Then I met Jessica. She can balance being totally natural and honest in a scene, which is what I heard about her from the beginning, yet she’s totally compelling and fascinating to watch; that’s hard to do.

Tova Stewart plays their daughter, who is deaf, as is she. Did you ever consider using a kid who wasn’t?
Early on I thought it would be easier to use a little girl that can hear, but she’d have to be the greatest actress in the world. Film sets are crazy places and how do you ask someone to turn off their hearing, especially a 6-year-old, so from pretty early on we never tried to cast anyone who wasn’t deaf. I saw two actresses; Tova was one and I think she’s remarkable. She just kind of played with us from the beginning and this movie could have gone so poorly without her performance.

In a recent interview Michael Shannon said Take Shelter’s small budget helped the actors because they were together so much, not going off to their own trailers. How do you create that intimacy with a bigger budget?
You just have to work for it and I think you have to demand it. I’m in the process of doing it right now. The learning curve on Mud will be the same as on my first film because it’s a new world for me. And my goal as a filmmaker is to try to get the stuff that is wholeheartedly fiction to feel as real as possible. I’ve given speeches to my production design department; they’re all amazing artists, and they’re like, “We can create that for you.” Well, you could, but let’s see if we can find it first. “Yeah, but it won’t be exactly the way you want it.” That’s all right; let’s let ourselves be limited by the parameters of reality.