Like the one wild card.

Yeah, there're a lot of wild cards. So we're all this hodgepodge of instinct, belief and impulses. What's more telling is why.

But the film doesn't really get into why a lot of those characters have those thoughts.

Yeah, it's not a critical-thinking film. That part of your brain is not working in the dream state. But I stand behind all the ideas as something interesting, something to ponder. I can say that while technically I don't believe that we're all in 50 A.D., it's a fun, provocative thought. But you hear that and think, What is time? Is it a construct? You have to think.

I hate to ask such a dumb question, particularly when I'm trying to give you the sense that I'm one of the smart people and that I really understand what you were trying to do, but I don't exactly understand the narrative of the film. You've said that hopefully the audience realizes the narrative of the film when the main character does. The stupid part of this question is, Is it the moment when the main character has a conversation with the girl about dreaming?

Yeah, I think that's kind of a fulcrum moment. The moment where he is fully lucid is the moment where we are all suddenly with him and everything sort of makes sense. And then we're with him completely at that point.

When you sit down to write something like this, do you just have a big notepad and keep accumulating ideas that you have been interested in over the last, say, 10 years?

Yeah, I keep notebooks and write down stuff, ideas, a paragraph here and there, a quote.

What about your part in the film, where you go into the Philip K. Dick monologue. How long have you been carrying that around, or wanting to find a place for that? That feels like it belongs there, but it also feels like something that you might have wanted to use for a while.

No, not really. In fact, that kind of spun out of an improv with another actor. Although I've been a Philip K. Dick fan. A third of the movie is stuff that comes from the actors, a third of the movie is stuff that I wrote and they rewrote and a third is prepared texts. And I really hope that you can't tell the difference.

To change the subject, I'm curious about the visual jokes. For example, in one scene the men turn into clouds and float away, or in a scene about evolution you see a fish in the tank behind the guy talking sprout a leg ...

You really watched closely. That kind of stuff is generally seen on the second or third viewing.

Well, I'm sure I missed about a hundred more of them. But I'm curious, is that your direction, or is that the animators having fun?

That's usually the animators being interpretive, reinterpreting the imagery. And the stuff that is there is there because we allowed it -- a lot of stuff was cut out. Some of it was so witty and dead on. But some of the other stuff was too far out.

What sort of latitude did you give them up front?

It's sort of their own artistic work. They were given a lot of latitude. My main concern was just that they capture what I thought were the characters, that their design matched the character. Then they were free. I think all the animation feels pretty hands-off.

The film took a year to animate after you finished filming and editing. Was it difficult for you to finish it, hand it over and then take so long?

No, not really. Everything that we did up to the animation was just a stepping stone to the animation. It was part of the deal from the beginning.

Now, when you were filming, did you realize what the animation would do to the images? One of the extraordinary things about the animation is that it makes you look at all of these incredibly routine things in an all new way. For example, early on when the tango group is rehearsing, one of the violin players lights a cigarette, and the way it glows is arresting.

I think the animation emphasizes the way your memory works: You'll remember somebody, but you'll only remember one characteristic about them. So it's like you're watching a memory basically. Like, say, you would remember that poetic moment of a drag on a cigarette when it lit up the embery end. Of all the information you're taking in all the time you would remember that little bit. So the movie emphasizes that in a way that you couldn't with photo-realism. It's really closer to how your brain remembers images. It's more attuned.

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