A Conversation with The Cabin in the Woods' Drew Goddard and Kristen Connolly

In THE CABIN IN THE WOODS a group of college friends set out for some fun in the wilderness but discover that someone or something is out to get them at their remote location.  To say much more about the clever horror-comedy from director and co-writer Drew Goddard and co-writer Joss Whedon would be to spoil the surprises in a film that amusingly deconstructs scary movies while still aiming to terrify the audience.

In late March Goddard and lead actress Kristen Connolly, who plays the archetypal horror movie heroine, visited Otterbein University and WOCC TV3 to speak with me about THE CABIN IN THE WOODS.  Ideally this film is best seen without a lot of foreknowledge as to its particulars, so I focused the conversation on the genre.  The interview is mostly spoiler-free, but those who don't want anything ruined in advance should proceed with caution or watch a condensed version of my interview. 

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Mark Pfeiffer: THE CABIN IN THE WOODS plays as if it is a dialogue with horror films that preceded it. In a sense it’s a direct form of film criticism. What prompted you to tell the story in this way?

Drew Goddard:  It really just came from a place of love.  We just love horror movies.  I wrote this movie with my partner-in-crime Joss Whedon, and we just started from a place of us talking about our favorite horror movies and what made us scared and what made us cheer and what made us laugh and trying to figure out how to make the ultimate horror movie as it were.  From those discussions we just sat down and tried to write the best version of it we possibly could.

MP:  Was it in response to anything in particular, not necessarily a film but maybe a trend?

DG:  Not really.  Certainly there’s stuff that we’ve seen in horror films that we don’t care for, but the movie wasn’t really directly commenting on that.  It was more about celebrating the genre as best as we possibly could.

MP:  The genre can be looked upon as being disreputable, but the film argues that horror movies fulfill a necessary purpose.  I’m curious what you think horror can do that other films maybe aren’t able to do as well.

DG:  I think first and foremost the experience of watching a good horror film with an audience, there’s nothing like it.  It must be that it gets us in touch with something primal inside of us that needs to be released in the relative safety of the theater.  I’m not sure, but I know when you feel that energy, that electricity when you’re in a good horror movie and the audience is all screaming together as one and laughing together and feeling that release, there’s nothing like it.  I think we must have this primal need to look at our own darkness and then be relieved that that’s not actually happening to us at the end of the day.

MP:  Kristen, as a performer, how do you respond to that?  Is it different?

Kristen Connolly:  You mean performing in a horror movie as opposed to a different (genre film)?

MP:  Right.

KC:  Yeah, sure.  I shot a little tiny independent movie after this, and it was a romantic comedy.  It was a lot of night shoots, and I was sitting around on the couch.   I was like, “What the hell are we doing?  Let’s get moving.  I’m going to fall asleep if we don’t something.”

DG:  Aren’t I supposed to be screaming?

KC:  Yeah, shouldn’t I be running and yelling and crying and covered in something?  I hadn’t really thought about it before.  I was talking about this with Fran (Kranz, co-star in THE CABIN IN THE WOODS).  It’s such a different experience working on a horror movie and one that I think people don’t appreciate how hard it is.  It’s just physically demanding. It’s emotionally demanding. And to be in that state of terror is very draining, but it’s really exciting also.  There’s nothing like it.

MP:  Does that create a different bond between the actors than it would on another type of film?

KC:  Yeah, I think so.  Our group got really close really quickly.  I’m sure part of that was running around in the woods together at 5 o’clock in the morning.  We all really bonded, and we all really took care of each other, I think.

MP:  The film gives the impression that this is way out in the middle of nowhere.  Was it actually as remote as it seems?

DG:  Pretty much.  We were really in the middle of nowhere in the Vancouver woods, and so we felt cut off.  Certainly on those night shoots you had trouble discerning the movie from reality.  I certainly started to get freaked out about 3 a.m.  I don’t know about you.

