“It was fascinating and illuminating and exhausting,” Sarah Polley says, sipping iced tea in a Manhattan restaurant. “I wanted to focus on all these voices telling the story in different ways. To me, what was interesting was not the story, but the way you tell it.”

She’s talking about “Stories We Tell,” the personal (and yet universal) tale of Polley’s family, which opened in limited release May 10. The film – Polley’s third as a director – looks at Polley’s family history, focusing on the story of her mother, Diane, who died when Polley was 11.

But, instead of merely remembering her mother’s dynamic life as a vivid, vivacious woman with a love of show business, Polley uses the film to explore the central mystery of her own life: her real parentage. Constructed almost as a detective story at times, the film first paints a loving portrait of Diane Polley’s too-short life, then gets into family secrets.

Specifically: In her teens, Polley became the focus of a running family joke that she looked nothing like her father, Michael, and that, perhaps, he wasn’t her biological father. As she got older, she learned more about her mother’s life – specifically, a six-week stint as an actress working in Montreal (the Polleys lived in Toronto) that preceded her pregnancy with Sarah. Though Michael visited Diane in Montreal and rekindled their marriage, Sarah’s paternity remained a subject of jokey speculation.

To look more deeply into the issue, Polley decided to make a film about it, sitting each of her four siblings and half-siblings down to tell the family’s story. She gathered more than 200 hours of footage, including reenactments of key scenes involving actors to play her parents and their children.

“There were a lot of pitfalls to the idea, not least of which was self-indulgence,” says Polley, whose previous films were the award-winning “Away From Her” and “Take This Waltz.” “That’s why it was so essential to create a narrative of our lives, to possibly find the truth in the past.

“Which is, of course, impossible. The closest I could get was a cacophony of voices. I wanted to be inclusive, to let everybody speak. And that felt close to the truth.”

She had no trouble convincing her family to participate, though her mother’s sister “had reservations about this stuff coming out. But she was supportive despite her reservations,” Polley says. “But everybody had reservations. I interviewed them each for about 10 hours and I don’t think anyone was elated about that. It was a tough process. But I expected a lot more resistance than I got.”

The form the film took shifted in Polley’s mind – and in the editing room – as she worked on it: “I thought I was making an experimental film that was a hybrid between fictional and documentary,” she says. “I thought it would be more theatrical. In fact, one idea I had was to have everyone in a theater, taking turns on stage telling their story. I wanted a question in people’s minds what was real and what wasn’t.”

The film, she says, “could have been 40 hours long. There was so much we cut out, including a lot about my mother and the facts of life in relation to men. I mean, she produced the first ‘Kids in the Hall’ pilot and did a lot of amazing things. I had a lot of pain and regret at not being able to show the whole person. But I hope I captured her spirit.”

The mother of a 1-year-old, Polley feels torn between the various careers that pull her away from full-time parenting.

“Writing is my favorite part,” says Polley, 29, who has been acting since she was 6. “I’d like to focus on that mostly, directing now and then. It’s not practical to juggle making films, acting and having a baby.”

Any thoughts to directing herself in a film?

“I’m pretty happy directing other people,” she says, adding with a laugh, “I think directing myself would be a kind of hell.”

But before emotional scenes in “What Maisie Knew,” Julianne Moore would often warn the other actor in the scene, “Now I’m going to cry here – but I’m not really sad, I’m just acting.”

And her co-star, then-6-year-old Onata Aprile, would smile, say, “OK,” and knock the scene out of the park.

Aprile is the Maisie in “What Maisie Knew,” an adaptation of the Henry James novel, told in a modern milieu by directors David Siegel and Scott McGehee. Maisie is the young daughter of rock singer Susanna (Moore) and traveling businessman Beale (Steve Coogan), who becomes the pawn in their bitter divorce, as they battle over their daughter without really wanting custody.

“She was this very bright, present and trusting little girl,” Moore says of Aprile. “She had a great sense of humor.”

Aprile is, in fact, at the center of the film as Maisie, in an almost eerily natural, watchful performance. She always seems to be in the camera’s focus, while the marital squabbles and romantic entanglements explode in the background. Which is a lot to put on a young actress.

“I’ve worked with kids before but this whole movie revolved around this little girl,” says Alexander Skarsgard, who plays the amiable and caring bartender who marries Susanna after she divorces Beale, becoming Maisie’s de facto caregiver and stepparent. “The movie won’t work if you have the wrong girl.”

Skarsgard spends a large chunk of his time in the film interacting with Aprile, as her mother abandons her to his care while she leaves for a rock’n’roll tour. When he was offered the role, he was concerned that the chemistry be right between him and whoever the young actress would be. The Swedish actor saw video of Aprile, then flew to New York from Los Angeles to meet his would-be costar.

