In the very first scene of "Listen Up Philip," the 29-year-old director Alex Ross Perry's newest film, the title character delivers a dressing down of an ex-girlfriend so full of vitriol it would make Rush Limbaugh proud. This is followed by a similar scene, and then another, and pretty much continues for the duration of the film. It's the kind of movie and character - Philip is a curmudgeonly Brooklyn-based writer played by Jason Schwartzman - that will surely alienate some viewers, but that won't bother Perry. A New York transplant and graduate of the Tisch School of the Arts at N.Y.U., Perry first made a splash in the film world in 2011 when his film "The Color Wheel," about an obnoxious pair of siblings who bicker their way through a road trip, was named the best undistributed film of the year by the insider film website Indiewire. Thoughtful and plainspoken in equal doses, he is renowned for being uncompromising and idiosyncratic in his work. And on Tuesday, the day after "Listen Up Philip" premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, Perry wasn't overly concerned about whether the critics liked his latest offering. Philip is a narcissist in just about every sense, and he's not the only unlikable character in this film. What draws you to writing unsympathetic characters? To me, there are two kinds of people - someone who's going to understand the personality of someone who creates conflict, and somebody who lives their life conflict-free and devoid of challenge. And no matter what he thinks of himself or how much he's self-destructive, the fact is that Philip is going to create problems where there are none. So in that sense, I find it to be not like, "Oh man, this guy's hard to watch," but rather just like this is a mixed-up person. But I care about all sorts of different personalities. Someone doesn't need to be pleasant and charming and easygoing for me to want to be their friend. In fact, the more like that they are the less likely I am to want to be their friend or ever make a movie about them. How much of you would you say is in these characters? I'm glad you said characters, because my girlfriend pointed out, like, "Everyone is going to say how much of you is in Philip, but no one's going to know that Ike is you. Jason talks more like you, but the way Ike acts and his complete disinterest in people and his gleeful willingness to just be alone, that is so troublingly you. So in that sense, I'm a 70-year-old man with a lifetime of enemies and accomplishments, except I'm 29 and I don't have any of those accomplishments. I'm just a miserable person who wants to be left alone and just to sit in a quiet house somewhere and do work and detach myself from all these people who just make me unhappy. Did you ever worry about making Philip unfeeling to a point where people couldn't sympathize with him? No, that's their problem. A lot of people are under the mistaken impression that a character in a movie has to be entirely on the table by the end of the first act. For me, it's like, "How long is the movie? The credits come up at 105 minutes? So long as we feel for him by 103, I think we're good. New York has a huge impact on the way your characters self-identify in the film. What version of the city did you set out to portray? It's difficult because I don't see portrayals in film and television of my New York. We shot one day in Manhattan and the rest of it was all in Brooklyn, and that's not to say the boring, ugly, architecturally disastrous part of Brooklyn like Williamsburg and Greenpoint, where I can't stand to walk down the street because it gives me a headache and there's broken glass everywhere. That's for the kids. I live a dignified life in Park Slope, and I wanted to make a New York movie that's brownstones and nice tree-lined streets, because that's my life. To me, it was so important that Philip and Ashley lived in a floor-through brownstone, where the bedroom window looks out over a backyard and the living room window looks out over the street. That's why we have so many shots in the film, maybe four, involving the stoop. In brownstone Brooklyn, there are stoops. I just wanted to create my ideal vision of New York - 1987 to 1992. I fetishize that period. I watch Woody Allen movies from that period, and I'm just like, "Ah, I missed it." I was so close. Anyone can make their New York movie. This is mine. The word "unpleasant" has been used a lot in discussions of your films, often in otherwise very positive reviews. How important is it to you for people to like your work? I believe cinema has the power to make people feel less lonely, and it is important to me that some of my work has the effect on people that the most meaningful films have had on me. Does that mean that it's the critic for any particular publication that needs to be touched that way? Not necessarily. I think that I learned with my last film that a movie can have a very untraditional path, and if it's genuine and interesting, it will reach the people that it needs to reach. It's important that the films be given a chance to reach their maximum audience. If some kid in high school in North Dakota loves Jason Schwartzman - has seen every one of his moves, watches everything he's in - he needs to be given a chance to see this film. So with negativity and the sort of critical backlash that tries to prevent movies from succeeding, you're not hurting the filmmaker or the film, you're hurting the people who could benefit most from getting a chance to discover this work. So you're the kind of person who reads reviews of your own work. Yeah, compulsively. What's the worst thing that anybody's ever said about one of your films? Some critic, I don't know who - of course, he's a completely irrelevant barnacle on the hull of cinema - he wrote something about "The Color Wheel" that was basically like, "Nothing in the world could be more unpleasant than watching this movie. I will not put a still of it in my review, because then you'd have to look at the disgusting faces of these horrible people, and no one should have to be so unlucky. To me, that's pretty spectacular. I really ruined that guy's entire day in 82 minutes. That's a strong reaction. Ambivalence would be the worst thing. I'm all for overwhelmingly negative reactions.