KC:  Yeah.  Oh, definitely.  And we had bears on set one day too.  That was pretty exciting.  I think they put out trays of Chinese food, and then all of a sudden there were six bears wandering around the set.

DG:  Bears love Chinese food.  A lot of people didn’t know that.  That’s what we learned from THE CABIN IN THE WOODS. 

MP:  While the film certainly upholds horror movies, it also feels free to criticize them.  What frustrates you about what you see in contemporary horror pictures?

DG:  I feel like I can always tell when the director doesn’t love horror movies or doesn’t love his characters, more importantly.  There’s a feeling of we’re just setting these people up to get knocked off.  And then taking that a step further, I can always tell when the characters within a horror movie don’t care about each other.  That was really important for the five of them, and they all got that immediately that they need to look out for one another.  I think you can feel that energy.  You can always feel in a bad horror movie when a friend of theirs gets killed, they’re all immediately, “Well, we gotta keep running.  Forget that person!  We don’t care!”  We made a real effort to find that bond, not just between director and characters but between characters themselves.

MP:  Kristen, what was the challenge for you playing a character whose most important characteristic is that in a sense she is an archetype for horror films?

KC:  To be honest I didn’t really think about that much while we were shooting.  I know we talked about it early on.  I think there are a lot of outside elements that do the work of that for you.  My focus was really on the relationships between the characters and the friendship between Dana and Marty and between all of them as a group.  I think that the costume does some of the work, that the writing does a lot of the work, and I think the audience’s perceptions of what that role is do a lot of the work as well.  So as far as playing an archetype, I didn’t feel like I was doing that.

DG:  Yeah, I always said, “Don’t worry about the archetype.  You play the character.  I will worry about the archetype.  That’s my job.”  Because it’s a strange thing we ask of our cast.  In this movie there are sort of two roles.  They’re playing their character, and then there’s an archetype, and they sort of switch in and out depending on where we are in the movie.  That can be very tricky.  It was always about making sure we’re just emotionally relating to the person and not the idea.

MP:  With that then, keeping the audience in concert with what you’re trying to do, what was most important to you in how you kept everybody in line?  The movie does bounce back and forth quite a bit, more so than I would have expected.  So that everyone is, “OK, I get what you’re going for, but I’m still invested in the main story,” as it were.

DG:  First and foremost, tell the story.  That’s the rule.  If we’re getting too off point, then it had to go and don’t worry too much about the second layer and the third layer and the fourth layer, just know that that will organically come to the story.  Our first responsibility is telling an entertaining story for the audience. 

MP:  I hadn’t read much about the film before seeing it on purpose, especially with South by Southwest and starting to hear reactions.  What was interesting to me upfront is that there’s this really jarring scene that if your expectations are essentially that it’s teenagers in the woods.  What were you hoping to accomplish with that?  What do you think that does to an audience that is coming in like I was?

DG:  I think we wanted to say first and foremost, “This is not your average, everyday horror movie.”  We wanted to tell the audience right away we’re not playing cute.  This is a different movie.  This is something that you have not seen before, and we’re going to take it to new and exciting places.  It was one of the first scenes that we came up with because that’s the sort of scene in a traditional movie that would go right in the middle.  Oh, here’s the big reveal and then move on.  And that’s what a lot of people who’ve seen the trailer are worried about.  Oh, we’re giving this away.  I’m like, no, that’s actually the first two minutes of the film.  We’re actually not giving anything away.  Just trust us.  We’re saving a lot for you.

MP:  Kristen, this is your first lead role?

KC:  Uh huh.

MP:  How was the whole experience for you?

KC:  It was amazing.  I felt just so lucky to be a part of it and that Joss and Drew gave me this amazing opportunity and as much responsibility.  I was like, “Really, are you guys sure you want me?”  And I got to do so much stuff in this.  I know that you warned me early on this is going to be really hard, it’s going to be really, really hard.  And I was like, “No, I go to the gym.  I’ll be fine.”  But there’s nothing that can really prepare you for it.  It was an amazing learning experience for me and an amazing amount of fun and then to go to the theater and see it has just been--I’m going to get emotional--it’s been just really a wonderful experience.