“I remember heading over there, thinking, ‘I hope there’s chemistry,’ because you can’t fake that – it has to be real,” he says. “But I got there and after about three seconds, I wasn’t worried. She had this phenomenal energy. She’s so alive and present and real. She can’t lie.”

The film, which was one of the top-grossing independent films when it opened last weekend, transposes James’ tale of 1890s England to 21st-century New York, but doesn’t lose the essential narcissism of Susanna and Beale.

“Narcissists – that’s exactly what they are,” Moore says. “They’re in a struggle over the child. Neither of them want custody – but both of them want to win.”

Maisie, meanwhile, seems to be the only one who sees things clearly. And she sees everything.

“She does notice things,” Moore says. “Susanna tells Maisie, ‘I used to be just like you.’ To me, that harked back to a mother that ignored Susanna, and her vowing to be a better mother to her own child. Instead, she’s what she is. And that’s the tragedy.”

Xan Cassavetes didn’t set out to make a vampire film. In fact, though her newest film is called “Kiss of the Damned,” opening today (5/3/13), she’s still not convinced she has.

Think of it instead as an obsessive love story, some of whose characters happen to be vampires.

“To me, it’s about how you navigate a combination of primal urges and intellectual and moral values,” she says, sitting in a West Village coffee shop. “The question is amplified when it’s posed with vampires in the world. But they’re the questions I live with every day, questions that interest me a lot.”

Her vampires are as much about lust as bloodlust, in this story of a woman (Josephine del la Baume) who seduces/is seduced by a screenwriter (Milo Ventimiglia). The relationship – and perhaps the entire vampire world – is threatened by the conflict that arises with the arrival of her sister. The film is as much about flesh as blood, and about the power dynamics of sex.

“The movie that influenced me the most – or the two movies – are the two ‘Nosferatu’s,” she says. “I love Herzog’s because it has Klaus Kinski and Isabelle Adjani; it’s in color, which is so beautiful, with the most amazing sound design and score. It underscores the incredible loneliness of Nosferatu. The vampire movies I embraced as a kid used vampirism as a metaphor that expressed deep sadness and a lot of human qualities.”

“Kiss of the Damned,” in fact, happened by accident. Cassavetes, whose father was the late filmmaker-actor John Cassavetes, had been trying since her last film, the 2004 documentary “Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession,” to make a feature. After several years of trying and honing a script, she was ready to begin preproduction on the film, with the money in place.

“It was just one of those ones where you planned to make something else and destiny changed your course,” she says. “I was set to make a more expensive film. I had the financing. And I realized I just didn’t feel the connection to the script that I had.

“So I wrote ‘Kiss’ over Thanksgiving. And I told my investors I had good news and bad news. The good news was I had an inexpensive, great vampire movie for them. The bad news was that I didn’t want to shoot the other script.

“They said yes. The screenplay was probably more commercial-looking than what I made. But all the investors are proud that it turned out the way it did.”

Cassavetes ticks off the location of the rest of her famous family on this warm spring day in New York. Mother Gena Rowlands is in Europe, making a film. Brother Nick Cassavetes is elsewhere in Manhattan, shooting a romantic comedy called “The Other Woman.” Sister Zoe Cassavetes, having spent several years directing commercials in Paris, is back in Los Angeles, working on her next movie. And Xan is sitting in a coffee shop, talking about where her filmmaking career is going.

It’s been almost a decade since “Z Channel,” time Cassavetes has spent writing and trying to get movies made. Though her documentary was well-reviewed, she had trouble convincing financiers that she could make a feature film.

“I have taste that doesn’t make people who want to make money super-excited,” Cassavetes deadpans. “We had this take for a film with Jonathan Caouette and my sister and Allen Hughes. We were going to each make a 30-minute film that would offer a critique of one segment of our culture. It was probably a little too arty for people. It took up a lot of time. I’d take writing jobs to make a living.

“But I’m not really an ambitious person when it comes to career. If I had been, I could have parlayed ‘Z Channel’ into a career. But that’s not the kind of ambitious that I am. Which is that I want to make what I want to make.”

Mira Nair’s film of the novel “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” isn’t about terrorism, Kiefer Sutherland observes, but about the reaction to terrorism – a very different thing.

“It’s what I was moved by when I read the material,” Sutherland, 46, says, relaxing in a conference room of a Union Square hotel in Manhattan. “My focus on 9/11 was on the victims – in the towers, in the planes – and all that loss.

“But I didn’t think of the profound ripple effect it had on people of the Muslim faith, on people of color – of the effect it had on them here and abroad. This script made me focus on the reaction – from suspending our own civil liberties to being able to get through that initial anger and deal with the specific problem, as opposed to just lashing out.”

