DC: The iconic American mythology was very interesting to me. I haven't set a movie in America since "The Dead Zone." It's not like I have a message to the world. When it came to the depiction of violence, it was where did the characters learn their violence and what was violence to those character, but my idea of what I think violence should be. Violence is innate in humans; we are that strange creature that can form abstract concepts, so we can conceive of non-violence. There are people who think that a world full of peace would be boring and would lead to a loss of creativity. That's an interesting, perverse argument that might some truth in it.

Q: It's in this film.

DC: The fact that the audience finds the violence exhilarating and that the children find it attractive, even though they are repelled by the consequences, shows the conundrum we have with violence. So many people fear it, there's so much money, energy, and government that are trying to avoid it at the same time that we outfit armies to go and commit it on other people--it's very paradoxical and endlessly fascinating, yet it's also very attractive which brings out the animal part of ourselves. Even the human, intellectual part of ourselves is also attracted to it. It's not easy to lament that we are violent creatures because that is just too simplistic.

Q: Even in the sex between Viggo Mortensen [Tom Stall/Joey Cusack] and Maria Bello [Edie Stall]?

DC: That's right. People experienced in sex and honesty will admit that there's a component of violence in sexuality--whether it's subliminal or not. Radical feminists have said that any form of sex is rape. I know that they are extreme, but I know what they're saying and there's some truth in it. Even that which can be considered tender and intimate is, in a sense, a spacial violation. That's what makes human sexuality so complex and reflective of every aspect of the human condition. That's why I tend to have sex scenes in my movie; I am failing to really deliver the goods to myself and my audience in terms of looking everywhere for what's really going on unless sexuality is in some way being examined. Especially in this movie, where there's a couple who have been married for 20 years and has two children and the only sex scenes are between the couple. How could you really say you've done your scenes-from-a-marriage routine if you haven't acknowledged their sexuality in a very specific way.

Q: Yet there's an optimism to this film.

DC: The feeling is that, perhaps, for Edie, the Tom/Joey hybrid is the full guy. Perhaps the marriage could even be a better marriage with the acknowledgment of that. Whether she can live with that or not is a whole other thing. With the sex scene on the stairs, there's an attraction-repulsion thing happening. That's another reason why I felt I had to have that scene. Despite the difficulty that people have with that scene, it is necessary to set up the possibility of hope in the ending.

Q: How did you make your casting choices?

DC: I gradually narrowed it down. After all, the movie cost $32 million, which means I had to have an actor of a certain stature for the studio to feel that they can sell the movie. It's very straightforward. I didn't need a big star like Tom Cruise, but I did need somebody who is recognizable and has fans already. Very few movies can be successful with unknown actors. Even for a two million dollar movie, the producers will want a recognizable name. That automatically limits you to a certain number of people. Then there's the age that the characters must be, within a certain range. And he has to be somebody who can carry a movie as the leading man, but, for me, he has to be more of a character actor. He has to disappear into his role as well as be subtle, eccentric, charismatic, and real all at the same time. It's a difficult thing to find. There's the subtle other thing that is beyond articulation which is my sensibility in terms of actors. There are some actors who I can admire in terms of their acting ability and stardom, but no compulsion to work with them. I go for certain actors that are my kind of actors.

Q: What about an actress like Maria Bello?

DC: The same goes for actresses. Maria is a beautiful woman, but still not what somebody says is the "ice princess" model of Hollywood these days; she's real. That means that she bring subtlety, complexity, and possibly the difficulty of her character. I want a real woman, but not an icon.

Q: You've never been afraid to show the ugliness of violence.

DC: I don't know, I must be fearless, it seems. For me the first fact of human existence is the human body. I'm not an atheist, but for me to turn away from any aspect of the human body to me is a philosophical betrayal. And there's a lot of art and religion whose whole purpose is to turn away from the human body. I feel in my art that my mandate is to not do that. So whether its beautiful things--the sexuality part, or the violent part or the gooey part--it's just body fluids. It's when Elliott in "Dead Ringer" says, "Why are there no beauty contests for the insides of bodies?" It's a thought that disturbs me. How can we be disgusted by our own bodies? That really doesn't make any human sense. It makes some animal sense but it doesn't make human sense so I'm always discussing that in my movies and in this movie in particular. I don't ever feel that I've been exploitive in a crude, vulgar way, or just doing it to get attention. It's always got a purpose which I can be very articulate about. In this movie, we've got an audience that's definitely going to applaud these acts of violence and they do because it's set up that these acts are justifiable and almost heroic at times. But I'm saying, "Okay, if you can applaud that, can you applaud this?" because this is the result of that gunshot in the head. It's not nice. And even if the violence is justifiable, the consequences of the violence are exactly the same. The body does not know what was the morality of that act. So I'm asking the audience to see if they can contain the whole experience of this violent act instead of just the heroic/dramatic one. I'm saying "Here's the really nasty effects on these nasty guys but still, the effects are very nasty." And that's the paradox and conundrum.

