Do you spend a lot of time on that stuff?

Well, I think I'm in a privileged position, living in a world of ideas, and, you know, art. And I don't have a day job. I probably have more time for it than most. And I've always, you know, had my interests that I could follow.

I don't want to make this whole interview about responding to reviews, but I do have one more question. You mentioned people that have to write seriously, but one of the things that I noticed in all of the reviews is that very few people are trying to make sense of the film, or trying to respond to it on the level that it talks to the viewer. Does it bother you that no one seems to be talking about the film at that level?

Well, they say things like it's non-narrative.

And you've pointed out that it is a narrative.

Yeah. But to tell you the truth, I haven't read many things. And some of them seem pretty thoughtful. It's pretty tough work to see something once and then have to write about it in a consumerist way, which is what reviews are. You have to give the consumers something to go by ...

That's a pretty limited view of film criticism.

Yeah, in a way. But I think there's another way where people can see the film a few times and have some room and space to write more of a think piece. There's an awful lot of smart people out there who can put things together in a smart way. I don't know -- I haven't really read that much about it. I'm at that phase where I'm sort of detached from it.

OK. But if I was to go through and sort of respond to some of the points that the characters make, and some of the philosophy, I get the sense that there are some of them that you take very seriously, and some of them that you find humorous, and some of them that you find just out there in the marketplace of ideas. But there's a blur among them. Are you consciously trying to keep the viewer from knowing exactly where you stand on each point?

I think they're all out there in an equal way, although I do think that they'll resonate for different people in different ways. But it's not like the whole movie is wall-to-wall thoughts and philosophy. Maybe half of it. There are a lot of dramatic situations, or characters. It runs the gamut. I generally see the movie as about ideas more than anything. And just because I put them in a film doesn't mean that I stand behind them, or even that I can talk at any length about any one of them. The terms of the movie are not pass/fail, or agree/disagree.

I don't go through life thinking a lot of things are true. I take them on the aesthetic level. Take religion, or anything. I'm kind of all over the place.

So there're these ideas out there of equal merit. Does that have a relationship to dreaming for you?

Like there's an uncritical part of you in dreams, maybe?

Right. I mean, if the idea is that you're not lucid as you dream, then you don't get to choose what's in your dreams, at least not on a conscious level.

Well, even lucid dreaming can take you to a place that you didn't intend to go. You can try, but you end up in pretty strange places.

Do you lucid dream?

Um, yeah. Pretty much. It's difficult at times.

Philosophically, in regard to the film, do you see systems of thought in the world in the way that they come out in the film? Specifically, do you think we live in a world where we live with all these competing ideas, but we don't have to take each one seriously? Or do you more closely align yourself with one of those ideas, and just recognize that the other ideas are out there as well?

I like embodying a lot of contradictions. You can believe strongly in one thing, and then believe another thing and they contradict one another. I don't know. Most films can't contain a lot of contradictions. They have to move along this narrow path. But I think we all contain a lot of contradictions in life. We all know that there are very rational people who go through life in a very rational way and then believe in ... aliens.

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