In the film, Riz Ahmed plays Changez Khan, a Pakistani who goes to Princeton and rises quickly to become a Wall Street analyst, who is hired by Sutherland, as the head of a firm who spots Changez as a young man with a future. But that future starts to crumble after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, which doesn’t necessarily radicalize Changez so much as alter the way he is perceived in the U.S.

“I love the character Riz plays,” Sutherland notes. “He understands, he empathizes – hey, the kid is living the American dream. But if you keep telling someone that they’re something – even if they’re not that thing – eventually they’ll become that thing. In our reaction to 9/11, I think we alienated a lot of people who could have helped us deal with the real problem.

“When I read the script, I was really moved by it. I found the script unbelievably enlightening. I hope people who see the movie are as moved by it as I was by the material. Ideologically, it represented how I felt.”

It seems ironic to Sutherland, who spent 2001-10 starring on the counter-terrorism thriller “24” on TV, that no one so far in interviews has mentioned the show – with its explicit and melodramatic use of torture as a regular plot device. But Sutherland is ready when it is mentioned.

“My response is simple: For starters, we were shooting the first season of ‘24’ six months before 9/11 happened,” he says. “And ‘24’ was born out of a fantasy. We were trying to create a new format with which to tell a story. The torture sequences were a great dramatic device that gave the show a sense of urgency and dynamics. Whereas this film is a response to a reality. To me, the difference is night and day.”

Sutherland notes that a lot of reaction and opinions about terrorism following 9/11 were “born out of ignorance. That leads to prejudice and racism. It’s too easy to issue a blanket indictment of a group of people. If you take a minute to learn about the situation before you form an opinion, it helps. But that’s something we do – myself included.”

Since the end of “24,” for which he won both an Emmy and a Golden Globe, Sutherland has been working relatively steadily, doing a revival of “That Championship Season” on Broadway and, most recently, in the two seasons of the series “Touch.” While that show doesn’t look like it will be back for a third season, Sutherland says, “I had a great time. I really enjoyed the second season. I loved the pilot script and just decided that I’d rather do it than regret not doing it. I also like working. I seem to do better when I’m working than when I’m not.”

Currently filming “Pompeii” for director Paul W.S. Anderson, Sutherland also hopes to finally make a film with his father, Donald Sutherland, a western they plan to shoot in Calgary in August.

“It’s the first time we’re working together,” Sutherland says. “It’s one of those one-shot deals, where you want to find something that is going to be special. When Jane and Henry Fonda finally worked together, it was ‘On Golden Pond.’ You only get to do something like this once.”

He’d also like to do more theater, and has a particular interest in finding a new play to work on.

“I guess that’s partly my fault – I might not be on top of anybody’s list, when it comes to access to new material,” he says. “So I do revivals of ‘The Glass Menagerie’ (which he did in Canada with mother Shirley Douglas) and ‘That Championship Season.’ What I’d like to do now is find a new play I was excited about.”

He’s a lithe, light-fingered actor who casually steals scenes with impeccable comic timing and unexpectedly rubbery physicality. Tudyk has been good in a lot of bad stuff but he’s even better in good (if little-seen) comedies like Frank Oz’s original “Death at a Funeral” (in which he played a nervous potential son-in-law who accidentally takes a hallucinogen before a funeral) and “Tucker and Dale Versus Evil,” as a backwoods type mistaken for a serial killer. And let’s not forget Wash on “Firefly” – or Steve the Pirate in “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.” Arrrrh.

But Tudyk is on the phone to talk about playing Ben Chapman, the Philadelphia Phillies manager who becomes the face of racism in “42,” which topped the box-office charts last weekend. In the film about Jackie Robinson’s first year in the majors, Chapman shows up spitting one racial epithet after another from in front of the Phillies’ dugout at Ebbets Field, a monologue of bitter bigotry that left Tudyk feeling slightly hungover after each day of filming.

“It was like I got wasted at a bad party,” Tudyk says. “It would leave a stain on your mood, and put you into a bad mood into the next day.”

In fact, according to the film’s director Brian Helgeland, the hate-speech that Chapman spewed (and which got laughs from his players) was toned down for the film. But that didn’t make it any easier for Tudyk, who had to chant, “Hey, nigger, nigger, nigger,” at actor Chadwick Boseman, playing Jackie Robinson.

“It was hard to get past my own feelings,” Tudyk says. “I had to get past that actor feeling of being someone sensitive and liberal, who’s not used to fighting.”

