We Are All Living in the ‘Southland Tales’ Future Now

It must separate a person a little bit from the normal experience of being human.

Absolutely. At the same time, I have met some billionaires. Believe it or not, I have met a few and befriended them. And there are some that are absolutely human, and it’s just an issue of how they compose themselves and what is their worldview. What are they trying to achieve with this money? It’s a really fascinating thing, to think about the responsibilities that come along with that much wealth.

Another recent, highly political, extremely current movie that was also a flop at the box office, was Eddington. Did you see that?

I loved Eddington. I’m friends with Ari Aster, and I love what he’s doing, the bold risks he’s taking, and I hope he continues down that path, I really do.

Eddington ends in a much more cynical fashion than Southland Tales. Yet the cynicism still seems to me to reflect a genuine emotion. And certainly, when Ari has talked about the movie, he’s talked about it coming from an emotional place. Looking back, it feels like your emotional response to the times was central to the movie. Is emotion what drives you to a project?

Yeah, and that’s part of the reason why I’ve been so reluctant to make another movie after all these years, because I want it to be operating on every cylinder. I want every emotional cylinder to be pumping. I want to make sure that there is a very strong emotional connection that I have to the material, and that I’m doing it for those reasons first and foremost, above all else. I was so blessed with my first movie. I’ve never had enough resources to work with, visual effects-wise. I almost got there on the third movie. But I was definitely very blessed on my first movie, and so I’m sort of operating on that threshold, or that ceiling. For the next movie that I do, I want to make sure I have all of the resources, but also the emotional stakes that I had with the first film.

When you’re sitting down to write and you have an idea, is emotion leading the writing process, or is it a bit more technical?

There’s definitely a conceptual element that always starts any story. But there has to be something that delivers the emotion that seals the deal, so to speak. With Southland Tales, it was figuring out the Taverner twins. That was the final emotional brushstroke that I needed so it wasn’t just me being too cynical. Because in the original script, it was just, the Hindenburg explodes over downtown LA and it’s just ridiculous. With my third film, there was an enormous amount of emotion packed with my parents. So yeah, it’s always there.

What about politics? This is your most directly political movie, but politics is there in Donnie Darko, and it’s certainly there in The Box. I don’t know what you’ve been working on, of course, but are you still interested in reflecting back what you’re seeing politically or socially?

Yeah. Any new script I’ve been working on, it’s either taking place—this sounds ridiculous—but it’s either in the past or the future? Even the present day contemporary stuff I’m doing is either set a little bit back or a little bit forward. I’m either trying to anchor something in a very specific time and place in the past, whether it’s 1988 or 1976, or I’m trying to lean a few years ahead and speculate a little bit. And when you speculate into the future a little bit, you can start taking some wilder swings with the world building.