Todd Solondz: "If Kubrick had been making a movie of 9/11, he would have cast George W. Bush as president. I cannot compete with the 24-7 Terry Schiavo Show for obscenity and grotesquerie!" Guardian photo by Mirissa Neff

"Gwyneth – no!" her mother barks, as if training a miniature schnauzer not to run in traffic.

You imagine the satirist filmmaker to be as cutting and ruthless as that remark – an extremely throwaway jab at the celeb-fixated cheese and received pretensions of a certain irritatingly aspirational and superficial strain of suburbia. But in person, Solondz is as pleasant and well mannered as the meanest yapper in a yard of kicked-'n'-picked-on underdogs, losers, geeks, and outcasts can be. Meeting to talk about his cinematic "choices" at the Prescott Hotel near Union Square, the 45-year-old Solondz fusses over coffee spills, napkins, and Bay Guardian staffer Mirissa Neff's New York City origins, like an old-world, elderly gent at home on a park bench: "Oh, what high school did you go to? Bronx Science? Oooh, so smaaart!"

A true Enlightenment-style disbeliever ("I happen to be a devout atheist, one of a tiny minority in the world") who has managed to make his Candide – and one of my favorite, chance-taking, audience-baiting films of the year thus far – about ideas (abortion, childhood sexuality, the female body and self-image) that most writer-directors won't touch with a 10-foot stick, let alone scalpel, Solondz clearly saves his bite for his movies.

Bay Guardian: So, did you design Palindromes to spark debate?

Todd Solondz: In some sense, I am out to get an audience to reassess, reevaluate some of the preconceptions and myths by which we live. We bring lots of baggage and bias and prejudices with us when we go to the movies, to the extent that we're not fully conscious of them, and the movie attempts to play with some of those preconceptions.

I'm not out to convert, from pro-choice to pro-life, or pro-life to pro-choice – to me its all Orwellian, anyway, these doublespeak terms – but to get one to examine the moral dimension, moral consequences.

BG: You could say the film promotes choice, or a variety of choices, like the array of actors portraying Aviva.

TS: There you go. That's part of the paradox. I can characterize myself as anti-anti-choice in this movie, but I don't want to say that choice is even something philosophically I believe in.

If you have a religious turn of mind, you must believe in the possibility of choice, you must believe in free will, otherwise you cannot make the leap of faith. Religion requires the belief in free will. If you are in an atheistic turn of mind, it is possible you will look at things differently, that we are a combination of our DNA and life experience and the randomness of all that – so that we imagine we have a choice of Bush or Kerry, but it's really the illusion of choice, that we cannot but choose the one or the other.

BG: Is there something about Christianity that fascinates you? It seems more in-your-face than ever, with the death of the pope, and violence around the world committed in the name of the religion.

TS: It's such interesting times we live in. When I was a kid, in the '60s, I remember seeing and reading about scientists and their discoveries and thinking how we were so advanced that religion would be absolutely from the Middle Ages. And of course, the human mind is a little more complicated.

I always thought, with Bush being reelected, the one good thing is it [provides] the richest material for filmmakers, for artists, to work with. If Kubrick had been making a movie of 9/11, he would have cast George W. Bush as president. I cannot compete with the 24-7 Terry Schiavo Show for obscenity and grotesquerie! All these terrible ironies abound: here was a girl whose looks were so important – what would be her great nightmare but to be on television around the world? Scrutinized in the most unflattering way possible. Every part of her body. Not only that, but she had these eating issues and didn't want to eat – years later, the president of the United States says, "You must eat!" You know, you just can't get any better.

BG: Palindromes is so similar, looking at the battle over women's bodies and the response you have to heavier actors' bodies, like Sharon Wilkins's.

TS: Anyone of us could have played an episode in this young girl's, this young innocent's, life. There is something striking and in some sense profoundly moving and beautiful about all these actors who played this girl. The big Sharon Wilkins – she's my Gulliver, surrounded by the Lilliputians. And then you see Jennifer Jason Leigh's face at the end – there's a woman of a certain age who has lived a life, and you see it there in the face; the sorrow is etched in those features, and it's as if this character has lived her whole life, and yet she's just a 13-year-old girl. I could play with these fairy tale, storybook elements that fed into the narrative.