To steel himself, he would go on the Internet, seeking out videos of streetfights: “But not those cage matches, where they both want to be there,” he notes. “The ones where someone is caught up in a fight he doesn’t want to be in, where he’s kind of saying, ‘Help me,’ and nobody does. I’d watch four or five of those and, when I stopped flinching and I had a knot in my stomach, I knew I was good to go. I had a good store of aggression and anger that I could take to work.”

Yet Tudyk’s job was not to be the most hateful person possible – but to be someone who would have fit right into polite society of the period: “Ben Chapman was like a lot of good ol’ boys I’ve met. He’s nice and funny – and then he tells a joke that’s extraordinarily racist and you think, ‘Oh no, I’ve got to go.’ I love the idea of him being somebody who could be likable. There were people who liked him.”

As he researched the role, Tudyk found that, in fact, Chapman’s entire career had been marked by a pugnacious (and racist) personality: “He would say, ‘Well, I’m an equal opportunity racist. I call Joe DiMaggio a wop and Hank Greenberg a kike. It’s all in good fun.’ He’d argue that, hey, this is a serious game and we’re playing for keeps so we’ll do what it takes to win. But at the same time, he’d say, hey, we’re just having some fun. There was a twisted logic there I could make sense of.”

Chapman’s own history was checkered as well: “He was one of the first players to get fined by his own team – like $100 or $200 when that sort of fine was not given – for starting a fight in the outfield over a Jewish slur he used on one of his own teammates. Apparently 200 people came on the field and started fighting. He actually got into an argument with an umpire one time, pulled the guy’s mask off and punched him in the face.”

With “42” in the theaters, Tudyk still has “Suburgatory,” the ABC sitcom which is just finishing its second season and is predicted to return for a third. He’s happy to have some downtime in a career that he never saw coming.

Growing up in a suburb of Dallas, Tudyk was active in speech – as opposed to drama – in high school “because I didn’t like the drama teacher. He was one of those guys who played a lot of mind games with his students. And besides, I was going to be in hotel management. I loved my job at Taco Bueno. I was taking classes in advance hotel management and thought I would work at a fancy hotel.”

But a teacher told him that he was too good not to try acting: “She convinced me I could become an actor and not be poor. She had this insane confidence.”

He went to a two-year college in Dallas, while finding acting gigs around town, before finally deciding that he needed actual training if he was going to act. He applied to the Juilliard School and was accepted: “Then I left before I graduated because I didn’t much care for it.”

Which was fine, because he was already working: He’d been cast to play a multiplicity of characters in Alan Zweibel’s “Bunny Bunny,” for which he won both the Theater World and Clarence Derwent awards.

While that play was being developed, he held one of his last non-acting jobs, working at Harry’s Burritos on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. There was a gorgeous soap opera actress who was a regular customer, who would come in with her handsome boyfriend and chat with Tudyk.

“I was so in love with her – but she’d bring in her boyfriend,” Tudyk recalls. “But the guy was so nice and tipped me so well that I couldn’t hate him. Six years later, I’m working on ‘Firefly’ with Nathan Fillion, who’s now one of my best friends, and we’re talking about our early days in New York. And we figured out that he had been that actress’ boyfriend and I had been waiting on him.”

We’re supposed to be talking about his latest film, a little indie that’s going out in limited release today (3/22/13) called “Silver Case.” But with a movie resume that includes more than 150 titles (15 since the start of 2010, alone), the veteran character actor has a lot to talk about. We barely get the chance to talk “Silver Case,” in which he plays a sly dealer, when he’s asked what else he’s been up to.

“I did Sidney Furie’s latest (“Pride of Lions”),” he says. “We shot that in Sault Ste. Marie. It was summer but it started to get cold. Canada was not a pleasant choice; they didn’t even have good chicken there.”

At 78, Cassel has been acting in movies for 50 years, ever since he wandered into an acting workshop in New York run by a restless actor named John Cassavetes. The workshop ultimately turned into “Shadows,” Cassavetes’ first film, on which Cassel served as part of the crew and appeared in briefly. It created a long-time friendship between Cassel and Cassavetes that lasted until the director’s death in 1989.

I met Cassel in 1990, while doing interviews for my biography of Sam Peckinpah. I spent a wild day riding around Santa Monica with him while talking to him for my book on Cassavetes in 2003, spending another afternoon with him in New York the next year for a follow-up. He’s voluble, funny, occasionally irascible, full of stories and opinions, and was always ready to chat about Cassavetes when I needed to check a fact or a story.

When I note that his IMDB page makes it sound as though he keeps busy, he says, “Everybody offers me everything. I read these things and go, ‘My God, where do they get the money?’ I wait for something good or something that will be fun. But they’ve got to pay me if they want me to work.”