MP:  Is that perhaps greater because the film has had to take a longer period of time to get in front of audiences?

KC:  Maybe.  I don’t know.  It could be.  It was a long time, and I think we all loved the movie so much that we really wanted to show it to people and knew that it was awesome.  We just didn’t know exactly what route it was going to take getting into movie theaters. To have it premiere at South by Southwest, to have it be with Lionsgate, it seems like everything has just worked out so perfectly, and it’s just been really extraordinary.

MP:  The movie does tap into what fuels nightmares and even some of the cultural differences that we have--you have the stuff with the Japanese horror films, which are clearly of a different model than what we get typically in America--and even the things that seem to bubble up and be of the moment of what seems to scare people.  For instance, you end up choosing the redneck zombie torture family, which is certainly something we’ve seen plenty of times, but at the same point, people don’t have that experience.  That’s not a natural fear that you have that you’re going to encounter these sorts of folks.  I’m just curious why you think that sort of monster or even the ones that do recur, why that resonates with audiences or even with yourself.

DG:  It’s hard because we deal with so many nightmares in THE CABIN IN THE WOODS.  I don’t want to spoil too much.  Just the concept of monsters in general is something that’s interesting to me.  I don’t know why any individual monster is more scary or less scary to some people.  It’s just some things resonate with people, some things don’t, and that changes over time.  It changes who we are.  We dealt with this a lot in CLOVERFIELD when this post 9/11 world where monsters suddenly became much scarier if they didn’t have a purpose behind them and it was just something rampaging.  I think that reflected what we were feeling as a culture.  And now we’re in this different time and the menace has a little bit more motivation behind it.  But again, that’s just reflective of the time.  It just evolves with time as society evolves.

MP:  Youth and beauty are always despoiled in these kinds of pictures.  That has been consistent whether you want to go back 30, 40, 50 years or today.

DG:  Even further.

MP:  Is that ultimately what’s underlying the fear in these films?

DG:  Certainly the question that interested me the most in making this film is--and it’s not just horror films--society has this need to idealize and marginalize youth and then destroy it.  And that’s not just in movies, that’s in society.  And that’s not just in current society, that’s been happening since the dawn of man.  We have put kids up on a pedestal only to sacrifice them, throw them into a volcano, destroy them publicly.   We keep doing it.  We have this weird worship of the youthful energy.  You see it now.  We idealize youth and then we send them off to war just to be slaughtered on the front lines.  As we get older we’re not fighting the wars, we’re letting these kids do it.  The question of why we need to do that, it serves some social purpose, but I don’t know what it is.  But the question of why is very much at the heart of this movie.

MP:  I may be reaching on this one, but looking at the stuff that you’ve written for television in particular that even applies to this film, there’s a view of reality of what we know and then there’s this invisible force designing it all behind the scenes.  Is that coincidence or is there something that draws you to this idea that you keep returning to it?

DG:  Yeah, I suppose so.  It is that age old question of free will or predestination.  I don’t know that I know the answer but I am fascinated by it.  I am fascinated by “am I free to make my choices or am I forced to make my choices because of the world around me”.  I do keep coming back to that, I suppose, but it’s never conscious.  I just notice it later after I’ve read my own script. 

MP:  I guess if you want to get into auteur theory it naturally goes right into that.  Well, we haven’t really talked about Joss Whedon and his involvement with the project.  Maybe both of you could speak to what collaborating with him was like.

