Miguel Arteta’s hotel room is booming with music, much like the first time I met him, when he was promoting his remarkable first feature, Star Maps, a meeting he recalls enthusiastically. The 32-year-old filmmaker has come a long way since then, having directed a range of TV (including the sadly canceled Pasadena, Freaks and Geeks and Six Feet Under), and two more critically acclaimed films, Chuck & Buck and The Good Girl.

Born in Puerto Rico to a Peruvian father and Spanish mother, Arteta graduated from Wesleyan University in 1989, and earned an MFA from the American Film Institute in 1993. Arteta's films, always smart, funny and incisive, are also increasingly pointed and subtle. The new movie again focuses on alienated, uncertain characters. Retail Rodeo cashier Justine (Jennifer Aniston), her housepainter husband Phil (John C. Reilly), his snide buddy Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson), and her angsty lover Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal) are all unhappy and unable to talk to one another. Arteta calls it "a comedic ode to depression."

He says that while he was "very excited to make a movie about a woman, because it doesn't happen that often, especially one that is realistic in the choices she's making," he tries not to think about the "labels" usually applied to his films. "Women, gay, Latino: I think that what's common is much bigger than what's different between people. I look for movies where characters are going through something that is personal to me, something I have a hard time with."

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The film's structure -- Justine's narration and the visual evocation of her subjective experience, in part through "pushing the exposure two stops throughout, to open up the grain and affect the colors, so there's sort of a fluorescent, Œrealistic' feel to it" -- is inspired in part by Todd Haynes' Safe and Terrence Malick's Badlands. Also, like these films, The Good Girl has a "tricky tone." Arteta laughs, "Almodóvar has been a big influence on me. I like it when a character is irrational, and does contradictory things. ... When movies make too much sense, I get bored."

He says it's "important" to make movies that are unpredictable from scene to scene. "My biggest idol in film was Sam Fuller, and I got to meet him about 10 years ago. He'd get up with his cigar and get right into my face, to make a point that I'd never forget. One was this: he had seen my short film, and he said, ŒI really like that I couldn't tell what the next scene was going to be.'"

It's a lesson the young filmmaker has taken deeply to heart. To that end, he feels "flattered" to be able to work with Mike White, whose scripts are "profound and heartfelt, yet funny, with strong characters and stories that move fast. They're not your typical Œindependent' movie that sort of meanders." So, he says, if you accept Justine's "ŒAmerican conformity,' to stay with her husband and that job, it's a death sentence. If you go with the lover, with an equally ŒAmerican rebelliousness,' then there is no place for you in society. You're screwed either way. The hidden story is that this world kills her imagination; she doesn't imagine a third option."

Lucky for him, he has an "alternative" perspective. "I think I have an advantage as a foreigner," Arteta says. "I can appreciate the irony of the language. While the dialogue is extremely important as a road map, what's going on in the actors' faces is crucial. I'm always struggling to understand what people are saying, through body language as much as what they say."

Arteta's sense of being an outsider also affects his attitude when shooting; for him, directing is a means of exploring ideas and problems. On the set, he says, "I try not to have set ideas. The actors don't improvise, but I let them emotionally improvise. We get takes that are radically different, emotionally. And that makes the editing a horribly long puzzle." When it's pointed out that this means actors must trust him implicitly, he laughs. "I always tell them, ŒIf you don't have the feeling that you're jumping into an empty pool chest first, there's something wrong.' It's meant to be scary. If an actor doesn't stick her neck out, doesn't risk something, we're not going to care, watching it."