I mention a film of his I’d seen on DVD, offered to me for the film clubs I host by one of its producers. The 2008 drama, about geriatric romance in a hospice, was called “Reach for Me” and was directed by LeVar Burton; Cassel costarred with Adrienne Barbeau. It was bittersweet and funny, though it was never released theatrically.

“Yeah, we barely got paid for that,” he recalls. “I think they were selling it at video stores in Hawaii. Hey, you’ve got to pay me when I work. If they’ve got the money, I’ll do it, although it’s mainly about the story and whether I’ll have fun with the actors.”

As much as Cassavetes blazed his own trail at a time when the words “independent film” were a rarity instead of the norm, he never stiffed his actors, Cassel recalled.

“With John it was different. He had a system he worked. He’d get somebody to put up the money and we’d go shoot. John was amazing. He had the freedom to do all the wonderful things he did. It was a whole different way of working. John was the smartest guy I ever met.”

Cassel has had big roles and small ones; he received an Oscar nomination for Cassavetes’ “Faces” in 1968, a coup for a virtual unknown. Over the years, he’s worked with and befriended everyone from Warren Beatty to Dennis Hopper: “I was there at the end with Dennis,” he says. “It’s what happens. You get old and then you take a walk in the woods.”

He’s served as muse to Cassavetes (who wrote 1971’s “Minnie and Moskowitz” for Cassel and Gena Rowlands) and to filmmaker Alexandre Rockwell, who wrote the marvelous 1992 film, “In the Soup,” for Cassel (which teamed him with Steve Buscemi). And he has appeared in a handful of Wes Anderson’s films: “Rushmore,” “The Royal Tenenbaums,” “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.”

When asked if he enjoyed working with Anderson, however, he says, “Up to a point.” He recalls working on “Tenenbaums,” in which he and Kumar Pallana played doormen, doing a scene with Gene Hackman: “Gene was a great actor, but Kumar was not an actor,” he says. “So you’re asking Gene to work with someone who doesn’t know how to do it. It wasn’t right. Wes would insist on these minute little things. But everyone thinks he’s a genius. And the Farrelly brothers – everybody thinks they’re geniuses, too. I don’t think there are many geniuses around.”

Cassel has an apartment in a tower above the beach at Santa Monica and says, simply, “I’m getting older. We all do. The toughest part is that I don’t drive anymore. I gave that up. Taking the bus is a pain in the ass, but people give me rides. The most fun I have is seeing my grandkids. My son has two girls and my daughter has twin girls and a boy.”

And, of course, there’s the question of mortality. Hopper, a long-time friend, lived in nearby Venice until his death in 2010. Mention of his name reminds Cassel of working with him on “Easy Rider.”

“I was his assistant director on that,” Cassel says, though IMDB makes no mention of that credit. “We had a lot of great times doing that movie. We thought it was just a movie about guys on motorcycles.”

So when actor Matthew Fox took on the role of Fellers in “Emperor,” which opened in limited release March 8, he figured the interpretation was up to him.

“MacArthur is this iconic military figure,” Fox says, sitting in a midtown Manhattan conference room during a recent press day. “There’s a lot of imagery of him. It was interesting to see how much (Tommy Lee Jones, who plays MacArthur) took from that.

“But I had a lot of freedom and I didn’t have to get embroiled in the minutiae of who this guy was. My responsibility to the film was very different from Tommy Lee’s.”

In “Emperor,” Fellers is a MacArthur subordinate, part of his staff for the occupation of Japan after the end of World War II. Arriving in Japan, MacArthur assigns Fellers to investigate whether Emperor Hirohito was the one who ordered the bombing of Pearl Harbor – and, if so, whether he should be executed for it. Fellers is chosen because he had spent time in Japan prior to the war, when he was involved with a Japanese teacher he’d met in the U.S. while she was an exchange student.

“I did quite a bit of research and, in actuality, Fellers had kind of a checkered career,” Fox, 46, says. “But as an actor, you have to ask how much that helps and how much it gets in the way. I love the research; I love doing it. Ultimately, nobody knows who Fellers is. So my concern was how to serve the film best.”

Fox is enjoying a run of acting roles – and the luxury to pick and choose among them – since the end of “Lost,” the TV series that transformed him during its 2004-10 run. He played a seriously twisted serial killer opposite Tyler Perry in “Alex Cross” last year, and will appear in “World War Z” later this year.

“I read things that come my way and, every once in a while, one comes that feels absolutely inevitable,” he says. “I’m at a point, with the choices since ‘Lost’ – on a personal level, they’re exciting. I want to challenge myself to do things I haven’t done, like ‘Alex Cross’ and this film. I’d never done a period piece. That’s what I like about acting: the challenge it provides me on a personal level.”