DG:  I’ve been working with him for awhile.  My first job was as a staff writer on BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER for Joss, and I got that job because I was the world’s biggest Joss Whedon fan.  When I first saw BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER I was in college, and it was like a bomb went off.  It was like, oh, somebody’s actually doing the most interesting, edgy filmmaking in the world and it’s on television on the WB.  I couldn’t believe that that was happening.  I love his writing.  He’s my favorite writer of all-time.  To get to work for him on BUFFY was a dream come true.  We’ve just kept that relationship going.  I’m always trying to find ways to work with him because I feel like he is one of those crazed geniuses you see once in a generation.  He’s just a joy.

KC:  Fran said something yesterday that I think is really true that Joss, without really doing anything, he just inspires you to want to do your best work.  And I think it’s because he’s always so supportive of people and he’s such a kind, nice person, but he’s also just so smart and it makes you really want to step it up.  I’m really glad actually that I didn’t know much of his stuff when I came out to meet you guys and that I didn’t know much of LOST either because I would have been a nervous wreck in that audition, so I think it’s probably good that I didn’t watch all of it until after.  I was like, “Oh my God, these guys are so smart.”

MP:  You’ve come more from a theater background.

KC:  I do, yeah.

MP:  How’s that transition been for you to do especially something like this, which has got to be vastly different from KING LEAR or some of the other things you’ve done?

KC: Although we were saying yesterday that Fran, his character isn’t that unlike the fool in KING LEAR.  I think that the approach to the work is the same.  It’s the same character work you do no matter what medium it is.  You’re not rehearsing really, so with this the shooting is the rehearsal, and you just try things and do it as many times as you can and as many different ways as you can whereas in rehearsal you sort of try those things out and then piece together what you like.  You’re an editor, I guess.  It’s funny, since I’ve finished school most of what I’ve done have been horror movies and Shakespeare.  I don’t know what the connection is.

DG:  There’s a lot of blood in both.

KC:  Yeah, exactly, a lot of blood.

MP:  What’s next for each of you after this?

DG:  I’m just having so much fun with this movie that I want to watch it with as many audiences as possible.  It’s really a fun movie to watch with an audience, so I’m on the CABIN world tour for the next month or so just checking this thing out.

KC:  I’m kind of doing the same for the next few weeks just going around watching the movie and talking about the movie.  Then I start a new series in April, HOUSE OF CARDS.  David Fincher is directing it, and it’s for Netflix.  It’s kind of a new thing, so hopefully it’ll be a lot of fun.

MP:  Clearly this is the sort of movie where seeing it with an audience is going to be a different experience than watching it at a press screening or even watching it at home.  What have been your observations as you’ve been at these various events seeing people reacting to it, hopefully in ways you anticipated and, I think maybe even hopefully, in ways you didn’t?

DG:  The thing that’s nice is, we knew if you’re a horror fan, you’re going to like this movie because we’ve got something for you in this movie. But the thing that’s been really satisfying for me is to hear the reaction afterwards.  A lot of people say, “I don’t even like horror movies, and I loved this film.”  That’s kind of surprising. That’s nice because it feels like I’m helping people see what I love about horror films and help expand that.  That’s been really nice.

KC:  There are moments in the movie--I can’t really say what they are--but I love hearing the audience respond every night.  There are a few that get the same reaction every time, and then there are different places where people laugh at something that maybe they didn’t laugh at the last time.  So that’s been really fun, to hear people enjoying the movie as much as I think we all enjoyed making the movie.

A Conversation with David Gordon Green

With GEORGE WASHINGTON, ALL THE REAL GIRLS, and UNDERTOW, writer-director David Gordon Green has built a strong body of work that shows him to be a keen observer of human interaction and, along with cinematographer Tim Orr, a crafter of some of the decade's most beautiful films. SNOW ANGELS, his fourth feature, is no exception. The film stars Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale in a lyrical exploration of love and tragedy.

Green visited Columbus on March 28 to introduce SNOW ANGELS for its local premiere at the Wexner Center. (The film will begin a commercial run at the Drexel Theatre on April 4.) I met with him to discuss SNOW ANGELS, his methods and collaborators, and what the future holds for his career.

Mark Pfeiffer: SNOW ANGELS features your first adapted screenplay. How did that come about?

