TG: Three times, actually. I was the on-set script writer for Ladder 49. That's where I met him.

RT: Do you seek out these collaborations?

TG: I do. I [enjoy working] with great actors. Clearly with Don. Obviously Joaquin. I'd love to do something with Daniel Day-Lewis. Jim and I have a couple of projects that we're talking about. It's just that you build up a comfort level with people. Ruffalo I would definitely work with again. Jennifer [Connelly] and Mira [Sorvino], they're good people. Suddenly you know their strengths and you start crafting characters that go along with that.

RT: Did you and John Burnham Schwartz collaborate on Reservation Road's script?

TG: He did his first and then I did mine. Not out of any decisions by me that that's the way it had to be. Joaquin gave me the script in June of last year and then we were shooting by September. We casted in a couple of weeks. We were going really fast. Everyone wanted to work on the characters a bit. Basically, out of practicality, I had to sit down and do it myself. Whereas with Sheridan we have a lot of back and forth.

RT: Have you read the book?

TG: Yeah. I read the script, and then I read the book. At some point, you have to put it down and make the thing work in terms of cinema itself. I'm very structure oriented. I need the three act structure. I like that because I think audiences are attuned to it. You're not challenging them to put together a jigsaw puzzle, you're challenging them to sit back and get in with these characters.

RT: Reservation Road seems like a challenge to adapt since a lot of it takes place inside people's heads.

TG: Books tend to be, and this one in particular, cerebral, and you have to translate that into the dialogue or the visualization of the scene. It's a distillation.

I always knew this movie had to be around 100 minutes. It couldn't be longer than that because the subject matter and the weight of it was such that if you didn't go fast with the edit and the storytelling it'd become maudlin, and depressing in not a very cinematic way.

RT: There's also the thriller aspect of the story to maintain.

TG: For me, it's more psychological thriller. I was more interested in the theme of revenge, particularly demonizing the opposition where you create a monster inside your head capable of doing violence to. That seemed like a very post 9/11 theme because that was the mood of the nation at one stage. Clearly, we've learned now the folly of that emotion as a driving force. The pain and the kind of damage that action does, and the inability to look beyond the event and try to find a way to come to terms with it is what interested me.

RT: Was it a challenge to balance the drama and thriller elements? Or to balance the story of the book and the story you wanted to present?

TG: I had to craft. I had to work at that. You can't take a book and then reinvent it completely. There's a sort of obligation to stay within the parameter of the book. Maybe change some stuff to make it work, but the basic events I wanted to keep in there. The small town setting. The fact that in that small town setting you could have people living in the next street to each who never meet and then an event happens and suddenly they're embroiled in each other's lives.

I know some critics had problems with what they said were coincidences [of the plot]. I never had a problem with that at all. And I'm very, I think, very rigorous about looking for plot coincidences or weaknesses that pull people out. But there you go.

RT: Do you follow film criticism closely?

TG: I did. [There] are some [reviewers] who are given credibility that I wouldn't have.

In a funny way, it's in the movie as well. I love the Internet. It's probably, in terms of the spreading of knowledge, the greatest thing that's happened to mankind. [But] there's an obsession with it, an addiction. Like, [Phoenix's character] Ethan goes to the Internet for solace. That's a reality. I know a lot of people who find the answer to everything on the Internet. On the websites that Ethan visits, there's a fueling, a reinforcing of this anger and sentiment between bunches of despaired people around America, around the world. That's kind of destructive. But as always happens in Hollywood...

It's like if you do a test screening. I love test screenings. I love the comments. But the studios insist on the score. They're fixated on the score. "Is it 86? Or is it 80?" Unnatural decisions are made on that basis. And more and more financial decisions, or the perception of financial decisions, are made on that score. They're willing to take any information in replacement for scholarly analysis. If executives thought that by sacrificing a chicken and throwing its guts and bones on the ground would help, there'd be chickens getting slaughtered all over Hollywood.