how crazy and Fitzcarraldo -bizarre or how crazy generally you try to be, yelling at people with your bullhorn, you can't push a single pencil across the table without help. It's just the way it is. The final product will always be a sum of all of the parts that are working on it. So if you want to understand cinema, you have to think about it as a social dynamic. And you have to investigate it and unpack it as a social project. And so for us, we went away and wanted to see first if we could write together. And once we determined we could write, we have such a great time together, just socially, we knew that directing would be a snap. AVC: Your films all touch on themes of fascism, oppression, and abuse of power. Is there a reason that dynamic attracts you? Is it more that these are just good traditional story seeds? LW: Power is something artists have been writing about since The Iliad . Okay, power is a part of the human experience. You see power dynamics trying to be understood in The Iliad , and you see them in The Master . It's still the same excavation of power. Foucault gave us insight into power in the postmodern world, and now we understand it in a different way than Homer did, but power will be a subject in the human story, I think, as long as we're human. [Laughs.] And so when