Let’s get back to when you unplugged yourself from the movie business. What led to your decision to eventually make another film? I originally wrote a screenplay called What Makes Pistachio Nuts, about a pig named Trotsky. This kid put a saddle on it and used a special adhesive on its hooves so it could walk up the sides of walls. I spent a long time on this, and the script was humongous. I was sure it was my great film, and even thought about retiring afterwards. It was great! There were scenes where this kid is riding this pig around firebombing empty houses. But my computer burned down. I couldn’t go back and rewrite this since I could never do it justice. But I had these images of nuns, and that’s how I came up with Mister Lonely. Do you always start from images? Maybe I’ll see some fat guy in a window with curlers in his hair and start imagining a story behind that. Ten years ago, I started thinking of nuns jumping out of airplanes and riding bicycles in the clouds, like a test of faith. At the same time I had this other story of a Michael Jackson impersonator, and they seemed to parallel each other. Rather than make two movies from these stories, they felt like the same film. Did you follow the image of this Michael Jackson impersonator in Paris like a thread, letting it lead you to including other impersonators in the film? I started to think about how cool it would be to have a commune of impersonators. I knew I’d never get a chance to work with Charlie Chaplin, James Dean, Sammy Davis, Jr., or The Three Stooges, but if I [made Mister Lonely], in some weird way, I would be able to. I’ve always been attracted to obsessive characters.