David Gordon Green and Paul Schneider on the improvisational style of All the Real Girls.

David Gordon Green and Paul Schneider look scruffy. Their jeans are faded, their hair tousled, their skin pale, their faces unshaved. They look like who they are: two guys in their late 20s who spend a lot of time watching, making and thinking about movies. They met at North Carolina School of the Arts, where Green was studying directing and Schneider, editing. They made a couple of short films, with Green directing and Schneider acting (Pleasant Grove and A Biography of Barrels). Their first feature was 2000’s George Washington, a gentle, gorgeous, critically acclaimed study of kids in rural North Carolina, dealing with grief, romance and hope.

For their second film, All the Real Girls, Green and Schneider share script credit. It’s the story of troubled, ordinary young love, with Zooey Deschanel and Schneider as the couple, again living in rural North Carolina, more or less (as Green observes, the exact time and location for the film are never named, as he seeks a kind of "timelessness"). Schneider and Green’s working relationship is completely tangled up in their friendship, at once earnest and relaxed. They seem to share thoughts while speaking, stepping all over each other’s sentences, appreciating and goading each other’s humor.

Green attributes his comfort with complicated girl characters to two things: "I grew up in a house with three sisters" (to which Schneider adds, "And I grew up in a locker room!") and his interest in "dealing with all people and trying to figure them out. … Most days I feel like I don’t even exist, I’m just this being, floating around, absorbing how other people exist."

For Green, casting completes, and even determines character. While he’s a painstaking writer, he’s also excited by and invested in the collaborative nature of film. He trusts his second-unit director to go find those stunning, broadly beautiful transition shots, he likes to rehearse with his actors until every word choice, "umm" and cough is in place. "There are some actors," he reflects, "who have to look good and sound smart, to be clear and perfectly pronounced. That’s not as interesting to me as someone who’s willing to get a little bit ugly."

He prefers experience as inspiration, rather than other movies. "It’s frustrating when an actor comes to you and talks about this actor or that actor. I’m more inclined to go with, "You know, my uncle used to do this weird shit.’ I like to be able to relate to something that actually exists, rather than the monologue from Training Day." (He smiles here, perhaps recalling his now semi-notorious criticism, in The New York Times in 2001, of Denzel Washington’s "phony, false performance" in The Hurricane, "in which I see him overdramatize every line he says.")

As his own performances demonstrate, Schneider shares this notion. "There’s so much [inclination] to make it precious and clichéd, to make it actor-y acting," he says. "But we work hard to make it look so "natural’ and "unrehearsed,’ to get the result we want, which is not the conventional movie. When I first saw this movie, I thought, it is just wet with emotion."

They also agree that this is their film’s great strength and potential appeal. Green says that, though they didn’t imagine an audience while they were making the film, "Once we made it, it would be great to get 18-year-old kids to come to an art house, to expand that audience." Still, they consciously worked against the "commercial genre within which this film could fall: a love story about people in their early 20s."

Though they laugh about genre movies -- from Julia Stiles romantic comedies to Mrs. Doubtfire ("It’s about the pain of losing your children!" observes Green; "It has transgender issues," adds Schneider) -- they also understand their value. "Those breezy charmers, totally made by committee," Schneider says, "are most instructive, what I don’t want to do." What they both want to make are "movies that have a mind behind them: Irréversible, Barry Lyndon, To Kill a Mockingbird, which has three great minds behind it: [producer Alan J.] Pakula, [screenwriter Horton] Foote, and [director Robert] Mulligan."

Green observes of All the Real Girls’ opening six-minute shot, "There’s a conditioning of the audience that’s hard to break through, and a lot of viewers get bored after three. People think the movie’s supposed to come to you. But we’re more like, "We’re going to wait over here, and if you want to come in, OK.’"

At the moment, Green says, he’s working the "balance between financial needs, what it takes to get your movie made, and what you want to say," while making a "thriller with a lot of blood in it. I would like to say that I do what I want to do, but I think it’s important career-wise to take new steps. Still, I get to watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre every day, one of the greatest movies ever made. I want the least amount of baggage so I can have the most creative control. It’s good to have, on a piece of paper, the words, "Final cut for you.’ But that means that I can’t do a lot of fancy stuff. And I can’t have a wicked title sequence. But that’s fine. I’m not interested in that."