You've said about your work -- in theater and film -- that you try to challenge people's sensibilities. Does that involve challenging your own sensibilities?

I think I'm the first audience, so I challenge myself by extension of openly challenging others. When I write and I don't know where I'm going and it surprises me when it comes out -- I look back on a few pages I've written and go, "Yeah, strange monologue to come up with" -- that's a really pleasing thing. An audience is pleased in the same way. They can look at something and say, "Wow, I had no idea where that story was going."

The positive responses to a film like, say, "Nurse Betty," were more geared in that direction. There are so many elements to that screenplay and the way that film was made. You can recognize it as a road picture, satire and soap opera, and it's got philosophical killers -- but I never knew exactly where it was going to end up.

The surprise of the journey is important to me. In the same way that the pleasure of the process is important to me. It's sort of a buyer's market in casting people and in hiring crew -- there are so many people with talent at a certain level, that you can kind of pick really carefully. But I'm very curious about and interested in getting people who I think will be a pleasure to work with. It's not worth it to say, "Well, we made a great film, but it was just hell." I'm not so into suffering that it just doesn't matter if I suffer personally for a year as long as the movie is good. I think one can do both; they can enjoy the process and make a substantial product.

Audiences, and critics, consider personal details, like the fact that you're a Mormon, when evaluating your work. Is that fair?

I don't know why it should be an issue. I can say that obviously, being a Mormon has an influence, as much influence as being a man or being of the political persuasion that I am, or being born in this part of the century. It does not have undue influence on me.

I do find [people's fascination] curious. It's often writers. Often with the writer it's the first thing they've considered about me. "Well, this is what a Mormon is supposed to be, and yet this guy is writing this and he calls himself a Mormon and that seems like an odd thing." So they just want to not even justify it but make sense of it to themselves. But the end result of that is me getting asked that a lot. And me getting over it.

You're a practicing Mormon?

Well, yeah. I need more practice, apparently. I'm still a Mormon. I had some difficulty with a play I wrote called "Bash," and I was dis-fellowshipped from the church because of that play, which is not like being excommunicated. One is still in the church, and can go to services, but can't take the sacrament -- there's a certain set of things that come with that. As long as I don't write bad things again, I might get back into their good graces.

Maybe we're just curious about it because we don't really understand what it means to be Mormon. What do you think we misunderstand about it?

I guess the polygamy question, which I still get. Someone just asked that question this weekend, like, "Can you have more wives if you wanted, do you still endorse that?" So sure, there's a certain, not even mystique, there's a mysteriousness with the church. It is probably the only American religion that was founded in America, that I'm aware of. That may be the case.

I think the questions have less to do with Mormonism than [the fact that] I'm meant to be part of an organization that is supposed to be sort of righteous and all of this, and then I write fairly unrighteous characters. So how do I rectify that, how does the church feel about that?

Will you continue to look at relationships, the dynamics of relationships in your work?

I would be hard-pressed to say that I ever plan to get away from the examination of relationships. One of my favorite filmmakers is Eric Rohmer. The way things go in and out of style, he's incredibly constant about the way in which he shoots, what he's interested in. For the most part, his films are very simple meditations on the kind of quiet craziness that men and women have toward one another.

I quite firmly believe that he imagines, no matter how many films he makes about that, he'll never get it completely -- not right, but he'll just never corner the market on what there is to say about that. I have been able to find plenty of reasons to continue writing about that. There are a couple of projects out there that are certainly different on the surface, but my inherent interest remains very much rooted in how people deal with one another.

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