It's funny, because my parents were similar to the parents in your film -- they were beyond reproach, they had these streaks of superiority, they confided in me about subjects that many people would consider inappropriate. I guess I'm wondering if your film is sort of a generational snapshot.

That's really interesting. I didn't think of it so much generationally. I think the time that the movie's set in, in the '80s, and the age of the people coincides with the fact that it was my own experience. If I take myself out of it, yeah, I agree that a lot of these things are true for that generation. Also, this idea of joint custody, I've been told, was part of that time period. I remember, before I wrote this movie, telling somebody we had joint custody growing up, and somebody saying, "Oh, I remember when that was a fad in the '80s." And I was still under the impression that it was best for the kids, but then I thought, I hated it, so why is it best for the kids?

What's wrong with joint custody, in your opinion?

The particular joint custody that they have in the movie, which is Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday and every other Thursday -- that was my exact joint custody situation. It's kind of liberating when I hear people laugh at it. I didn't know it was funny, I was just putting it down because it was what my parents did. And there is that sort of thing about having made this movie where people do laugh at things like that. Or blanch at things like that. I'm glad to know that the fact that I hated it was maybe OK!

But going back to what you were saying before, which I think is really interesting: There's a thing about families of intellectuals, the sort of "us against the world" feeling, which can be very empowering in some ways, but it's also completely isolating. So there's both this strange thing of feeling better than everyone else and your family is also somehow unique, and then also being ashamed of your family because you've been told you're not like anyone else.

And you can see that they're so obviously out of step with the norm.

Right. As a kid I had this feeling of, "My parents are smarter and better than all other parents," and "Other kids are talking about 'Gremlins' but I know 'Rules of the Game' is the real one to watch" -- you know, even though I hadn't seen it. But at the same time, split right in me, was this shame of people coming over to my house. Is this weird? Is this different? Is my mom's cooking as good as the other kids' moms' cooking? And then when your parents break up, all these things come to the surface even more. It's something I definitely relived and also investigated in writing the movie. The older kid in the movie accuses his mother, he says, "This is a great family. I don't know why you're screwing it up." As if it's like a baseball team.

You say there's a big change between "Kicking and Screaming" and this movie. I would think it's almost like coming out of the closet, to take on subject matter that's this personal, and to reveal stuff about your past that it's tough to own.

It's funny, because when I talk about it or think about it, everything [from my childhood] is in there, in the movie. Even if I had made this movie about cops, if I had been able to write as honestly, on some level, and find myself in the filmmaking the way I did in this movie, I would feel similarly, in a general way, that I found the kind of filmmaker I want to be. Since that's not my sensibility, and it is about my childhood in some way, and partly about a kid who's having trouble finding his own identity, in some ways it's like one of those Russian dolls. I can chase myself in circles thinking about it. I talk about it in therapy, and I'll be talking about the movie itself as the outside movie, and then we're talking about my experience of making the film, and then suddenly I'm talking about things about my own parents that I realize that I've actually put in the film, and then it's like I'm chasing my tail.

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