David Gordon Green: It was a book that was brought to me by another director that was interested in having someone develop a project with him. So I started as a writer and was excited about the idea, the experience, the experiment of adapting a book. I started with page one and started writing it.

MP: How was it different working with material that you didn't generate first?

DGG: One thing with anything that I write, I try to find characters that I emotionally relate to, and if they're not on the page, then I evolve them to be so. I personalized it, but the architecture was there. It was a really great book by Stewart O'Nan. I felt like the structure was in place so that it just was up to me to try to bring a little emotional authenticity and personal spin on it.

MP: The subject matter of the film is heavy, which is true of your other movies as well, yet there's a sense of hopefulness and optimism in spite of the tragedies. Is it fair to say you see the world in that way?

DGG: Yeah, that's definitely how I am from my personal perspective on life. That's how I deal with rougher situations, but I think in this particular movie it was an experiment in emotion and having a shared experience by people going to a theater, seeing it together, witnessing it with people they know and people that are stranger, and, at arm's length, being able to digest the cautionary tale. At the same time it's being shown through the perspective of a young, hopeful high school relationship of two people that are going through the invitation and imperfections of their own connection.

MP: Sense of place is something you do really well in your movies. What I really admired about SNOW ANGELS is that it seemed to understand what life is like in a small town, the people that are there, the connections that are made, and even how the homes look inside and out. Are these places familiar to you from your background, or is this something that you've picked up along the way?

DGG: Both. I've spent a lot of time of my life in small towns and find a real genuine sincerity to my affection for those cultures. There's a beauty in places that people don't see the obvious beauty, and it's not in the sterilized, Hollywoodized version of it. It's in the rust and the cracks and the shadows and the areas that people aren't always looking that I find the beauty in small towns and rural existence.

With this movie I wanted it to be universally appealing. Everything from the casting to the art direction to the selection of locations, I wanted to make sure that it was vague enough where everyone could relate to it. It could be anywhere, and it could be down the street. It could be you and me. By being in a cold environment it kept people indoors. A lot of this movie for me was about opening up the doors and seeing what the secrets were behind them.

MP: Is there anything you learned making this movie that you didn't on the others?

DGG: I learn things every day. I try not to set up a situation during production that is so preconceived and planned and designed that it's not open to the evolution of a project, and once you have a great sense of artistic and technical collaborators, you just let it loose. So I learned a lot about working with actors.

It was the first film that I'd worked in that wasn't crewed by all of my friends. I brought all my department heads, and we went up to Nova Scotia. There was us and there was them. It was trying to communicate with them so they could become us and we could all work together and form that kind of unity that a true collaboration advances from. It was an experience in communication and working with bigger name actors that are experienced professionals. They demand discipline, trust, and energy from directors and all of us. We just brought our best plan and most open minds to the table every day.

MP: You've worked really well with kids in your movies. Obviously GEORGE WASHINGTON comes to mind, but even the little girl in SNOW ANGELS come across unlike the typical child performance. If anything, it feels like it documented how she is on the set that day. What's your method working with kids to get that out of them?

DGG: My method working with kids is exactly what you said, documenting the kids as they are that day, not telling them what to say. Grace Hudson was three-years-old, and that's a really fun age to work with kids for me because they're not self-conscious. A lot of times you'll work with actors that have some degree of experience. They're seven-years-old and can smile at the camera and mug for you and be cute as a button, but that's not as interesting to me as some kid that's not trained and comes from a good, supportive place of family where you can trust emotionally they're not going to be damaged by the experience. I'm not going to lie. It can be a pretty challenging thing to go through emotionally.

As far as lines and working with her, there was one line where I needed her to say, "I want to go play outside." That was essential to the plot of the movie, and I needed her to say that, but I just gave her a Skittle and said, "Say this twenty times." (laughs) It was pretty easy. But then there would be situations when the little girl has to cry. The camera was there, she was crying, and we worked it into the scene. We filmed it and it plays to the emotional authenticity of what was going on in the scene, but it wasn't something that we had the agenda of filming.

