Miguel Arteta

Well I feel really lucky to have been able to work with Mike. The characters are lovingly misguided. He finds humor, compassion and their flaws. He has fun with the characters without making fun of them. The material always feels daring. There is always an incredibly cool observation and it's an entertaining ride. He can get some stuff that is pretty deep without getting pretentious. It's really a director's dream. The Good Girl is comic ode to depression. That's a very hard topic to discuss without being too dark. It's a great line he walks. I really relate to the characters.

No, I actually wanted to do The Good Girl before Chuck & Buck but Mike [White] was going to direct it. But after Chuck & Buck was such a satisfying experience, he let me do this. It made it scary because I wanted Mike to be happy. But I don't think about films in terms of Latino, gay or any kind of label. When we made Chuck & Buck, all the money people who read it said it was career suicide and not to do it. They said it was incredible writing but can you write me something like it that's not so daring [laughs]. I've been in love with The Good Girl for five years.

I've never encountered any blatant racism. But I've definitely come into people saying things like, you're a Latino filmmaker, so there's two kinds movies you can make. A one dimensional gang-banger movie or the movie that convinces everybody that Latinos are an angelic community. The truth is that there are a million different Latin communities and the best that I can do is try to do things from my perspective.

It was awesome. She works really hard and then would share those things with me. She came really prepared. Usually in working with roles like this an actor would reveal too much of their process but she would try hard and then hope what she did was good. It all was.

I think there was, on her and especially on me. Because this is a bigger movie for me and there was personal pressure that we wanted to come through for each other. What was really cool was that she was doing this for the right reason. I'm sure she could have done any number of independent movies for the last three years. She waited until there was a role and a script that she believed in. For this she did and I hope it shows.

Paul and I wrote plays together in college. His stuff is really great. Very character driven and hilarious. I'm really proud of About a Boy. It got me. I thought it was funny and I thought Hugh Grant was terrific. Any story that has to do with a lack of father or searching for the father figure always gets me.

Well, she was a little surprised. The movie has a father prostituting his own son and all this sex. It was a little ironic because they had been rooting for me all these years never knowing what I am doing. Then I tell them it got bought at Sundance Film Festival and it was having it's premiere at the Grauman's Chinese Theater. Then they see my movie and its about the family from hell. She was a little shocked but she says that she's glad she went through that because nothing she ever sees me do again will shock her. She has yet to see Chuck & Buck [laughs].

Well I met Tim at the Seattle Film Festival. While we were both at the festival we had to cast, write, direct and edit a short film. It was such a low budget movie that the schedule wasn't so great for the actors. His first scene was the one where the dog pulls the sheet away and he's naked. It was like welcome, I hope the dog doesn't bite your ass. He's a great actor.

Him and John C. Reilly had spent eight months together in some sort of barracks in Australia working on The Thin Red Line [released in 1998, directed by Terrence Malick]. They have grown to be really good buddies. They have a great rapport together and are hysterical. I knew they were in the same movie but I didn't know they had such a good rapport together.

I'm directing a couple of episodes of Six Feet Under and I would like to do more. I'm developing a movie about money laundering called Columbian Gold. It's about a woman who comes to United States and wants to assimilate but she gets caught up and has to become an informant to the government.

by Daniel Robert Epstein