David Gordon Green shot his first film, George Washington, in 1999, the summer after graduating film school. Green set his coming-of-age story, which featured a cast of young nonactors he’d met in churches and at YMCA casting calls, against the wooded backstreets and abandoned industrial sites of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. George Washington went on to scoop up awards from multiple film festivals. His next film, All the Real Girls, starring Patricia Clarkson, Paul Schneider, and Zooey Deschanel, is a love story set in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It fared well critically, but disappeared from movie theaters in just a few weeks. In 2004, his third film, Undertow, a dark, quirky thriller about a boy’s murder, suffered an even shorter lifespan: despite the backing of United Artists and producer Terrence Malick, the film all but vanished after a single Halloween weekend. In spite of the commercial challenges his films have faced, Green has emerged as one of the most interesting and idiosyncratic independent filmmakers of the last decade.

Like Malick’s, Green’s films are emotionally driven stories told through photography and sound—warm, yellow-gray skies hover over flannel-green trees and scalloped junk heaps. Green stays true to the term “motion picture,” orchestrating his scenes with slow camera approaches and long, static shots. Eschewing overly expository dialogue, Green’s characters speak with the natural clunkiness that comes from trying to communicate a multitude of intense and distinct emotions simultaneously. Underneath it all—perhaps in reaction to the nihilism and violence of the big-budget independents of the ’90s—Green’s most powerful asset is his sense of optimism. No matter how bleak the subject matter, his films hum with a feeling that despite the catastrophic nature of the present, these times, too, will pass.

When we spoke, Green had just finished the sound mixes for Snow Angels, his adaptation of the novel by Stewart O’Nan. Financed independently and featuring Sam Rockwell, Kate Beckinsale, and Amy Sedaris, the film is the story of a young man’s disintegrating family, his old babysitter, and a murder set against the brittle winter of a suburb of Pittsburgh. We met on a conspicuously cloudy Saturday morning in West Los Angeles, early enough to avoid competition with the serious brunchers.

—George Ducker

I. BLOCKBUSTER

THE BELIEVER: You’re from Little Rock?

DAVID GORDON GREEN: I was born in Little Rock. I grew up mostly outside of Dallas.

BLVR: What’s the topography like down there? Is it mostly hills or flat plains?

DGG: It’s not in anything. But it’s near a lot of things. So you can get to the woods real quick.

BLVR: Were you an indoor kid or an outdoor kid?

...