to defend it. I remember this review of Bottle Rocket, where the writer said, “In the movie, their getaway driver is named Bob Mapplethorpe. Ha. Ha.” I mean, what are you gonna say to that? “We thought it was kinda funny…” I certainly couldn’t explain what was funny about it—probably nothing.

Of the two films you’ve made, do you think one is better than the other?

I don’t really know. I feel like Rushmore is more “finished” for me. It’s more carefully made, and the filmmaking—whatever that is—is maybe better. But, you know, I don’t want to sell the other one short. There’s definitely parts of that where I feel like I wouldn’t have done it any differently from the way I did it—most of the movie I feel that way about. There’s just stuff that, if we’d made a movie before, we would have solved certain problems before we were shooting. In Rushmore, we had a movie that could work from what we shot; we didn’t have to go reshoot things, or rewrite things after we wrote them. Or spend a year in the cutting room. I think we cut Rushmore in two months or so. Also, some of the visual ideas of Rushmore are more complicated, maybe a little more ambitious. You know, he’s putting on these plays, and certain things like that. Rushmore is personal to me in a way, from stuff growing up, but Bottle Rocket is personal because it’s about the stuff that we were doing right then, six months before we were shooting the movie. And it ties a lot into my whole friendship with Owen; that has a lot to do with what went into the movie, and making the movie.
   Also, getting further away from having just finished Rushmore, it’s not like there’s one I’m still “with.” l’m with something else now.

When Rushmore was released, were you surprised at the critical response?

I think so. I don’t know, was it that great? It was pretty good, I guess. I still don’t really know what it’s like to have a movie that’s a big hit. That’s probably a lot better.

Sometimes, though, if it’s a popular success, it seems that less attention is paid to the filmmaker, and more to the stars.

Maybe so.

When the critics like it, they tend to focus more on the “auteur.”

I’m being a little glib about it, anyway. Compared to what happened with Bottle Rocket, we were ecstatic about the way the movie was received. Bottle Rocket got good reviews, but everything was low-key. Everything was quiet. Nobody had heard of the movie, because Columbia never got into it. To this day, they don’t consult with me about anything to do with the movie; I don’t think they’re even aware of it. I really want to do a Criterion Collection version of it, because there’s tons of material that’s related to it that might be of some interest. I guess the DVD of it is fine. Also, I really don’t like the art that went with any of the releases of the movie.

Do you read reviews?

I read everything. I wrote this thing about screening Rushmore for Pauline Kael that was in the New York Times—

I was going to ask you about that.

What happened was, I went to visit her, I really liked her, and thought she was a real character. I respected her very much, and, you know, I sent her the piece that I wrote before it was published, and she made a couple of changes to it. And then, after the piece was published, I got attacked by some people.

David Edelstein wrote a letter to the Times saying you were “making sport of her infirmities.”

Which I feel is idiotic. I mean, the piece begins with her forgetting who Bill Murray is—not a terrible crime—but then I explain in the piece that she’s on medication which can cause a memory lapse. But the story I was trying to tell was what my experience was in approaching her, which was funny, because I was convinced that telling her Bill Murray was in it was the one piece of information that was going to get her into it. And then she had no idea who he was. I mean, it’s well known that she has Parkinson’s; I wasn’t the one who “broke the story” on that. And also, she’s a character; she’s not someone who’s this sweet, gentle old lady. She’s someone who’s very tough, quite prickly. I don’t feel it’s wrong to write about her in a way that shows some of the edges, because otherwise, what’s the point of writing about it? As far as Edelstein and David Denby’s reaction to the piece, I don’t know. I mean, she suggested I show the movie to Edelstein, whom I’d never heard of. The next thing, he’s attacking me.
   What were your thoughts about the piece?

Well, I’ll tell you, I came across Edelstein’s response first, which frankly biased me against it. But when I finally read the piece, I thought it was very funny, and that you’d covered your bases, as it were. You must have gotten your fill of the media when you were doing press for Rushmore.

Oh, God, yeah.

As I read through some of the articles, I noticed that you’d answer the same question differently: For instance, to the old saw about whether or not the character of Max was autobiographical, you answered in the San Francisco Chronicle that “Max is like me, except that he’s not shy,” but in Newsday, a month or so later, you said, “He’s not me.” Was this a case of having a little fun with the whole process?

No, not having fun. I’m sure I was contradicting myself, but I didn’t ever want to make it too much of an autobiographical thing. I mean, there’s some stuff that’s obviously going to be, but it’s really a made-up character, something Owen and I invented. And then, I guess, depending on my mood, I either tried to qualify it or to distance myself from it in different ways. But you know, Schwartzman and I went on this bus—we went all over the country for a promotional tour on this insane bus. We just went crazy. It’s like, my whole focus became how to make sure we were in the best possible hotel as quickly as possible. How many of the interviews can we not do, or get through, before we can go to the hotel? It was just insane.

How did the whole bus tour thing come about?

I don’t like to fly, so we ended up on the bus, which, in itself, was good; they got us this great one. It’s just that it was incredibly boring out there. But once we got to DC, we switched to good hotels from then on, and it was OK, basically.

Do you feel like part of a filmmaking community here in New York?

I didn’t know any movie directors or anything until quite recently. Now there are several people in New York—Peter Bogdanovich, Noah Baumbach, who’s a really great guy. This director James Gray, who did Little Odessa, comes here a lot. And I’ve met other people, like David Russell and Vincent Gallo. So yeah, in a way, kind of, I guess.

Are you out a lot? Premieres and that sort of thing?

No, but I have these screenings, and a lot of those guys come to those. I don’t like to go to premieres; it’s a weird way to watch a movie. Big crowds and things. Sometimes it’s fun, but it’s not really the greatest to me.

Are you going to shoot the next movie here?

I would like to. The only creative reason—meaning not having to do with the money—not to would be if we decided to build a lot of the movie, which is a possibility. One idea I have that could be a way to go with it is that it’s snowing throughout the entire movie, in which case it would probably be best to just build it. Most of the snowing would be outside windows and stuff, but still, it probably has to be built. To snow for the entire movie is a tall order, a big hassle.

You once said, “It really doesn’t matter where you make your movies, it’s who you know in Los Angeles.”

I said that? lt sounds like a Speed-the-Plow line or something. Not a memorable one, though. I don’t know exactly what I meant by that—I mean, I know what I meant by “who you know in Los Angeles.” But that’s just about getting money for movies.

Are you planning on staying here?

Yeah, this is the city where I want to live, so I don’t have any plans to leave. I’ve got to go to L.A. sometimes because Owen prefers to be there—he comes here to write with me, and I’ve gotta go there to write with him—but this is where I like to live. I’ve got all my stuff here.