Your Mud star, Matthew McConaughey, is another very charismatic lead. How did you cast him?
I wrote the part for him 10 years ago, before I made Shotgun Stories. I was a kid just thinking about this story. I’m pretty excited, we’ve been communicating in pre-production and I can’t wait.

Then you have Reese Witherspoon [playing his girlfriend], which seems like a departure…
For her or for me? [laughs] I’ll just say this, when I first met Reese, I was immediately struck by the fact that she’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. And again, I’m really excited, mainly because I find myself in a situation where I have extremely famous people in my movie and a studio didn’t tell me I had to have them, because we’re an independent film. I cast the right people for these roles, and they just happen to be really famous.

As a film student, was there any director whose career you wanted to emulate?
When I was younger, no, I didn’t pick one, I picked movies and most of them had Paul Newman in them. My top five would always be Badlands, which doesn’t have Paul Newman in it [laughs], The Hustler, Hud, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I loved David Lean, Lawrence of Arabia, and epic, sweeping, beautiful things, but I wouldn’t say I picked out one filmmaker. I like everything I hear about Clint Eastwood, the way he’s very economical, he kind of knows what he wants, executes it, gets out of there. But at the same time, I think Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are two of the most exceptionally directed films ever, so it kind of runs the gamut.