David Gordon Green is getting some rough press these days. In his scathing review of The Sitter, Slant Magazine critic R. Kurt Osenlund dubbed Green a "genre-swapping sellout," while Miami Herald's Rene Rodriguez went with "full-on hack." Green's IMDb message board is littered with words like "hypocrite" and "liar." Hell, the sixth word in my review of The Sitter is "terrible." So, just why are everyone's panties in a collective twist?

Betrayal. We feel betrayed. Three of Green's films are on Roger Ebert's best films of the year list -- George Washington in 2000, Undertow in 2004, and Shotgun Stories (of which he was a producer) in 2007. And then, in 2008, everything changed. That year saw the release of Pineapple Express, a better-than-average stoner buddy comedy that gave Green the biggest bucks of his career. From there on out, he was done with indie dramas, choosing instead to focus on those oh-so-lucrative d*ck and fart jokes. Now look, I have absolutely nothing against d*ck and fart jokes, but the quality of Green's post-Pineapple filmography (some episodes of the superb HBO series Eastbound and Down aside) has taken an inarguable nosedive, first with the middling Your Highness and now the rock-bottom Sitter.

But here's the thing: Green is an absolute gem in person. I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I sat down with him last Friday, but the man I met was as friendly, funny and off-the-cuff as they come. One can only hope he rebounds with a film -- comedy or otherwise -- of passion and focus. I for one think he's got it in him.

Benny:  It’s a pleasure to meet you.

DGG:    It’s a pleasure to meet you too. You have very nice hair.

Benny:  Do I?

DGG:  I don’t. I woke up with greasy ass hair and didn’t have time to take a shower.

Benny:  That’s how I showed up to the New York premiere of The Sitter, because I didn’t realize it was the premiere.

DGG:  I didn’t either.

Benny:  You didn’t?

DGG:  It wasn’t really a premiere. All of a sudden, there was a red carpet and it was an economical way to get a photo shoot, I think. I’d be really depressed if that was the premiere.

Benny:  But it wasn’t?

DGG:  It was the first time it played in New York, but it wasn’t a premiere in a traditional sense.

Benny:   Jonah looked good, he was in a suit.

DGG:  He did look dapper. Someone gave him the heads up that he would get his picture taken, whereas I rolled out of an airplane and got rained on.

Benny:  I had a similar scenario, because the publicist, bless his heart, said, "Just go to the screening." A common screening is just a bunch of shlubby critics in a room, and everyone looks hungover. But low and behold...

DGG:  Method Man is there, woah! Let’s get this party started. Grand Master Flash was there!

Benny:  I saw him!

DGG:  Amazing.

Benny:  Mr. Hill himself was sitting across the aisle from me. I should have brushed my teeth.

DGG:  At least you didn’t make out with him.

Benny:  I tried, but he turned me down. Alright, let’s get into serious questions for serious people.

DGG:  The Sitter...

Benny: The script is by Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka, who appear to be first time screenwriters. Tanaka has some short films under his belt, but besides that, they hadn’t written a feature before.

DGG:  They had not, but I went drinking with those guys and Brian told me Alex used to be a child actor. He was on the soap Swan Crossing and he was a teen idol and stuff. I can’t confirm that, but if it’s true, it makes me laugh. His sister was the young girl, the love interest in Rushmore.

Benny:  I know who you’re talking about. So, how did their script end up on your desk?

DGG:  I was talking to Jonah at Sundance a couple of years ago, and an executive at FOX, John Fox, sent me a couple of scripts. This was when I had just gotten back from Ireland, where I was filming Your Highness. I let it be known that I was looking for a character piece, something that simplified logistics and let me just run with some great actors. Jonah asked me if I had read The Sitter and I said that I actually had. We had been friends for a while and we had been talking about working on something together. I was excited because I had just seen Cyrus that night and talked with the Duplass brothers about how cool he was to work with. We just talked about it over tequila that night, and it came up a couple of weeks later when FOX came to us and said, “We heard whispers that you guys liked the script." It was pretty simple. Certainly within my career it has been a lot harder to get movies together. This one made sense at the time, considering what I was looking to do.

Benny:  What was the most difficult movie in your career for you to get together?

DGG:  Your Highness. It was a passion project since I was a little kid. It was something with a very specific tone and tons of special effects and action and things that weren’t in my wheelhouse. It took a degree of education, a huge crew, a lot of money -- convincing people to trust us with that money was really tiresome -- and impossibly precise marketing. Every step of the way, it was a challenge. Me and Danny McBride have collaborated for a long time, so it was us just pushing this mountain of a project from the moment we had the idea, all the way to getting it on DVD. It was an exhausting ordeal, but we're proud at the end of the day, because it was exactly what we had in mind. It’s difficult to have a vision of a movie and get it made exactly like you want to. There are a couple of guys who've done it; Kubrick was one. I’m sure David Fincher has the time and resources to make that stuff happen, and I look forward to his movies because of it. But for a guy like me, it's not the easiest thing to accomplish.

Benny:  You mentioned working with Danny McBride. You’ve directed several episodes of Eastbound and Down, correct?

DGG:  Yeah, we’re working on the third season. I just finished three episodes.

Benny:  Can you reveal anything at all? I'm a huge fan.

DGG:  Danny is definitely the spearhead for that, and I don’t know what he is saying about the broader concept for this season, so I don’t want to say anything. I don’t know if this means anything to you, but after we finished up this great scene, a PA came up to me and told me, “This is like Fassbinder meets The Little Rascals.”

Benny:  I assume you're not talking about Michael Fassbender the actor.

DGG:  No, the German filmmaker.

Benny:  I won't pretend to know who that is.

