Do reviews affect you just as much as they ever have?

Yeah. I would kill for a good review in the New York Times, just once, because I always get something pretty mixed. Or, in the case of "The Royal Tenenbaums," terrible. But, you know, the reality is that everybody's right, and there are a hundred different ways to look at any movie. A lot of a critic's reaction has to do with who that person is. When I see a movie, I bring so much of myself to it. The thing that's gonna make you cry is the fact that your father was actually like that, or something like that.

In "The Life Aquatic," it seems like you were comfortable with thwarting the audience's expectations of how the story should develop.

Definitely the kind of movies I've been doing are movies where, with good luck, there are people who it'll really connect with. And for the same reasons it'll really connect with some of the people, there's a big part of the audience that'll just totally reject it. And I think that with really big studio movies, the idea is to not do that.

Right. You want people to show up, and go for a ride, and who cares if they connect with it or not.

Or if everyone really connects and everyone gets onboard, except for the small group of fringe characters who were the ones who actually liked my movie.

Do you ever worry, though, that you might be too stubbornly attached to your own personal vision, as your lead characters often are?

Well, do I worry about it? Not so much. But is it true? I would say yes.

Is that the only path for an artist?

No. I don't make a conscious choice about that. Basically, so far, I've been able to just kind of write whatever is in my imagination and try to work on it to make it work dramatically in all the ways that I think are best. I want to do a lot of work, it's not like it's some kind of stream-of-consciousness thing. We put a lot of work into these things to try to make them work for an audience the way we want them to work for ourselves, but I've never been in a position where I've had a lot of pressure on me to do things to the stories or to the casting or to anyone else that is against my instincts.

Do you second-guess it when you get reviews that say, "Oh, this is crazy! This is self-indulgent!"?

Yeah, I second-guess everything at that point.

I was thinking while I was watching the movie last night that maybe your concept of what a movie should be, from the painstaking art direction to the soundtrack, is pretty far removed from what other directors are doing, and so it confounds expectations in that way. Do you feel like your approach is different from that of most directors? I know I'm kind of asking you to be pretentious, here.

What I think is, there's the one way where you get hired, and there's the other way where you show up with your gang, and say, "Do you want us?" And I'm in the second category.

That's fortunate for you! Every shot is always so perfectly framed, like a painting. How important are aesthetics to you and what role does that play in advancing the story?

I guess I like to try to fill the frame with a lot of things -- I like to fill it with jokes, and I like to fill it with ideas, and just kind of get as many things in there [as possible]. Because what happens to me is I end up accumulating a lot of ideas over the years of working on it, because I take a lot of time to prepare these things -- I work slowly, slowly. I'm just really trying to get as much in there to make it as interesting as possible, I guess.

Creating a little world and making it as rich as you can for the audience is really important to you.

Yes. That's exactly what it is. I feel like I want these movies to be in some setting that you've never experienced before. I mean, hopefully something that's new in the broad ways and also in all the details. And if there are enough details, maybe that becomes part of the broad ways.

Modern audiences may be so used to encountering movies that are more like a high-speed ride, and they may not be good at slowing down enough to actually pay attention to the world they're entering.

And for some people, the world I create isn't going to work for them. So I steel myself for that. [Laughs]

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