When you see an impersonator, you’re not seeing Michael Jackson. You’re seeing someone transform into that celebrity. Yet you still see part of the original person. I was more interested in that person underneath. When I was living in Paris, there was an impersonator I’d watch from my window, dancing on the street in the rain, and people would just pass him by. This was when all these scandals were happening with the real Michael Jackson, and I realized this guy’s income is predicated on the actual Michael doing well. The worse Michael does, the worse this guy does. It called into question all these ideas about identity, but it was also funny. Do you think impersonators feel more alive when they perform? It’s like that Ingmar Bergman quote: “I could always live in my art, but never in my life.” Yeah, but these guys take it to the extreme, where they live this character. They look at it as something noble and keeping the dream alive. You encouraged communal living on the set. Were all of the cast and crew living at this castle in the Scottish Highlands? Everybody stayed either in it or around it. But Denis Lavant, who was our Charlie Chaplin, lived there in character for the entirety of the shoot. At night, he would unicycle down the hall naked. Since he was around all the time, he was readily available if something spontaneous happened that you wanted to shoot. One of the things I try to do is set up an environment that makes room for accidents to happen. It’s like shaking chemicals up in a bottle and documenting the explosion. Denis understood that. Sometimes, I’d create an entire scene based on what he was doing, like when he was practicing his English, or sometimes it was as simple as catching an image of him washing dishes through a window. There were a couple of actors who were like that, but he was really good at it. You have a script, but if something interesting happens, you divert. Basically the script is a jumping-off point. It is paper and words, but then there is real life in front of me. I encourage the actors to take it to another place. Sometimes it works better when it’s written, but I always like pushing people out of their comfort zone. One of the things that always frustrated me about making movies is how studied it is. It takes so long, and you lose the spontaneity. I like not knowing. I like not having storyboards. I like riffing until I figure it out for myself. If I had to write a script and film it verbatim, it would feel like any other job. You assembled an interesting cast, including Samantha Morton, Anita Pallenberg, and James Fox. Who is Richard Strange, the guy who plays Abraham Lincoln? He’s a real first class weirdo! I wasn’t familiar with him either, but he’s a British guy from the punk scene, in a band called the Doctors of Madness. I met him at a party a few months before filming. He had a voice that could break walls and shatter glass. He gave me this book he wrote about himself, and it was longer than the bible. I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me!” But he gave me eight of them over the course of the shoot, just in case I misplaced one. People talk about you as being some kind of bad boy provocateur, yet I find your work surprisingly empathetic. Well, it’s fun for me if people get riled up. But I really do this because I feel like the middle ground is dull. In my life, this has set me up for a lot of fucked up things that happened to me, but I always wanted to bypass that middle ground. I find it more exciting having ups and downs. With these films, I try to make myself laugh. I do what feels right to me. I’ve been attracted to these stories my entire life. When my grandmother told me stories, the ones I laughed at were always the ones that were a little bit nasty, and the ones I heard at school would put me to sleep. As for people who only see me as a provocateur, I long ago quit trying to figure them out….