Life During Wartime: Happiness Recast

"Unfortunately, I don't think it's cyclical right now what's going on," Solondz frets. "There's been a kind of shift that we have to figure how to contend with: The 20th century was defined by the movie as the preeminent touchstone of pop culture. It no longer is. You now have to compete with the Internet, you compete with the TV with a thousand channels, the DVR, the piracy. Most people don't wanna go out. I think the studio movies are doing well, [but] this 3-D thing seems out of desperation, like a replay of the '50s — like, 'My God, TV's coming!' The little movies, audiences have dwindled. How many American filmmakers actually have careers outside of the studio system?"

Solondz himself has never taken a work-for-hire gig, or dabbled in TV, or directed a film he hasn't written. He pays the bills by teaching at NYU. "I never thought, in a million years, I would ever want to teach," Solondz says. "Then I learned that they could give me a generous arrangement, it could make my life much more manageable. It's strange, because they have a school in Singapore so I teach there in the fall for six weeks, and then I teach in the spring for 12 weeks in New York. Singapore is a lot like Boca Raton, Florida — only instead of the Jews, you've got the Chinese."

Are you happy now? Ally Sheedy, Paul Reubens and Shirley Henderson in Life During Wartime

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More About

• Todd Solondz
• Happiness (Movie)
• Life During Wartime (Movie)
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• War and Conflict

Speaking of Jews in Florida, faith plays a much more direct role in Wartime than it did in Happiness; with its ghosts crashing the physical world and plotlines dovetailing at a bar mitzvah, Solondz's latest feels in some sense like a companion piece to the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man. "In my head, the family was Jewish [in Happiness]," Solondz says. "Not Maplewood. Trish married a gentile. And look how she paid for it!"