At the time, and still to this moment, I feel like it was a good idea. I love the movie and it means something to me, but unfortunately I’m still mired in the aftermath of all the **** that surrounded the release, so I think it’ll be a while before I can kick back and appreciate it like I did when I first put it together. About a year ago, when I had the first cut together, I loved the movie and I still kind of love it, but it’s clouded by the **** we had to put up with to get it into the theatres in the first place.

So I think, like with Mallrats – that got savaged by the critics and did really badly at the box office – it took a few years for me to able to appreciate the movie again. That movie found its audience eventually though. People rented it on video and wound up digging it, and it’s the gateway film for all our movies when you talk to the fanbase, because that’s the movie they saw first, and it led them to the other movies. So I wound up falling in love with it again, and I’m sure the same will happen with this.

Could you ever see yourself doing what Ollie does in the film, and sacrificing your career to take care of family commitments?

Yeah. Absolutely. For my kid? Absolutely. And it’s weird because this is the one time where I’ve come up against journalists who get really dug in on this issue. Some people think it’s inauthentic, or disingenuous, or very Hollywood. My take on it is: most people who take issue with the idea of giving up a career for somebody, they feel like they’re being judged because they like their career. I’m always like, “Do you have a kid?” And they’re like, “No.” So I say, talk to me when you’ve got a kid because then it’s a whole different story.

You’re trying to be a role model and shape their existence, and you get a small window to that, and it becomes of paramount importance. Luckily I have this gig where I get to do both. But you’re talking to me eight months after my father died and, believe me, if I knew my old man was going to die, I would have given up working for two years just to hang out with him. I would put my family ahead of my career in a heartbeat.

The biggest pain in the arse I ever worked with… Linda Fiorentino. When we were making Dogma, the cast was working in a favoured nations type of affair where everyone was getting paid the same – scale, which is the minimum wage for the movie business. And we were all trapped out in Pittsburgh shooting this movie, which is the middle of nowhere, so whenever people had a few days off they would ask if they could go to New York, or back to Los Angeles, or elsewhere. I always said “sure”, because why would I want to make anybody sit in Pittsburgh if they’ve got something else to do?

Linda, on the other hand, had to work every day on the movie because she was in every scene, so she really never got to leave and she got irritated when cast members would go elsewhere. She got really angry about that and asked me to do something about it. And I said, “What am I supposed to do? I mean, they want to go away and they’re not working, so that’s fine.” And one day she stopped talking to me for a whole day, because she was so irritated by the fact that other people got to leave the set. That was kind of weird. The weirdest experience I had making a movie.

Do you believe in test screenings?

Only inasmuch as it’s great to watch the movie with an audience. I don’t believe in the process of filling out the cards and doing the focus group where they ask the very pointed questions about “what did you like?” and “what didn’t you like?” and “what could we change?” S*** like that. But I do like sitting there and watching with an audience, because you get a feel for what works and what doesn’t work, particularly if you’re working with a comedy – so much so that you don’t really need the cards. The cards muck up the process, and when they start breaking it down into percentages and whatnot, that’s when the movie starts to suffer.