We never enter into new recording projects thinking, “Yeah we’re gonna write something great here!” A lot of the time it’s a feeling like, can we write anything else? Is there anything else to say? You know what I mean? There’ll always be things to say, but if we can’t dress it up right, then it’s game over. It feels like a pretty honest place to start from: What is there to say?

I think they’re different. They’re different modalities. When you start an essay, you know you’re going to write an essay. I mean, when I started my essay on “My Night at Maud’s,” it was almost as if I was going to write about myself, not about the film, and I love this mixing of the two.

You would think my work would be like Warhol’s and others since I have spent so much time in and around that crowd. Well, I’m not a very good modern artist in the sense that my life is not part of my art. I think that Warhol was idea-driven. He was always looking for good ideas. I’m more intuitive; I respond to what I love. I see something beautiful, and I want to paint it. That’s how I work.

It can be combining something disparate. With Greenberg , for example, I had the idea with the character and I wanted to make a movie in L.A. and about L.A. Then I put the two things together and that was the movie. With Francis Ha I wanted to do things in black and white, in New York, and with Greta Gerwig. These are the more conscious things.

I keep office hours. I work from 9:30 to 6:00. It’s curious. In the morning, I could just about tie my shoelaces before noon, but I can write. It’s obviously a different part of my brain that’s working.

Anyway, what’s the point of a plot, you know? Has life got a plot? Not that I know of. So why should a novel have a plot? But it has to have some kind of story. It has to have some kind of structure.

But my own mottos are, “Don’t imagine for a moment that you’re going to be able to express yourself.” ... And most aspiring artists think, “I have something to say.”