Without In The Company of Men, I could still be teaching, so who knows if this would've existed.

But even with a character like Cary who is relatively outlandish, at the end of the movie he's in a place where I wouldn't have expected him to be - taking on the responsibility of a woman who is pregnant and who used to be his best friend's wife.

But for me, it feels like a natural extension of what I've been doing: exploring relationships. Here you have two relationships and we can explore how difficult it is for people to be together.

First I would probably place men at the bottom of the food chain. On a grander scale, I would say they're reacting to change. Feminism has got to be part of that.

I think Christine and Chad are on the opposite extremes of the spectrum. Christine is a model victim, and Chad is a model perpetrator, and Howard is closer to the middle.

I wanted to make these people real, not like they were in a painting. Like these are people who don't know they're in a period movie. Those concerns are incredibly immediate.

Just in the past few years - since I've been making movies, which isn't a very long time - you now have a culture that is fascinated and informed about the box office in a way that sometimes filmmakers weren't even.

My business is can I create a world that's possible and could happen? I think that's the only thing that I have to do, and I think that I have done that each time.

There is a lot of absurdity sometimes, not just in Mormonism but often in other religions that want to pretend that no bad happens in their church, rather than taking care of what bad does happen.

With In the Company of Men, the misogynist label stuck early and firmly. In the end, it probably did hurt the film a bit, because getting women into the theaters was difficult.

You start as an audience member and create a world you're interested in, and then you move into the telling of those stories, bringing what has interested you as an audience member.

In a relationship you have to open yourself up.

We live in a disposable society. It's easier to throw things out than to fix them. We even give it a name - we call it recycling.

Everybody has the ability to be manipulative, to be hateful and deceitful.

I will say that the idea of a woman being deceptive came from that original discussion with critics and reporters about if woman could do that kind of thing. Evelyn, herself, grew out of the discussions about how capable women are of deceit and lying and manipulation.

I was very careful to cast guys who were very good-looking and very fit and who had a certain sense of privilege about them, because with that sense of privilege comes contempt.

I'm more than open to hope, but I think men and women have a difficult time dealing with each other and often take the low road.

My best male friend is my best friend until he crosses me. We're all protective of the self.

And I've got some screenplays and plays ready to dip into when I need to.

And with Aaron, I'd have to find a reason not to work with him.