Take Shelter really keeps the viewer guessing about what’s actually going on. Was that dynamic hard to achieve?
It’s the trickiest thing a writer and storyteller has to do and sometimes you get it more right than other times. Just the right amount of ambiguity is the goal and I realized that while working on my first film. It’s a constant balancing act, where you’re trying to give just enough information so your film doesn’t feel muddled or confusing, but you’re not spoon-feeding the audience all the answers.

The cinematography [by Adam Stone] is terrific; where was it shot?
In Ohio; it was originally written for Arkansas, where I made my first film and am making my new film, but one of the producers is from Ohio and they had a nice tax incentive, so I had to change my game plan, and it turned out to be a really great place. I needed really flat horizon lines because it was so much about the horizon and skies and we were able to find that south of Cleveland. There’s a lot of farmland and it’s Tornado Alley, so there was a lot of atmosphere going on. It was a very appropriate place to make the film, whether I knew it or not at the time.

Where there any real storms during the shoot?
Yeah, there are a couple of shots of them in the film. There’s a shot in the backyard with a massive storm coming in and it actually happened during filming one day; we used a lot of it. During another really windy day, the leaves were moving on all of those big trees. On such a low-budget film, there’s no way we could have afforded to have that done. We kind of lucked out with the weather.