in a million years they would dip into their pockets. It's a tricky thing -- filmmaking isn't cheap, even low budget is incredibly expensive, and they put their money where their mouth was. The reason they did it wasn't that they had a particular axe to grind or to see a return on their investment but they just wanted to help out a friend. Aside from saying they'd do it, that was the last involvement they ever had in the film until they watched it. JR: Trying to find financing like that must be very hard. Would you prefer to continue working at that level, where you perhaps have more freedom over the end product, or would you rather be given a bigger budget with more marketing heft but less say over the final film? MW: In an ideal world I'd like to move between different budgets and different projects. I think there's a strange logic applied to directors' careers. You make a short film for about ten grand, then you maybe do a TV show where you get to play with forty grand, then you go off an do a first feature for half a million, then the Hollywood film and suddenly there's no where for you to go unless you're doing a film for big money. For me, the most interesting careers are people like Orson Welles, Steven Soderbergh and Michael Winterbottom -- whom I've worked with -- who tend to make the budget fit the movie rather