He might push critics and movie goers to distraction with his polarizing work, but writer/director Todd Solondz hardly comes across as a rebel rouser or an arrogant, curmudgeonly artiste. Rather, he sits on the couch in plain slacks and simple button down shirt and asks diffidently how he can help. "What can I illuminate?" he says, in the manner of someone who has been perpetually misunderstood. Throughout his absorbing career, whether as director of the critically acclaimed Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness, or of the critically drubbed Storytelling and Palindromes, he's sat there, happy to discuss his work. With his latest, Life During Wartime -- a kind of sequel to the controversial Happiness -- he seems prepared to suffer the slings and arrows as much as he is to accept the plaudits. He spoke with us about his new film, French sensibilities, and Obama's favorite TV character.

I’m starting my review of the film, and I pulled out this story, which might not even be true. Supposedly, when Kafka read "Metamorphosis" to his friends, he was howling with laughter. To him, it was a total comedy and he didn’t understand how others didn't see it that way. You have described your work as "sad comedy." The question is do you find it actually funny?
Well, yeah, I think. As you say, I acknowledge that these are comedies. They would be unbearable if they weren’t funny. I couldn’t sit through them otherwise. I think it’s a question of sensibility, with the audiences. When horrible things happen, and they happen often sometimes, you can just take pills or jump out a window, or you can laugh. I like to laugh and have fun, but at the cruelty of fate and the way it plays with you. But I think in my movies, comedy and pathos are intertwined and it’s a tricky line that I navigate. It’s trouble that I get into, because years ago I remember when I screened Happiness in Telluride, afterwards that night, a college kid, a little drunk maybe, he came up to me and said, “Man, your movie was awesome, loved it, and when that kid got raped it was hilarious!” and then I knew I was in trouble. I knew that I’d been playing with fire. That’s why subsequently I said my movies aren’t for everyone, especially people who like them.

To keep with the idea of the sad comedy: right at the beginning of this movie as in Happiness, there’s the awkward dinner scene. The character Alan is trying to explain to his wife all the things he’s no longer doing, and he starts going into this long, intricate list of pretty heinous and awful sounding things. It's a funny moment, but he’s saying this list with such emotion, tears streaming down his face, it’s like you don’t have permission to laugh, or if you do, you feel kind of cruel. You were clearly making a different kind of film than the standard American comedy, which gives you not only permission to laugh, but very obvious places to laugh.
They’re not sad comedies! See, that’s not a form in which the Hollywood system operates. So it’s just different. It’s apples and oranges. You can do a lovely, classical romantic comedy, and that’s wonderful, it’s just a different animal. You can do it well or not do it well. And likewise, I can succeed on my own terms, but it’s just a different kind of experience with different kinds of aims. My sensibility responds to this blend; it’s a kind of prism through which I see and experience and express my sense of the world. But if you are doing a so-called light romantic comedy, it doesn’t mean inherently that this is an inferior form, it’s just different.

Still, it really challenges American audiences in a way it maybe wouldn’t challenge a French audience quite so much -- and audience that hasn’t been so steeped in this particular kind of cinematic bubblegum.
Don’t overvalue the French sensibility. I think it’s really not the subject matter in my movies so much as it is all about the sensibility. Because the subject matter is out there, on TV in the media every day of the week 24/7. I think it really is the sensibility and those who feel comfortable with it and can embrace and respond to it, and other who feel alienated by it and reject it or condemn it. I don’t think just by virtue of being French, they have their own traditions, and while they do value the notion of art and the art of film in ways that Americans don’t, it doesn’t mean that the French audience is naturally more inclined.

Is there a pantheon of sad comedies that you favor?
There are a lot of sad comedies. Look, even Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. It’s not like I invented it in that sense. I enjoyed Greenberg and A Serious Man. I think Greenberg has a poignancy to it, and A Serious Man I wouldn’t characterize as a sad comedy, but I liked them both. So there is room for other voices. These are voices, of course, who don’t yield much at the box office but there is an audience for them.

Your career is largely supported by your audience. You’ve definitely found a following.
My “career” is in quotation marks, please. But I am fortunate that I have been able to make what I’ve made. When I think, 'oh my god, someone gave me money for this,' you know, I’m very lucky. And knock wood [sic], my new movie won’t fall apart, and I’ll get to do it again.

In a lot of films from a kid’s perspective, like the Harry Potter series, the kid is the empowered one. But from the adult perspective, such as in your films, small kids don't have any power of their own, completely being controlled by damaged and wounded adults. Do you see kids as being very much powerless? Or, in the end of this film, does Timmy actually does have a big influence?
Well, he does, in a very tragic, sort of sad impact. But children are the most vulnerable. That’s the fantasy, is that they are empowered. They are the most vulnerable and classically, the most victimized, by all statistics. So they are a kind of prism through which one can express and gain understanding into the adult world because they are engaging insofar as they reflect who we are as adults. You try to be true to your characters, you may not agree with what they have to say or like what they do but you have to respect the integrity of that reality that you’re setting up.

Was your decision to recast everyone for this sequel of sorts in any way inform the way in which you wrote the screenplay? Were you thinking of different actors at the time?
Well, the only two I knew I wanted from the beginning were Allison Janney and Ally Sheedy. All the others I figured out later. But, yeah, I wanted to have the freedom to not be beholden to the literalness of what had been established way back when. I wanted to play free and fast and loose with these details, and not have to think “well, she could be a little more like this…” because then I could get new colors, shades and meanings. It’s like Paul Reubens, like John Lovitz, both very funny character people. But Paul Reubens of course has a whole history as well, that I think lends an extra layer of sorrow, of pathos, poignancy to his scenes. And Michael Kenneth Williams came in, I hadn’t known "The Wire" at the time, but he came and read -- a very powerful actor. So I just retooled it to make it work for him, to suit his qualities. And I remember he said to me, “Todd, I’m not funny.” And I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.”

Have you subsequently watched "The Wire"?
Yeah but I don’t have it in order, so, no, but he’s wonderful. And you know he’s Obama’s favorite TV character, Omar. Not many presidents would have chosen the gay drug dealer as a favorite TV character.

Read our review of the film.