Who do you look to for moral leadership?

My own conscience.

Maybe you were brought up right. What about the rest of us?

Well, I was brought up by wolves. Never trust that.

"Teddy Bears' Picnic" offers a bleak picture of things. These powerful white men who make a mess of everything -- they're not going anywhere, right? They'll have their clubs and groups and continue to make a mess of companies and people's lives.

One of the things I find so unsatisfying about an awful lot of Hollywood formula comedies is that they do feel the need to be hopeful. People learn stuff and people change and people get better and they learn to hear each other and talk to each other and understand one another. I don't know what's funny about that. I know what's funny about that as a premise, which is that it's ludicrous. I don't know what's funny about the resulting work.

To me what's funny is how flawed we are, that's what's funny. And you know, we wouldn't be able to laugh at Shakespearean comedy today if we weren't the same flawed people that we've been for a long time. Shakespeare was drawing on a lot of the same stuff as the comedies of ancient Greece. It's hard to resist the idea that we're the same flawed people that we've always been. So to sell fake hope about us changing is the funniest thing of all.

Why do we expect that we shouldn't be flawed? And isn't there any hope?

There's hope and there's dismay in equal measure. It's not a totally dark view of the world. One of the things I was trying to do -- I feel a little presumptuous at even mentioning my little film in the same context -- but I always admired Billy Wilder's ability to create stories that felt like [they had] happy endings until you thought about them, and then they weren't, really.

What New York went through, it has this in equal measure. You're surprised by the ability of people to just pitch in and help in difficult times, and then you're surprised or dismayed by the ability of people to wrangle about, "well, they're getting more money than we are," immediately afterwards. And both things are true. It's an imperfect view of the species to insist that we're only one or the other.

But isn't it distressing that not even something of the magnitude of Sept. 11 would make us stick with the good and not veer to the bad?

I think it's amazing that in the face of something so bad the good immediately is the first thing to come out. It takes people about a week to figure out, let's make T-shirts out of this.

Back to this question, again: How much of us being this way is the effect of those powerful, rich people?

I don't think it's "poor pitiful us." As I say, I do think the comedic view of this is that if we were subject to their temptations and their seductions most of us would act exactly the way they do. They're us and we're them. That's what makes it comedy and not stick figure satire in my mind -- it's not "They're evil and we're good and we're corrupted by them." They're us in different circumstances. Like Linda Tripp said: "I'm you!"

Are there people out there who've impressed you with their ability to avoid that temptation?

The people that inspire me more often than not are artists who keep on plugging away despite the lack of great commercial success. I take great strength from the fact that, Jesus, if they can keep going, what the hell do I have to complain about? That functions more as a beacon for me than a guy who runs a company. That's so much more of a foreign environment to me. It doesn't relate as much to what I have to do every day, so it doesn't have exemplary power for me.

The one place where I feel some degree of resonance with them is directing. When all is said and done and you've had all the great ideas, directing is an exercise in management. So people who have interesting ideas about managing people, I relate to that because I think a lot about the task of managing people on a movie set. You have to get a bunch of different people with different crafts and different ways of looking at the world and basically who speak different languages -- all of them stemming from English -- to kind of do what you want them to do most of the time, and also to share with you their questions and their thoughts in a reasonable way. That's a management task. That's about the most I can empathize with the corporate guys.

In movies, too, there are directors who feel that it's important to hold information close and there are directors who feel that it's important to distribute information widely. And I think that's sort of the template for good and bad managers in corporations. You know, people who jealously guard information and keep little fiefdoms, as opposed to people who believe that, you know ... George W. Bush keeps preaching the idea when he goes abroad, that "we love transparency." But it's more in the preaching than in the doing among his circle, I fear. Bob Dole used to bellow, "Where's the outrage?" and I used to bellow, "Where's the transparency?"

Were you a transparent director?

I tried to be. Some things are personal. I tried to tell everybody what was going on as much as possible. And to hear their feedback. I can only run things measured by the way I'd like them run if I were a cog in the machine. I think that whatever people think of the film, most of the people who worked on the film had a nice experience. That's not the ultimate measure, but it's something you'd like people to do. Especially with comedy. I've never understood people having a bad time making comedy. Why would you do that? One of the prerequisites to making people laugh, it seems to me, is kind of being in an easy, jocular mood yourself.

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