“So I did a painting of it. It’s pretty simple — the climax of the movie is initially incredibly grand and epic, in his own personal experience. Then the second time we see it, it’s incredibly regular and kind of stupid, like kind of funny. [The point is to] stop aggrandizing your own pain. Everyone is the fucking same. We are plain as day, dude." Most people haven't seen Come Swim yet, so explain what it's about.

“Oh dude, this movie is like full-frontal heartbreak. I’m definitely not shying away from that, that’s absolutely what it’s about. It’s that first fall to this existential netherworld. You can attack yourself with memories or, depending on perspective, you can take a step back and say, ‘Actually, it wasn’t so bad. That was fun, we did have fun and it was nice.’ So I had my two actors play in a pool and talk to each other and I gave them a couple of key words. But they said some stuff that we pulled and made really negative and terrifying and kind of ominous in the beginning. "He’s killing himself with these memories and his brain is so scattered and he literally cannot get the voices out of his head, but in reality it wasn’t so bad. He regrets everything he said and he’s like ‘Ugh, why couldn’t I have just done this different?’ He’s just reevaluating everything and going over every word he ever said to her being like, ‘How could I have saved this, how could I have fixed this, it’s all my fault, I fucked it all up.’ In the second part of the film, you’re just like, ‘Dude you didn’t, it just kind of fell apart, that’s what happened.’ I just wanted to externalize an incredibly internal struggle and then see it again from the outside.”

How would you describe yourself as a director?

"I’m a pretty obsessive person, which is I think entirely necessary. You have to be a little crazy to put yourself through something like that and actually make it happen. I was probably a little bit more controlling than I thought I would have been. My favorite thing in the world is when it feels like something starts to get up and walk itself. When something’s really good, and it’s rare — honestly I’ve made a million bad movies. Not bad, it’s just like sometimes they don’t come together in a way that feels miraculous and when they do, it genuinely feels like something is floating and you’re all sort of blowing on it to keep it up and it’s like, that fully happened. It’s so cliché, it feels like super pretentious to say this, but you genuinely feel like this vessel and you’re like, ‘That was sick, I don’t even know what just happened,’ and it’s just fucking real.”