There was a point when Fox wondered if he’d ever get that chance. His breakout role, as Charlie Salinger in the TV series “Party of Five,” seemed to constrict his choices once the series came to an end.

“Post-‘Party of Five’ was sort of a difficult time in my career,” says Fox, who grew up in Montana and went to Columbia University and got a degree in economics, with an eye toward a Wall Street career. “I was not getting a lot of opportunities outside roles that were a lot like Charlie Salinger. I’d done a big TV show and people thought that’s who I was. Don’t get me wrong – I had a fantastic time on that show and learned so much.

“But Charlie was a character that had a tone I personally am not drawn to. I felt like the male characters on the show were what women tell men they should be: very soft and ultra-sensitive. I knew I didn’t want to continue doing those ultra-sensitive men. That’s not who I am.”

After “Party of Five” ended, Fox filled the time doing theater and looking for other work – until J.J. Abrams invited him to read for “Lost,” a mystical, mysterious adventure series that became a TV phenomenon. When he auditioned, Fox was only given a couple of pages – and was reading for the role of Sawyer.

“But afterward, J.J. took me aside and said, ‘Dude, you might be Jack – do you have an hour?’” Fox recalls. Abrams sat Fox down in a closed office and had him read the entire script on the premises: “It was sort of top secret. I loved it. It was so different than anything I’d read.”

The show was a massive hit – but Fox didn’t have any sense of that until he got away from Hawaii, where most of it was filmed.

“When it really dawned on me was when I started to travel around the world – there were so many fans of the show in so many countries,” he says. “That’s when I realized how big it was.

“A couple of times since then, I’ve been on airplanes and the person sitting next to me will lean over and make the same joke. They’ll say something like, ‘I’m not sure I’m comfortable riding on an airplane with you.’ They’re joking but they’re half-telling the truth. People really bought into that show.”

It took five years for Ramona Diaz and her producing partners Capella Fahoome and Josh Green to make her documentary, “Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey,” which opened in limited release March 8. And every step of the way, they thought it would get easier. It never did.

“We thought, well, we’ll get it in the can and then it will be easy,” Fahoome says. “Then it was, well, we’ll get it edited. Then it was, we’ll submit to festivals.”

“But each step seemed tough in itself just to get through,” offers Green.

“Don’t Stop Believin’,” which had its debut at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival, follows singer Arnel Pineda, who was discovered in a YouTube video and hired to be the lead singer of Journey. Until that point, Pineda was a former street kid in the Philippines, singing in a cover band in a Manila club. Suddenly, he was singing in front of 20,000 people in a stadium in Chile – as frontman for Journey.

Diaz, who is Filipino, felt compelled to tell Pineda’s story, once he was announced as Journey’s new lead singer. But Journey’s management didn’t think there was a movie there. They offered Diaz the chance to film for one day while the band rehearsed in the San Francisco Bay Area, to see whether she could convince them to let her make the film.

“The first time I met Arnel, there was a quality about him that was just golden,” Diaz says. “He was very open and the camera loved him. And once we cut that footage together, the band’s management saw that there was a story there.”

The film includes extensive footage of Pineda talking to Diaz and her camera, sometimes in English, sometimes in his native Tagalog, openly discussing the pressure he felt – both from Journey fans and from himself. Even as he started an American tour with Journey, he couldn’t quite believe that this would be a lasting job.

“He became more confident as they went on, but he was always hedging his bets,” Diaz says. “He felt like he was always auditioning. Even when he gained confidence, he didn’t want people to have high expectations. He would always tell us before a show, ‘I have a cold; I don’t feel I can sing that well.’ And then he’d go out and blow us away.”

Pineda was onboard from the start, Diaz says. The rest of Journey was another story.

“It was a process to gain the trust of the band, its management and its crew,” Fahoome says. “A long process.”

Says Diaz, “When they gave us access, I don’t think they understood what that meant. The crew particularly wasn’t used to having cameras around backstage and on the tour bus and at the hotels. They were surprised when they said we could stick around for the summer, that we actually did it. We ran into a lot of resistance getting backstage.”

As they followed the tour, the filmmakers saw a relationship blossom between Pineda and the rest of the band. The band has been around in various forms since the early 1970s, when it was formed as an offshoot of Santana. But it hadn’t had a singer for a couple of years – and they took a major leap with an untested unknown like Pineda.

“I mean, he wasn’t even famous in Manila,” Diaz notes. “And here he was, the lead singer of Journey.”

“We began to call it a bromance,” Green says. “It was a huge leap of faith on all their parts. The band had some skepticism at the start but they became a family as he earned their trust.”

Getting a movie made is an Olympian task. Getting a movie made and released is even tougher.