DGG:  He’s amazing. The guy made like 400 movies, all these interesting art films. You should watch Chinese Roulette, it’s a really good movie. Anyway, that meant a lot to me, because we were going for very highbrow/lowbrow material. We try to make some of it dramatic and some of it laugh-your-balls-off. It's an incredibly fun show to shoot. And we get to live on the beach.

Benny:  Is there more Katy Mixon?

DGG:  Oh yeah, she’s back. Hot stuff.

Benny:  Best show ever.

DGG:  I’m glad you like it. For a while, people were looking at us out of the corner of their eye like, "What the f*ck are you guys making over there?"

Benny:  Stevie Janowski is hands down my favorite character. I love when he quits his teaching job -- “Goodbye f*ckin' sh*t school. See you f*ckin' morons later."

DGG:  Steve [Little] is a genius. Have you seen The Catechism Cataclysm?

Benny:  I have not.

DGG:  You gotta see it. Todd Rohal directed Steve in an amazing performance.

Benny:  Noted. Getting back to The Sitter, you've got these three kids in almost every scene, with foul language, guns, and big muscly guys with sledgehammers. What was the mood like on set? Did you have to tone yourself down when the kids were around?

DGG:  It was always crazy. I was really lucky 'cause I was able to hire all the department heads from my first movie, everyone from the DP to the Production Designer.

Benny:  George Washington?

DGG:  You got it.

Benny:  Points!

DGG:  It was a reunion of sorts. We’re all in the studio game. The composer [David Wingo] has been my best friend since third grade. The way we make movies these days is that we just f*ck with each other to push the envelope. So, with a drama, it's taking it to a new level of authenticity, and with a comedy, it's taking it to a new level of absurdity. With The Sitter, we were trying to layer some drama and texture into the comedy. The point I am making is that the friendships have evolved, and it’s a real family environment. I just had twin babies, you know.

Benny:  Congratulations!

DGG:  We're in the puberty of adulthood, you know what I mean? We’re all f*cked up crazy guys who haven’t really grown up, but now we have responsibility. Some of us are married, some of us have mortgages, so we use movies as our fun, freewheeling, creative palette to go nuts. But as strange and far out as some of the situations might get, the set was a great place to be a kid. Those kids come from healthy homes, and their parents were there every day, and were really supportive of the voices we were encouraging them to have. It was an extremely collaborative process. The kids had great ideas about the script, and half of what you hear is what they made up anyway. I wanted to protect the authenticity of what this family was like while capturing the different dynamic between the kids and their babysitter. But this is not a family film. This is for people who like to watch crazy sh*t happen -- kids unleashed, unlikely babysitters, drug dealers and cocaine. This is the first family film where I would encourage people to leave the kids at home.

Benny:  I figure people have been asking you about Adventures in Babysitting, to which your film is a spiritual sequel of sorts. Was it something you decided to draw from or ignore completely? Up until The Sitter, when I thought of "babysitting adventure," I thought of that movie.

DGG:  Sure, God, 1987 was my second favorite summer for movies in my life time. Beverly Hills Cop 2, Witches of Eastwick, The Untouchables, Dragnet, Full Metal Jacket, Robocop, Predator, Innerspace, La Bamba, Lost Boys...

Benny:  Damn, you're good at that.

DGG:  Snow White was rereleased...

Benny:  Look at you go!

DGG:  I'm kind of a weird savant for movie release dates. I recall not wanting to see Adventures in Babysitting at first. I have three sisters, and that was one of those, "I’ll go see that with you if you go see this with me," but I ended up seeing Babysitting a couple of times that summer. It was sort of a guilty pleasure for me, because there were a lot of badass movies coming out, but that was one that stuck with me. I actually talked to Elisabeth Shue, hoping she would play the mom in The Sitter, since I had a crush on her since Karate Kid. It would have been fun, but it didn’t work out with her schedule.

Benny:  Too bad. Switching gears, what's Black Jack?

DGG:  That’s a pilot I shot. I’ve got a company now with Danny McBride, Jody Hill and Matt Riley, and we have a number of TV projects going on. We have Eastbound and Down, we have a cartoon on MTV that just came out called Good Vibes, and we have that pilot with Ving Rhames. We’re not exactly sure where that’s going now, but there's a couple other things that hopefully will be filming over the year, like a great, really dramatic HBO series named Knuckle, based on a documentary.

Benny:  No kidding! I just posted my review of Knuckle.

DGG:  Well, we got the rights to it.

Benny:  And you’re doing a narrative version of it?

DGG:  Yup. The guy who wrote Trainspotting [Irvine Welsh] is writing it for us. I think Jody [Hill] is going to direct that. And do you know about the Barefoot Bandit? This kid from the Pacific Northwest who stole a bunch of planes?

Benny:  Yeah, I remember reading the Rolling Stone article.

DGG:  Dustin Lance Black who wrote Milk is adapting that for us for FOX. We’ve got a lot of ambitious projects that break free of the comic arena. My instinct, since I’m such a lover of all types of film, is to explore as many things as possible.

Benny:  Fantastic. Last question -- do you have any memories of terrorizing a babysitter or a babysitter terrorizing you?

DGG:  I’ve never been terrorized by a babysitter, but I always used to hit on them. I remember being, like, six and hitting on my 17-year-old sitter. I would encourage my mom to hire hot ones, because I thought I could make a move. It never really worked for me. I wasn’t quite the Casanova I thought I was. I was a strange kid.

Benny:  I locked my babysitter out of the house once, taking inspiration from a Calvin and Hobbes strip where they do just that.

DGG:  See? They should ban it, forbid kids from reading Calvin and Hobbes.

Benny:  No. That would be the worst idea ever.

The Sitter is currently in theaters. Watch the trailer below, connect with other Filmologists on My.Ology, and follow me on Twitter.

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