BG: Did you switch the actors playing Aviva as a detaching device, so the viewer wouldn't identify with her?

TS: For me, it was the opposite. The convention, of course, is one actor per character, and by this particularity, we gain access to a universality of experience. I'm going at it from the other end of the telescope, saying that, in a sense, any one of us, whoever you are in the audience – it doesn't matter [about] your ethnicity or your shape or your sex – any one of us can gain access emotionally to the plight of this young girl. (Kimberly Chun)

Kuchar restorations

In the early 1960s, Bronx twins George and Mike Kuchar were fresh out of high school, enduring low-end employment gigs, "festering in a subjective tar-pit of self-abuse and too much chocolate-mocha cake" (as their dual autobiography, Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool, put it). Yet they'd already made numerous 8mm epics together – with titles such as Pussy on a Hot Tin Roof and I Was a Teenage Rumpot – and would very soon be the darlings of a freshly percolating Manhattan "underground" film scene.

That moment of torment and incipient triumph will be revisited May 5 as the San Francisco Cinematheque presents the first four early Kuchar works to be preserved by New York's Anthology Film Archives. Offering 90 minutes of purple melodrama starring friends, neighbors, and the Kuchars themselves, these movies (a hobby begun when the brothers had barely passed puberty) flabbergasted the gasbags in a downtown art scene that had never quite glimpsed anything like them.

It all happened when the siblings' frequent star, Canadian expat and color-blind painter Bob Cowan, tipped filmmaker Ken Jacobs and Village Voice critic Jonas Mekas to the splendors hitherto screened only in friends' apartments or after-hours at George's Norcross Greeting Cards workplace. The impact on boho viewers made the Kuchars microcelebrities, their work influencing Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and John Waters, among many others.

Having made umpteen more contributions to film and video art since, George (whose latest collaboration with his S.F. Art Institute students has the archetypal moniker Dynasty of Depravity) is understandably a little hazy now regarding the details of these long-ago efforts. The origin date of Sylvia's Promise is forgotten; both brothers directed individual sequences in a saga starring the ample Edith Fisher ("one of the original Rumpots") as "a girl who's a little heavy, with a cheatin' boyfriend. They have a showdown. Then she winds up happy in bed doing a little jig or somethin'."

The half-hour 1961 "big story picture" A Town Called Tempest anticipates George's later nonfiction weather studies. Cowan plays a Kansan obsessed with building a storm cellar, but ill winds wipe out his family anyway. There's also a "hooker throwing hand grenades" in there somewhere. George says his star still lives in his parents' house, where it was shot, but warns, "It's a mess – [his mother] hardly ever cleans up."

More domestic disarray was caused by 1963's Anita Needs Me, which featured a pal and his blond Swedish girlfriend (later wife) as a squabbling couple. The leading lady was so scandalized by the film's final sequence that she demanded her husband cut off George as a friend. When asked what the offending sequence was, he shrugs and says, "Oh, it's just me on a toilet bowl, thinking about their relationship. Then I get up and beat my mother."

Mike's own 30-minute behemoth Born of the Wind (George lays directorial claim to just one dance sequence) completes the tempestuous quartet. One of the more blatant efforts at "making our friends into stars," as George recalls, it features bodacious early Kuchar regular Donna Kerness as "a mummy that turns into a beautiful princess – but with a bloodlust." Kerness also starred in Mike's arguably greatest moment as a solo director, Sins of the Fleshapoids (1966), of which she recently said, "The dynamics of that movie linger in my memory glands – the sauerkraut, George's sweaty cheeks, robotic infants marching out of stiff bushy Fleshapoid crotches, the tawdry tearing of Mike's jockey shorts. I was a Kuchar star, and proud of it!" (Dennis Harvey)

'George and Mike Kuchar: Early Restorations' screens Thurs/5, 7 and 9 p.m., Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room, 701 Mission, S.F. $4-$7. (415) 552-1990, info@sfcinematheque.org.