So Alex Karpovsky’s accomplishment – writing, directing and starring in two movies that are being released the same day as a double-feature – seems positively Herculean.

But that’s what the 30-something multi-hyphenate will do this week, when his films, “Red Flag” (an improvised comedy) and “Rubberneck” (a scripted thriller), open in New York tomorrow (2/22/13); they’re already playing on Tribeca Films’ VOD outlet.

It was not by design, says Karpovsky, who shot both films in 2011 – filming “Red Flag” as a way to take a break from editing “Rubberneck,” then moving between editing the two and finishing both at roughly the same time. “Rubberneck” played at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival, “Red Flag” at the 2012 Los Angeles Film Festival.

“Basically, I checkerboarded the production and editing of the two films,” he says. “I made a mistake with my first three films, where I immediately went into editing them after I’d finished shooting. And that was just a little overwhelming; it was easy to lose perspective when you’re so close to something for so long.”

Karpovsky, whose day job currently is playing a Brooklyn coffeehouse manager named Ray Ploshansky on HBO’s “Girls,” has assembled a schizophrenic double-feature, both stylistically and in subject matter. “Rubberneck,” storyboarded, scripted and shot with an actual crew, is a thriller about a Boston laboratory technician named Paul (played by Karpovsky) who develops an obsessive attraction to a co-worker who has no interest in him. “Red Flag,” shot on the fly from an outline, follows a filmmaker named Alex Karpovsky in the wake of a romantic breakup, as he tours the South, screening his most recent film.

The latter film actually blended reality with fiction: Karpovsky did tour the South, showing his second film, “Woodpecker” as part of a small tour of independent film venues. He invited friends along to improvise the story of the filmmaker, dealing with his relationship problems while dodging a fan he meets at one of the stops.

“It was a very lo-fi tour, where you got a per diem and stayed in crappy motels and drove yourself from city to city, showing independent films to audiences that are not normally exposed to them,” he says. “And I had recently had a breakup and the last thing I wanted to do was be alone. The allure of the American highway had evaporated for me. So I invited some friends to come along. Once I had them, I thought, well, let’s be constructive and do something. It was an indirect way of evading loneliness.”

Shy and introverted in high school and college, Karpovsky gravitated to acting in grad school as a way to get out of his own mind, taking it a step further when he returned to the U.S. by pursuing the sort of humorous solo performance art that Spalding Gray popularized. Eventually, to make ends meet, he began working in catering, then was hired to learn video editing for a company where he edited everything from industrial films to karaoke videos.

“I learned a skill I found fascinating and did it for four years, full-time,” he says. “That was my film school. There was more money than catering and more of an intellectual challenge.”

The company where he worked had its own equipment, which it let him use – which led to his first film, “The Hole Story.” He finished it in 2005, after three years of working on it, mostly on weekends: “At one point, my crew quit and my mother ran the camera,” he says. “I made a billion stupid mistakes.”

Still, the film had a festival run and led to two more directing efforts – and those, in turn, led to acting roles, starting with Andrew Bujalski’s “Beeswax.” Then, while showing his third film, a documentary called “Trust Us, This Is All Made Up,” at the 2009 South by Southwest gathering, he met another filmmaker with a movie in festival: Lena Dunham. They became friends and she wound up casting him in her second film, “Tiny Furniture,” and then in “Girls.”

Which, he says, hasn’t significantly changed his life. Still, he’s been hired for more acting gigs than he ever expected; he has a small role in the Coen brothers’ upcoming “Inside Llewyn Davis,” but he had to audition for that.

“I was beyond surprised to get that – it was almost a dissociative experience,” he says. “They’re my favorite filmmakers of all time. It’s dreamy – but not in a groovy way. It’s a little disorienting. I’m not anxious, just a little confounded.”

And he hasn’t really tried to capitalize on the visibility that “Girls” has given him in pursuit of making more films, beyond using that fame to bring attention to this week’s double-feature release.

“I haven’t tried to make a film of my own since ‘Girls’ got out there,” he says. “Part of me is intimidated by the process of trying to raise money, so I haven’t tried. I might want to try and make another one the same way I did these – so they’re small enough that I completely control them.”

And the success of “Girls’?

“I’m doing my best to keep it all at arm’s length,” he says. “I tend to guard my expectations. I put up a lot of firewalls and roadblocks. I don’t allow good news to find me. If I think I’ve got a hit, I’m convinced something bad will happen. I do read reviews of my own films but I haven’t read anything about ‘Girls’ because it’s ongoing and I don’t want reading that stuff to affect what I’m doing in any way.”

