Creating a Kevin Smith-Like Fictional Film World Where Characters Go Back and Forth Between Films: “I don't have any grand scheme of that sort. I look at each one individually. I suppose the further that I go along, if I want and an actor wants, I can bring them back. Anything is possible. But I don't have some sort of plan for my next five movies. I'll be lucky if I can make another one. They kill you, each one of them. I don't take it for granted that I'll have that opportunity. So I just do one at a time and I sort of discover myself what I have wrought.
In some sense, I mean, really the process of filmmaking is very much a process of discovery. It's a mystery what it is that makes one put pen to paper. I've been writing since I'm reading and it is a mystery to me. It's certainly not fun. So what is it that pulls me to pursue this story? In some sense I find myself not choosing the story, but the story choosing me. I may have other ideas that might be much more marketable, let’s says, but I just get compelled by it to have a life of its own, to pursue certain kinds of stories, and I just have to be true to that impulse. Certainly, I could have a much more successful career if I didn't do what I ultimately wanted to do.”
Bringing Ellen Barkin Out of Semi-Retirement for “Palindromes:” “I've always been in awe of her because she's such a formidable presence and after I finished the script, I thought immediately of her and I gave her the script. She read it and said that she wanted to do it. Actually, her and Jennifer [Jason Leigh] were the easy ones to cast because they just said yes. Everything else was just much more painstaking with trying to find the children, trying to find all these kids. With Ellen it was very easy. I mean, she read the script and she immediately understood it. I didn't have to explain it. She got it immediately. She responded to this dramatic situation, the situation of this character, and felt that she knew this person. It's a character that's very polarizing in many ways and she was fearless about, I think, approaching it without vanity, approaching it in a way that felt truthful.
People may look at her [in this movie] and say that she's a terrible mother and others might say, 'Oh, she's a sensible one.' What do you do if your 13 year old daughter comes home and not only is she pregnant, but she wants to keep the baby? It is a crisis, a nightmare that forces one to re-examine convictions and understandings that we live by. It's an impossible dilemma, and you might even call it a lose/lose proposition.”
The Seed of the Story: “I'll tell you, I did have one image in my head, one of them that I knew I needed to get to. There were these stories… First of all, we live in a country where it is such a volatile issue, abortion. Abortionist are murdered, assassinated. Clinics are bombed. Nowhere else in the world does this happen and it's hard not to be responsive to it, to this fact that to be an abortionist - like to be a policeman or a fireman - is to take on a heroic profession. You put your life on the line. You risk your life in ways that if you performed other procedures, you could make a good living. But people who do perform these do certainly risk themselves and you cannot but respect that, regardless of the political conviction that you may have.
That said, there was an incident, several, but there was someone captured in Georgia, I think that he's up for trial in Alabama, who when he was captured what was interesting was how the community was very sympathetic and stood by him. I had to wonder what is it that, of course, makes someone perpetrate an atrocity such as this. I think that it's a profoundly human thing to feel at heart one is a good person. I think that everyone thinks they're fighting the good fight, even though people might not agree on which is the good fight. But the man who is certainly murdering the abortionists, of course thinks he's saving a million unborn babies. There is a logic here at work. I mean, Stalin on his deathbed, everyone thinks that they're basically a good person. Now I'm not out to dispute that. I'm not out to go, on the other hand, to appeal to one's sense of vanity, one's narcissism. I mean, narcissism and self-deception, I've always said that these are survival mechanisms without which so many of us would jump out of the window. So I wanted to get at this situation where this young girl who we would all feel for, certainly we feel for her plight, her pain, her sorrows and what's she been through and you feel for this young girl, and yet you have this moral horror at her saying, 'Do it, do it, do it.' She's saying, 'Pull the trigger,' so to speak. It's this moment of, on one hand, feeling for this character, and yet at the same time saying, 'Oh my God, what are you doing? How can you do this?' It's that convergence, that friction of those two impulses that rub against each other, that I think is intrinsic to the dynamic of all what I do."
