My DP was Teo Maniaci. He'd done Clean, Shaven (1995), Claire Dolan (1998), a bunch of others, a good NY indie, we worked very well together. He had a smooth, crisp quality about his work. We talked a lot about colours. The production designer Dana Goldman and I talked a lot about the rooms. Everyone thought I was insane, but I saw this hotel as a biosphere. I wanted to get this elemental, archetypal, kind of sense that this was this weird industrial Eden. I wanted to do a hotel room where you want to reference the standard look of everything but not make it a winking kitsch, campy thing like "look how ugly the hotel rooms are"--or to make it unreal. I wanted it to be real but also menacing and creepy at the same time.

Each room had if you look carefully very subtle themes: the green forest room, the desert room, we go to a pool with a lots of water. And we played with sounds like taking sounds that are outside the building including bird sounds and took it inside the atrium, I had a really great sound designer at C5, the guys who used to do the Coen Brothers and Scorsese films and they worked on Business mainly because they liked the film, I think. It's really a great sound design--it was really fun to play with those elements.

You have a really striking final scene in which a plane takes off behind Ms. Stiles--how did you set up this scene, or was it serendipitous?
It was certainly an accident when we got that plane. I knew the runway was in the back and that's why I set that shot up--but they were only taxiing when I saw it and then for some reason in the middle of another shot I saw a plane start to lift and I screamed "C'mon everybody!" Right in the middle of Stockard's shot I lifted the crew, lifted the camera, threw Julia there, and did a couple of takeoff shots.

You've mentioned that your short film's reception sort of established your reputation as an actor's director, yet during the course of our conversation, you've been extremely detailed and excited about the visual aspects of cinema. What would you consider yourself to be: an actor's director, or a visual stylist? Or do you think the two can coexist?
I feel really conflicted about that. It's funny because I think so visually. Even in my writing, I could not have written it without thinking of it in a visual environment. I don't see a difference between them, to answer your question, actors are just as important to me as visuals I would guess. I care about their involvement and soul that we really know the Julie character, and the Paula character.

For all of that, though, I would like to do something more visually intensive for my next project. I felt like Business didn't really show any visual chops on my part. I say that, though (and now I'm going back again)--I say that and I'll get down to writing it and something has to resonate and the films that resonate with me always have strong characters. I definitely view with suspicion things that are purely aesthetic exercises because I find them very easy to do and very mechanical--but I definitely have a very real humanistic concern. I'm laughing because the film played at in France, and this French critic, he didn't say much to me, but he did say [affecting a French accent], "You are a subversive humanist." It really made me think about my film and the role of an indie filmmaker.

It's what Manny Farber described as "termite cinema"--the idea that it bores under the society and shows things as they are. I think that's really the job of indie film, that it's important not to show the audience what they could get at the Cineplex at a lower budget. I feel that it's not my job to please everybody and I wear the fact with pride that some people get offended by the film. Independent film should show us something that we don't usually see. I get furious at indies that do banal romantic comedies.

I don't know that I can do a Hollywood film yet, I feel really committed to exploring that termite cinema.

Are there Hollywood films that impress you, though, that you feel aspire to that "termite" esthete?
Yeah. I think Steven Soderbergh--if you look at Traffic, I certainly respect that in a formal way and I think he does try to subvert convention, he definitely tries to. Listen, I love Hollywood history--it's such an easy knee-jerk thing to bash the studios. Granted, they're probably gonna do American Pie 5 and we're gonna have to sit through that shit, but there are films that try. Look at Malick and The Thin Red Line, I mean they even get it right sometimes.

Badlands was a primary instigator in my wanting to study film and talk about them in a public forum.
Malick is just this fucking poet. I refused to see Pearl Harbor, but I wanted to see what Bay did with the bombing sequence so I actually timed at the multiplex that I would see another film and then sneak into Pearl Harbor. Unfortunately I had to endure thirty minutes of insipidness before it started but just looking at that bombing sequence, it was amazing to see someone who had literally hundreds of millions of dollars to create that and do it somewhat faithfully and, at the same time, capture not even a quarter of what Malick did in Thin Red Line or Coppola in Apocalypse Now in terms of disorientation and the horror of war.

It ended up being this bland epic, this glamorized, exploitive, spectacle in the worse way.

Malick really is our Faulkner.

What has the reception to Business generally been?
I brought the film into Sundance not completely finished--there were a lot of music issues that needed to be resolved and there were a lot of music cues I didn't like and I was pretty nervous about showing it, but since then it's been really great. Toronto was just an amazing reception, it's been good and a lot of people are talking about Stockard possibly getting an Oscar nomination. IFC changed the release to December because they want to get it closer to Oscar season. Everyone's talking about Stockard's performance and I'm biased, but SC should get it!

What were your goals with this film, and do you feel like you got to where you wanted to go?
There are different models on how to become a feature director and one is that you become an assistant director in Hollywood and you go through all the different departments. The problem with that model is that you don't necessarily prove yourself as a writer and I really wanted to be a good writer. Someone, I can't remember who it was, had the idea that you do a good short and prove that you can direct and have a good screenplay and get the job that way.

For Business, it was the ambiguous psychological darkness that I really liked--it's very important to end with that scene you mention with Julia in the airport and the plane taking off. I felt like I really wanted that scene to mirror this idea that she had this understanding of herself that she couldn't articulate--well, it's not exactly that she couldn't, but that's not what we do when we have a profound understanding. You know, we can know ourselves a little deeper in a moment, and then we move on.

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