A decade into his filmmaking career, Karpovsky, a Boston native, still isn’t sure that filmmaking – or acting, for that matter – is where his heart truly lies. Technically, he’s still on a leave of absence from the Ph.D. program at Oxford University in England, where he was studying anthropology and specializing in visual ethnography. He left in his third year (of a five-year program) to try his hand at acting and never went back.

“I did think about being an academic and getting a cushy job at a university,” he says. “I’m still interested in that sometimes. The allure of a tenure-track position at a northeastern college is still attractive. The idea of riding my bike through the turning leaves is just so romantic.”

When he plays Boyd Crowder on FX’s wildly entertaining “Justified,” Walton Goggins is the charming face of evil, the yin to the yang of Timothy Olyphant’s Raylan Givens.

“I love my day job, with Boyd Crowder and his relationships on that show,” Goggins says. “I’m very grateful for this season.”

When I spoke with Goggins, he was part of a December press junket in New York for “Django Unchained,” in which he plays a vicious henchman of Leonardo DiCaprio, who nearly castrates Jamie Foxx. It is one of two visible (and slavery-era) roles he had in year-end movies that would go on to be Oscar-nominated for best picture (the other being “Lincoln”).

“Yeah, I have good management and a lot of kind people on ‘Justified’ who try to accommodate these other things,” he says. “It’s so nice to leave Harlan County and go into other worlds that come along. To go into the world of Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg is kind of mind-bending.”

The current season of “Justified,” its fourth, is at roughly the halfway mark, though, when I spoke with Goggins, the season had yet to debut. Boyd, who initially was supposed to die during the show’s first season, survived to become an integral part of the series: a former coal-miner and white-supremacist bank robber who was transformed by his near-death experience. Instead, he became a born-again preacher, though he ultimately returned to his larcenous and murderous ways.

This season, he has consolidated his power in an effort to become the kingpin of drugs and prostitution in Harlan County, Kentucky, with an eye on dominating the state itself. Where past seasons focused on one or two nemeses for Raylan to chase (and Boyd to either partner up with or go against), the current season has focused instead on Raylan and Boyd and their relationships with each other and with the people around them (while tracking a long-missing and presumed-dead criminal who may actually be alive).

“We’re going back to spend time with these two men – who they are and their interactions with each other,” Goggins says. “There’s some funny shit, and some really serious stuff. I’m really excited about it.”

Goggins, 41, is tall and angular, with a spiky outcropping of hair atop a high forehead and a wide, sometimes sharklike grin that makes him look a little like the young Jack Nicholson. A courtly Southerner, he grew up “18 miles outside downtown Atlanta in a farmhouse that was 150 years old,” he says. “I felt like I had the bucolic experience right outside a major metropolitan area. For me, in some ways, it was the perfect childhood.”

He had an aunt and uncle who acted in theater: “I’d sit in the audience watch them tell stories onstage,” he says. “And because of them, I wanted to be in this business.”

He moved to Los Angeles at 19, intent on being an actor but unwilling to necessarily suffer for his art: “I never subscribed to the notion that I needed to be starving to be an artist,” he says. He and friends started a valet parking business: “I did not make a lot of money but I had freedom,” he says.

He sold cowboy boots, worked as a personal trainer and took small roles in films like “The Apostle” and “Shanghai Noon,” until he had built a nest egg on which he could live. Then he gave it all up to pursue acting full-time.

“That was such a strange and scary proposition,” Goggins says. “It was not something I was accustomed to – not going to work every day doing something for a living, and just doing this, instead.”

His breakthrough came in 2002 when he was cast as Det. Shane Vandrell on “The Shield,” a role he played for seven seasons of the gritty, sometimes shocking series about an elite squad of rule-bending, vicious Los Angeles cops who manipulated the law to their own ends.

“I’d been working a long time when I got that, but I don’t think people knew what to do with me,” Goggins says. “TV really had no place for me before these programs started cropping up on cable. But then Shawn Ryan and Clark Johnson and Scott Brazil saw they could use what I had to offer.”

Goggins also has produced a handful of films, including 2009’s “That Evening Sun,” and hopes to do more in the future.

“There’s something so expansive about it, something so addictive,” he says. “I’ve got a movie I want to do this summer that my wife wrote, and a TV show I hope to find a home for in the not-too-distant future. I’ve been around a long time – sometimes it takes a person a little longer to arrive at a place, given the opportunity.”

Having played a diverse pair of bad-asses in Shane Vandrell and Boyd Crowder, Goggins laughs when asked who would win in a showdown between the two characters.

“Oh, definitely Boyd,” he says. “He’d rig the room with explosives. Boyd is a lot smarter than Shane. Shane would come in with his guns drawn – but Boyd would be somewhere else, flipping the switch to blow the place up.”