MP: Do you use a lot of non-professional actors in the smaller roles? I get a sense that the people seem more authentic, that you're not necessarily having actors dealing with other trained actors on a lot of occasions.

DGG: I love two kinds of actors. Well, three kinds. I love all of them. What am I going to say? I love non-actors that are just charismatic, confident, crazy, or whatever they bring to the table, they're just characters. I love who they are, and I want to film it and have them say what they're going to say. I also love the extraordinarily talented, gifted, trained performers like Sam and Kate and Griffin Dunne and Jeanetta Arnette and the actors in the movie that brought more resume to the table. I love putting the extremes of those two together.

I was talking a little earlier about making it feel universal. In the casting too, I wanted to cast every one of the little bit parts with an ethnicity. So we've got a Croatian Chinese restaurant owner, we've got a Russian photographer, we've got an Australian carpet store owner. I really tried to find people within the local community of where we were filming in Halifax that weren't from there that brought an accent. It's another good way to dodge a Canadian accent when you're trying to make an American movie in our northern friends' country. There's a lot of effort in that. I love the idea of just having people be who they are and not telling them what to say but giving them a guideline of what the scene's about. If you set up the right environment, it can be really believable.

MP: It's interesting you say that because one of the things I think that you do well as far as, I don't know if you'd even say it so much as dialogue, but characters in your movies seem to have a lot of trouble articulating what it is inside them. I think it's really difficult from a filmmaker's perspective to be able to write that and to get that out of actors because otherwise it would seem rather unformed or lazy if you just say to them, "Well, go in front of the camera and not express yourself."

DGG: Right.

MP: But in your films it seems much more refined to where I think of ALL THE REAL GIRLS where you've got these two people who are falling in love but also really don't know how to communicate. Of course, that's all over SNOW ANGELS as well. In the case of Rockwell's character, it's how he is saying one thing and he's putting on this mask of having redeemed himself and become a new man, but you can see the desperation leaking out. That's not something that really comes through in the words so much. I guess the question with that is how do you write that? How do you get that out of the actors because it's not something really that you can put on the page?

DGG: It's not. It's weird because for me the perfect is the imperfect and that's what we go for. Sometimes that's the first take when they don't know what they're going to say, and you have those awkward pauses and imperfections of speech. Sometimes it's more rehearsed. So, depending on who the character is and what the specific instance of it is, it's always different, but in the editing room I find myself so drawn to those moments of vulnerability and awkward silence and two actors that are genuinely listening. You can see such a wonderful rhythm that feels believable. If I'm in a situation, especially of any drama or intensity, the last thing I am is eloquent. You see a lot of really amazing Oscar-nominated performers that go in there and always look cool and know the right thing to say, but how often do we really, especially when there's tension and emotion at stake? So I try to capture how would it really be.

MP: How much is improvised? How much do you stick to the script, and how much do you let them do on the set?

DGG: I don't know percentage-wise. I haven't read the script since before we shot it if that gives you any sort of indication of my possessiveness of a script. I can just say a substantial amount of it is improvised. A lot of it is taken from the book. The actors had copies of the book and would take things from that.

But there would also be something like a scene when a detective comes up to Sam Rockwell when he's beginning his investigation. It's kind of a confrontational scene. It was cool. The detective was in a trench coat as he stereotypically would be, and we're kind of playing to the clichés. When we rehearsed it, I said, "It's missing something." While we were talking about what it might be, the actor dropped his pen that he was taking notes with. I said, "That's what you do. You come in there, and you have a confrontational scene, an aggressive scene. You approach. You drop your pen, and you have to pick it up. And that takes all the tension out of it. And then we're going to zoom into it as if that dropping the pen is the most important thing of this whole movie. That becomes what it's about." The scene is now not about two guys confronting each other. It's about a guy walking into an intimidating situation and dropping his pen. That never would have happened if we weren't just bullshitting about what makes it interesting and there was that happy accident.

