When you construct a collage you ultimately affect the modern values of the pieces you cut up to build it. I wanted to ask a question about rewriting the last line of T.S. Elliott's The Hollow Men. Initially I thought this was about spin but now I'm seeing it differently.

RK: Flip flopping T.S. Eliot's last line in The Hollow Men was an absurd statement. [The original goes] "Not with a bang but a whimper." Me, [I think] that's T.S. Eliot having a premonition about global warming. The whimper is us slowly drowning ourselves over many hundreds of years. This is the flip-flop of that [notion] where it all ends on the fun party weekend before the election in 2008. It all happens just the day after tomorrow -- just right around the corner. The idea that "with a bang" is Hollywood blockbuster hero Dwayne Johnson is your guide through that final three days. It felt comedic and it felt like an inversion of the poem was the right way to go.

It also seems to be a good tennis fellow for your Road Not Taken reference. It seemed to me as if you were saying "we took the road more commonly taken, and here we are."

RK: The Road Not Taken really is the one where we all vote, take a stand, make a difference and try to solve the energy crisis together. That's the 'road not taken', unfortunately.





The aspect of the film I found most challenging was the acting. You've wrangled some adept talent here but their performances sometimes broach the realm of camp, which I should qualify can be ambiguous if not easy to confuse for poor performance. As deliberate as I understand the performances were, could you explain Timberlake's histrionics and Johnson's Monty Burns impersonations?

RK: (Laughs) It's funny you say "Monty Burns." Dwayne was playing Boxer Santeros but he's also switching into Jericho Kane, renegade cop: The Ralph Meeker character in Kiss Me Deadly. And he studied Ralph Meeker's lowering voice. That became Jericho Kane and he's a schizophrenic [living] between those two identities. It was a deliberate discussion had with each actor to understand the role he was playing and the whole greater mystery was a lack in my mind. With Justin it was all about - he's this doomsday prophet who's a famous guy who's been drafted and disfigured by his best friend in Iraq and now he's been put on this perch in front of this big alternative fuel center to guard it. [He's] a terrorist in the Santa Monica Bay. And he's dealing this underground drug. The elaborate mythology the audience has understood, Justin was able to latch onto that, in a way. Like you said, it was all very deliberate. I was just trying to capture the humanity beneath any of these eccentricities they developed.

Do you feel that could be a future vehicle for camp?

RK: Yeah, but the characters are all sincere, even when they're acting eccentric. What the actors were trying to do was remain sincere in their moments of eccentricity. Dwayne is really terrified when the woman pulls the gun on him at the beach. He had an absurd facial expression but he was terrified and really is schizophrenic and thinks he's the cop trying to talk her down with the gun. I think one of the more important things to understand about Dwayne's character is he is schizophrenic and he is playing this ridiculous cop character. He's researching the role to get into character.



JT bringing apocalypse back.

The film involves a lot of parallel texts: TV, news, the plot of the underground, the plot of the right wing, Boxer's story, the script he's carrying around. And all these texts blur into each other and share details. Tell me why you felt this blurring was important to involve in your apocalypse satire?

RK: I think that there's a metaphysical quality to the way in which the news media is scripted and our lives feel scripted. In a way [when] you think about the way the war in Iraq was sold to us, almost as a screenplay. And I feel like there's "what could have been" and "what we're living with now." It's a very metaphysical thing. It's hard to wrap it all into one easy explanation but sometimes I wonder if there's someone out there who's written a screenplay for our lives. And living in Hollywood, are we all living in a movie? Sometimes I feel like my life is a movie.

Are you talking about destiny?

RK: Yeah. It is about predestination. What is the destiny of our country? Are we going to be able to pull ourselves out of this or are we going to continue [like this]. Are we going to self-destruct?

The critics are really wrestling with this one but I for one hope it's seen by a lot of people.

RK: I'm proud of it. I can finally sleep at night.