MRH: One of the hardest scenes to watch actually comes early in the film, and it’s where, for the first time, Betty plants the camera in her son’s bedroom, and goes downstairs to go make dinner, and we see Darwin break down and cry from his parents’ disintegrating marriage. Betty then knocks on the door, and Darwin makes an excuse so he’s time to ready himself before going down to eat with his mother.

The scene feels intrusive, and at the same time it’s also is a stark example of what happens behind closed doors when there’s a personal problem going on between parents and children, or between siblings or anybody. It was a really naked scene to watch.

You raised the subject of reality TV in one of the DVD interviews, and I wonder if you think that scene resonates more now because of reality TV; that genre has a lot of issues that are negative (the exploitive element and nonsense content) but it has an undeniable power in capturing a lot of stuff that has never been seen before on any screen.

SR: I think that that’s true. I think that a lot of reality TV is confessional or satiric - one or the other - and I think one of the reasons that scene might be interesting is, up until then, you weren’t really sure what you were watching. ‘Is this a comedy? What am I really watching? I’m sort of intrigued…’

When you get to there, Darwin won’t talk to her, and she does this outrageous thing quite early, and the payoff of him discovering [the hidden camera] doesn’t happen for two years. Two years, you know? And then it’s horrific. She almost loses him, but I think that if this were really reality TV, spending this many months with a real person, and this is what’s she’s done, it would be like watching paint dry, and very self-conscious.

We didn’t do 54 days of shooting in order to find the movie; we did 54 days of shooting because we didn’t have the money to shoot it any other way. We knew where we were going.

You can be an independent filmmaker; you grab a camera, go out and start discovering the movie, but the truth is that without a script of some kind, without a compelling story and certainly not without actors, you can’t do it.

It’s a very old-fashioned film in some ways. The technique is different, but I needed a stage actress who could hold the screen for five minutes without a cut. I mean, I’ve done Curb Your Enthusiasm (I did four or five of them) and I know how they wrote that; that’s actually written on the set; those are a bunch of very talented comedy writers who are used to being in a writer’s room and who are now addicted to writing on the spot with actors. The storyline is written down by Larry David, but you improvise, and the writers say, ‘Keep this and this,’ and they’re writing on the spot. It’s an addictive adrenaline rush, you know?

This is different. I challenge you or anybody to point out ‘This is improvised, this is not improvised, and this is scripted.’ … Probably the thing I’m proudest of is you can’t tell what part of it is improvised, and what part of it isn’t. You’ve got to remember, it was in a way a bit of reality TV going on for me. Wendell’s son (Luke Humphrey) plays her son, and her ex-husband (Mark Humphrey) plays her ex-husband.

MRH: I didn’t know that going into the film, and when I watched the interviews I thought, ‘Oh, you really were married. Oh, that really is your son.’ And then there’s that challenge of which I’m sure you must have been aware, where as a director you’ve got to make sure people don’t’ go crazy because I’m sure there must have been past family issues –

SR: Luckily nothing like that; it’s not in their past. That’s not a dysfunctional family. Wendell’s now remarried, Luke is now in college studying to be an actor, and they’re all professional actors

Betty Munson starts off in a $3 million house (that a friend of ours owned) and then she moves to this kind of apartment complex. Well, we had some friends staying at this complex that’s famous for actors (The Highland Gardens Hotel) and we couldn’t film inside the rooms, so we used the apartment where Wendell and Luke were living together, and made it look as if it was inside the complex. When we finished shooting, they were back in their lives in this same place. That bedroom was his bedroom; her bedroom was her bedroom.

If I would’ve been using non-actors, then it would’ve been really tough, but they’re professionals. They’ve been doing this for so many years, they knew how to create their own dividing lines.

Also, I discouraged Wendell from directing her son, and I realized there were many scenes that were a little too convenient in making Betty right about Chet, and I wanted to throw wrenches into the works, like when she talks to her son about using girls, and says ‘girls are not just kisses.’ That wasn’t in the script.