Can you talk about what it was like with that grocery bag in the beginning about using it in all those scenes and what is symbolizes if anything?

Hal Hartley: I thought she was destroying it second by second.

Parker Posey: All the things a woman has to carry, a single mom.

Hal Hartley: She was the only one who knew it was continuity.  She knew where the cereal box was and how high…

Parker Posey: Oh yeah I’m good at that. I take a mental picture. I’m so used to doing independent movies… what’s it like to work with Parker Posey. She’ll totally get what do they call those stands?  A C-stand? She knows how to operate a C-stand.  I hear something fall and I say I’ve got it.  I reach over to some guy and like pull out this gaffer’s tape and we’ve got it keep the camera rolling.

Hal Hartley: I have a photograph of you from Amateur—asleep like a child on a big thing of cable. 

Parker Posey: Just exhausted, oh yeah.  Jason has a really good picture of me from some movie getting makeup put on on a milk crate outside on the corner somewhere. 

Parker, how did you react to the storyline—such an extraordinary storyline compared to a much more contained version with Henry Fool?  Were you concerned at all about exploding into such a big international thriller from small little Queens?

Parker Posey: I loved doing the kind of imagining your character out to how she is in the beginning to what she goes through in the middle and what happens to her by the end. It’s kind of like...it’s a unique kind of space that you put yourself in and she becomes more calm and more resigned I think by the end of the film because she knows this kind of truth. She kind of always knew that Henry would come again somehow, you know, and she’s kind of haunted in the film I think but she finds herself being her own superhero and all of a sudden she’s in these situations in over her head but not even wanting to know what the problem is and not being able to understand the problem but she knows she loves her husband and even though throughout the entire movie she hates herself for it and she’s denying it and all these guys are trying to flirt with her by the end you know there he is.  Yeah, there he is again.  I’m not seeing him, he’s not seeing me. It’s just mythological, it’s really a heavy mythological.

Hal Hartley: It’s not so heavy but it is mythological.

Parker Posey: Well, in a sense that it’s not like Broken English doesn’t have a weight that Fay Grim has.  It’s not as….I don’t know what the word is but anyway, I like that. I like carrying movies. I think it’s much harder to do a little part than to do a really big part.

You just did a small part in The Eye right?

Parker Posey: Yeah.

So was that harder than the work you did on this and Broken English?

Parker Posey: I like to feel utilized.  I don’t want to feel like just some like person who’s used for some plot thing or just like you know?

Hal Hartley: So it’s not as much fun?

Parker Posey: It’s not as much fun. You’re not…sometimes in movies like that even if you want to be a full character they say what is she doing?  Don’t do that!

So are you going to be in the next Superman? 

Parker Posey: No, I don’t think so.  I don’t know though, I haven’t heard.  I don’t think so.  I would love to be there if only briefly.

So that’s not the sort of thing where you feel under-utilized?

Parker Posey: No, with Superman?  Not at all.  I enjoyed Superman a lot.

About the evolution of the story from Henry Fool which was in this booming internet age and globalization bearing down on that too… this which is very post 9-11 can you talk about the evolution of that in the story?

Hal Hartley: Um, well maybe Henry Fool in this film might be more obvious about this but all of  my films ever since the beginning have always been very important for me to have my films, regardless of what they’re about, to be reflective of the time and place that I’m living in.  It doesn’t have to be right up front and center but it should be there. I used a similar technique or it’s not really a technique—it’s a similar discipline when I was writing Henry Fool I was reading the newspapers, reading magazines and watching the news, just trying to get concrete examples of representative things in that time and everybody in that time was a swing to the right in Congress and Senate and a more right wing politics and also all this stuff about censorship of the Internet and the real heated debate going on about how it should be controlled.  Should the government control it?  So those things found themselves into the core of the story and so I took the same approach here with Fay.  I knew it was going to be some sort of espionage thing. It kind of lent itself to that in terms of comedy and in terms of where we left off with Henry Fool.  The question—did he get on the plane or did he not get on the plane?  So I did the same thing. I kept a folder and clippings and I was surprised to find how many in the daily newspapers, how many little stories there are about really about what we used to call espionage—spy stuff.  You read this and say this sounds like a James Bond movie, you know.  I collected them and tried to put them all in there.  Almost all that stuff they referred to is real.  It comes from a real source.  The American’s had satellites spying on Britain and Israel during a period of time when they were allies about something and that would piss everybody off. I was just really intrigued by that. 

I was going to ask real quick though if you could talk about what you guys are both working on now?

Hal Hartley: I’m working on staging an oratorical in Amsterdam next summer—2008 of Louis Andriessen, the composer.  He’s done Dante’s opera—comedy. Dante's divine comedy is a 5 part oratorical and I’m staging it. 

Amsterdam for the summer, huh?

Hal Hartley: June 13, 2008.

You’re going to have a tough summer. 

Hal Hartley: Oh, yeah.

Before you leave the room can you say what else you’re working on right now?

Parker Posey: I just finished shooting a pilot and I’ll see in a couple of weeks whether or not it goes.

What network?

Parker Posey: Fox.  Amy Sherman-Palladino who did Gilmore Girls. It’s with Lauren Ambrose, we play sisters—estranged sisters. It’s called The Return of Jezebel James.  I find out I can’t have children in the episode and I try to get her to carry my baby. 

So if the show gets picked up that’s a …

Parker Posey: We’d shoot in New York.

…that’s a big commitment to TV.  Is it a 1 hour?  30 minute?

Parker Posey: It’s a half-hour.  It’s very Norman Lear in tone.  Very 70’s televsion.  Serious and funny elements. I like it.