Could I have picked up on the history of their friendship?

At that point, the "air traffic" becomes very dense -- there's so much going on, so much information. The character of the super-brat director is about to make her entrance. I felt when I did the mix that she's a new important character, and we can't underplay her arrival. Certain sacrifices had to be made to other characters at that point. And that's always going to be the way. I like the fact that you have to go, "What's happening there?" I like that you have an approximation of information overload, but you're always being led, in I hope a subtle and sophisticated manner, down a specific garden path. At the same time your interest is being piqued by so much other information that you always have the sense that you're missing something somewhere else -- the idea being that the mix is rich enough so you're not simply confused.

Quentin Tarantino came to the opening night and said, "I really wanted to stay in the limo, with Jeanne Tripplehorn, when she was in the middle of a speech. We went into a pitch meeting, but I've been in pitch meetings so many times, I'm bored with those; I wanted to know what was going on in the limo." Everyone's going to have their own idea of where they want to be. And the answer to that is, if you buy the DVD, there is an interactive version where you can listen to any one of the four movies in isolation.

You shot with one camera yourself; were you in communication with the three others in any way? If not, where did the directing kick in?

About three hours after we wrapped each day, when we played back the entire film on four monitors together, as you see it now. I would do a live mix, like I'm doing tonight, of the four camera mikes; I would also add music, so it would feel like a movie, and I would show it to all the actors, all the technicians, everybody. We'd climb into this viewing room and watch the entire movie with no break. Then afterwards, we would sit down to coffee and start analyzing what we had just done. I would then become the director and say, "Hey, this worked fantastically; this was too rich, Salma; you're talking at the same time as Saffron and Stellan, at a minute-43 seconds, so you should pull back and do yours five minutes later. Just tread water for another four minutes and start dialogue there. Make a note on your charts."

I started to stretch things out, like notes in music, so it was more like a string quartet. There was texture and it was interesting all the time, and you didn't just have these logjams of information. And then just talk about their acting, which is great, because you're looking at a monitor. You can actually say, "Look, there, wouldn't it be better if you did that, but also if your camera guy went into a close-up of that point." I could say, "Wouldn't it be gorgeous, visually, if at one minute-26 [seconds] all four cameras were in a wide shot and then over the next minute went very slowly into a close-up on eyes; three of us did it, in fact, so that you have three very extreme close-ups of eyes. Having the luxury of being able to watch it and talk about it as a whole.

Was it exhausting for the actors?

The poor dears! I think they were put on earth for this moment, to do what theater actors have been doing for centuries. Get into a performance, like musicians, and stay on for a whole set. I found them to be so invigorated, energized and delighted by the process, that when we were shooting twice a day, they said, "Why don't you shoot it three times?" -- because they were all getting into their stride. I shot for two weeks -- 10 days, shot [the] movie 15 times; twice a day for four days, eight done in four days; then once a day, or two days off entirely to take a break from the technique of filming.

Almost two-thirds of the way through, I got nervous that the structure wasn't working. It was interesting, funny, but it wasn't working as a film. So I stayed up all night and completely re-drew what I called the score of the script. The complicated thing was that if you made a dynamic change in one of the characters, by the nature of it being tied to four cameras, you then had to change everything. There was a domino effect. Up to a point, you can patch; but then it's blank paper, start again.

The character of the super-brat director, who wants to do a digital movie like this one and comes up with these clotted, dialectical justifications for it, was hilarious. Was she intended as a comic release for those who are suspicious of your own movie?

A lot of people have said over the years, "Why don't you do more comedy -- you're a funny guy." One time I really wanted to do a movie at a studio, a very good script, and I got turned down because the head of the studio said "Mike Figgis has no sense of humor." On this one it came through -- I think because of the nature of improvising, and keeping the humor going as an energy thing. Most situations potentially are funny.

This girl is also the enfant terrible of characters: the child prodigy. I remember there's a story about André Previn conducting a piece of Beethoven at the Hollywood Bowl when he was 11 or something, and as a joke one of the musicians said, "Why don't we all transpose everything down a semitone." And at a certain point not long into the piece, Previn stopped the orchestra and said, "Gentlemen, I believe we need to tune up."

I love the idea -- dramatically, and visually too -- of a very young face going up against Skarsgerd's weary authority. Their exchange is my favorite part of the film: It is funny, she is pretentious, but within the pretension I agree with everything she says; it's just that she says it in such a pretentious way you don't want to agree with it. So Skarsgerd articulates something for the audience there, but there is some absorbing of her information there, because he doesn't totally kill her -- he just says you're young and pretentious, but probably very talented.

Will you return to more traditional forms after "Time Code"?

Oh, there's nothing anti-celluloid or anti-script about this. This is just one film made in a certain way for a certain reason. I'd like to think about these techniques and absorb them into a more mainstream approach; after all, there is an audience now that is open to new techniques. Look at the films of the last 12 months -- "Three Kings," "Being John Malkovich," "The Blair Witch Project," and a lot of the "Dogma" stuff. You're talking about, within the mainstream, a younger audience and a whole slew of techniques that would have been unthinkable five years ago.

Or "The Straight Story," which is so straight that it seems new.

Well, yes! When I was doing theater, at a certain point I realized the most avant-garde thing I could do was do a text-based play on a proscenium arch, so we could see the proscenium arch for the very avant-garde idea it was when it was first thought of.

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