Can you talk about how you put all these ideas into the script? Do you let your actors venture off script a bit?
When I work with the actors, I feel like it rather depends on the actors and the scene being shot but I am open with a scene becoming what it is meant to become. What I am excited about when I’m writing or when I film is to surprise myself, I suppose, as much as my collaborators or audiences. I want to feel very alive when I make it so I am very open to changing things up. When you work with somebody like Aubrey Plaza, it would be a bit boring not make it evolve. It is very specific on-page and it is about taking the intentions on the script and making it into a somewhat more concentrating version of that. I do try many things on set but I feel like my brain kicks in when I am in that world when I work on a tightrope and have no clue if I am going to fall off it. [laughs]
It is never easy having this kind of creative freedom and finding financing. Your films are risky endeavors for studios but thank God, they are still being made.
I do not think it was too hard to finance. I am always surprised when I see some films with well-known actors that have small budgets and vice versa, big budget films with actors I have never heard of. I do not understand what is an attractive proposition to an audience or a financier. All I know is that what I find exciting to see in a theater is very different from what many people find exciting and want to go to see. I do not go to see Marvel films, for example, but I do go to see slow Turkish films about lonely middle-aged men. I think this is a very accessible comedy and a very romantic comedy, but I don’t know how anybody else would perceive it. I don’t know why anybody would not enjoy it. I do not see it.
Do you find these Marvel films will age well?
I think that anything that feels very tied to our times will probably not age quite so well. If you make a film about the launch of a specific mobile phone, then that will not date very well. But if you make a film about emotional relationships and people happen to use that phone when they talk to each other, then maybe that will age better. I suppose that is why I also quite enjoy making films that are not of this world and that just feel like they exist in their own orbit. I do love filmmakers that create their own specific universe and if that is somebody like David Lynch or Jim Jarmusch or Aki Kaurismaki then I always enjoy those.
Has that been your mantra, making films that nobody else could make?
Or rather just to make what I want to make and it is in my DNA because of my upbringing and how my family was in letting us express ourselves. To express myself in ways that only I and nobody else can. If anybody is doing it then I do not need to say it.
I heard you have been working on the small screen as well. How was the creative freedom on TV?
I am finishing a TV show for Adult Swim and I got two film projects that I kinda sort of packing, if you would say, so I would like to get that going by next year. They have been very loose in the reigns. A lot of freedom to make something peculiar.
Adult Swim seems to be a good fit for your idiosyncrasies and stylistic choices.
It definitely fits a part of my personality. Making films is like getting things out of your system and I got something out of my system with my last two feature films, but Adult Swim is another thing and of course, they are all ‘of me’ so there is some kind of linking between them but I just want to keep exploring different avenues.