MP: You've worked with cinematographer Tim Orr and composer David Wingo since the beginning of your career. How did you all meet, and what keeps you continuing the collaboration with them?

DGG: I met Wingo, who I happen to be conveniently wearing the shirt for his band Ola Podrida, I met him in the third grade when I was seeing THE KARATE KID and he was there too. We were the only kids in the third grade that went to movies by ourselves, so we became friends. He works musically in a way that I work in movies, so it has always been a very quiet partnership where you read each others' minds, and that's been really awesome to have that. Then, depending on the project, we determine who his collaborator on the project might be. Sometimes it's bringing in electronic musicians, like in SNOW ANGELS we brought Jeff McIlwain, who we met at freshman orientation at college. So the two of them collaborated on the score.

With Tim Orr and a lot of my crew on the movie, we went to film school together. We were assigned to work on a documentary project together, so he shot a documentary I did about the artificial insemination of cattle. Driving to and from set, which was an hour away, we were listening to music and talking and quickly realized that we liked each other and became friends. Then when I was looking at the dailies, I said, "Whoa, this is a DP I don't have to look over his shoulder and question the composition. I really trust his instincts in lighting. When he says we should shoot over here, he's right." So, he's a guy who literally, in a good way, I don't have to worry about the camera department. I just let him do his thing, and it always falls into line with my taste. There's a communication and a discussion sometimes, but in a bad way, I've lost all the vernacular and education and some of the insight I had to the camera department because he's so good that I don't study that. I just leave it up to him. It's been a great relief so I can work a hundred percent with the actors and the other elements of moviemaking.

MP: Is that your favorite part, working with the actors?

DGG: My favorite part is actually casting a movie, which is working with actors and discovering who these characters could be. Everybody that you audition brings some new insight and love or repulsion of these characters. To me every moment is a discovery. Ultimately I guess that translates into working with actors. It's the most fun because you're in a room asking people to behave in ways that you want to see them behave, and how often in life can you play God like that?

MP: You've made smaller films up to this point. The action comedy PINEAPPLE EXPRESS is coming out this summer. Certainly in scale or release pattern it's a much bigger film for you. Do you see yourself continuing to do those sorts of movies, going back to the smaller ones, or alternating between the two?

DGG: Literally I don't try to put that expectation on myself. By working with a group of people that I trust--department heads, friends that I've made, and actors--I look to them when I have an idea of what might be the next move. They really help me guide my own instincts and come up with what's unusual, what pushes me, what educates me, what's more of an adventure but also what maintains some degree of soul and intimacy that rings with a truth that says yeah, invest the next year of your life in this project, because you don't want to do that for nothing.

Something like PINEAPPLE EXPRESS was a blast, it was a fun project that was made in a really wonderful way with an extraordinary, inspiring group of collaborators. And yet it can be a popcorn movie that people bring their friends to and have a great time at the movies. So I like to not put that expectation or that burden of what's next or where I come from or what makes sense and literally just follow my gut and bring the band.

MP: What haven't you done yet that you'd like to do?

DGG: A ton of things. The difficulty is that I have a lot of professional ambition, and to be healthy that has to be balanced with my personal life outside of movies. I get pretty excited. It's easy to get aggressive and take advantage of opportunities, but it's important to maintain and make sure you're walking your own beat and picking up stories that aren't just regurgitations of books or other people's screenplays, that they come from a real place. I'd love the opportunity of working in the genre of horror or making a western or science fiction movie. Right now I'm adapting a John Grishman book that's about a guy on death row, so I've been researching and hanging out in pretty interesting places and meeting some characters.

I'm interested in anything that is a path to other worlds. A lot of people use movies as escapism, as entertainment. I feel really fortunate to work in an industry that says, hey, go and invest, research, learn, occupy, and then entertain.