I interviewed Mike Judge shortly before his newest film, “Extract,” opened on Sept. 4 – and then I promptly misplaced the notebook with my notes from the interview. 

I recovered the notebook in a recent fit of office-cleaning (a rare occurrence). And “Extract” is still playing on hundreds of screens across America. So better late than never, here’s a quick Q&A with Mike Judge, writer-director of “Extract” and creator of “Beavis and Butthead,” “King of the Hill,” “Office Space” and “Idiocracy.” (More…)

“This was a challenge from start to finish because it was hard to establish the tone,” Diablo Cody is saying, sitting in what appears to be a well-used hotel room where she’s just spent a day doing round-table interviews.

“Writing a horror-thriller-comedy mash-up is difficult. Plus Karyn and I are both oddballs. So you had a huge studio that’s used to making things straightforward and packaging them accordingly. And you had the two of us, who wanted to make ‘Andy Warhol’s Dracula.’” (More…)

Twenty years after he burst onto the scene with “sex, lies, & videotape,” Steven Soderbergh, dressed in black casual clothes, sits back on a couch in a Toronto hotel and considers what’s changed in the intervening decades.

“I don’t feel that different, really – but then I don’t feel different from when I graduated from high school,” Soderbergh, 46, says. “I know more about my job now, by virtue of having practiced. I’d say the only thing I know now for sure is that people don’t change. For a while, I labored under the illusion that people did  change or that you could change them. I let go of that fantasy, which was a healthy thing to do. I’ve realized that they can change, but they have to do it on their own. They have to want to.” (More…)

“I got dragged in kicking and screaming,” Joe Berlinger is saying on the telephone. “It’s the last film I thought I would make.”

Berlinger, 47, is talking about “Crude,” his newest venture, a documentary that’s bound to inflame viewers – even as it becomes the target of a face-saving smear campaign by Chevron. (More…)