Q: You're a Canadian who's made this essay about violence in America and you choose not to adorn it with special effects and visual dramatics; that makes this story so profound and so "Cronenberg."

DC: Yeah, it's a tendency I have and I relate it somewhat weirdly to Samuel Beckett, and modernism. Somehow I feel that to me, one of the ultimate challenges is to not adorn, not to hide behind stuff. There are very easy things that you can do in films, especially now, to disguise yourself and make things easy and protect yourself. I'm as vulnerable as my actors, maybe more so when I direct a movie. Maybe not in the same physical way, but very vulnerable and its very tempting to do stuff, to hide behind it. I try not to do it, or get overly technique-y. If you can do it right, there's a raw simplicity that's incredibly powerful because there's a certain truth right there. If you blow it, there's nothing to hide behind. Its obvious when you've blown it. So that's why you get guys that do jittery camera stuff when it's just a guy sitting in a room talking; they do stuff up here and they've got cranes and whatever. I just sit there and say "Ok, I've cast this guy for his face, for his voice, for his acting. I just want you to see that. Let's just trust all that you've done and look at this guy talking." I don't need to do fancy, silly stuff that has no meaning or artistic purpose.

Q: When Tom/Joey leaves small town life, is he really changed?

DC: That's certainly the way we played it. Imagine, he's suddenly forced out of the identity he had and you have to decide how much of this you want to reveal to your viewers obviously, or you could spoil the movie for them.

Q: Don't worry.

DC: [When he originally left the East Coast], he could have chosen to be anything--to be a Joey in Florida, or a Joey in the west coast. He could have gone to some other country and been a small time gangster. But he chooses to be part of this American mythology of itself, this kind of ideal guy in this ideal small town with a family. Non-violent, very sweet, very gentle with his children. And he genuinely is, he's been that for 20 years. So he's been very successful at that. And that's not hiding, At that point he really wanted to become somebody else. If he got hit by a bus before the bad guys came to town, he would have been buried as Tom Stall, everybody would have thought that's who he was and that's who he would have been.

Q: So when the violence breaks out, was he reverting?

DC: No, the way we were playing it was that Joey was not actually a violent person. He didn't have that incredible anger and rage. Because you would feel that if he had that incredibly violent temper and anger and rage for example that it would come out in those 20 years that he tried to be Tom. You know it would have come out sooner. But in this case, Joey learned violence because--being physically kind of athletic--he could be good at it, because he grew up in the streets of Philly. His brother was a mobster, the union was mobsters and to be successful and have some kind of life there, he had to become part of that. He could do violence, so he did violence, but he wasn't particularly innately a violent person. So it was just as he says, when his brother says, "We're brothers, what did you think would happen?" He replies, "I thought that business would come first." For him it was business. And that was the approach to violence in the movie that I took, which is rather an imposing concept of what violence should or shouldn't be. I wasn't thinking about that... I'm thinking, "Okay in this movie where does the violence come from?" It comes from these guys who learned it on the streets and from the business. Its not sadistic pleasure, an aesthetic thing, or a martial art with a philosophy in fighting, it's just business. You do it, you get it over and get on to the next thing and make as little fuss about it as possible. That's what it is to Joey, and therefore its very possible for it to disappear. Now it comes back only because it's a tool he needs, that he has. It is like the gunslinger who was the fastest gun in the west that put his guns away, you know, its has American iconic reverberations and we were very conscious of that. [Joey's] the guy who's reluctant to kill although he has a talent for killing, but its not something that gives him pleasure. That's really the approach we took and its realistic in the sense that it would make it possible for him to become Tom and live that life for so long without revealing something else.