SFBG: My impression is that bringing a personal vision to the screen intact is an unholy nightmare. Did you find it significantly easier to make the graphic novel a reality?
AC: It was extremely easy for me since I didn't have to do any work at all, other than write the script.

SFBG: Did you feel like you were giving up a lot of the control on the visual side for Waldo? If so, was that a hard thing to do?
AC: No. The DP and the gaffer and the art department usually handle the visual aspect while the director wrestles with the actors.

SFBG: Waldo seems very tied to the time in which it was written, originally as a screenplay, in the early to mid nineties. Was it your intention to comment specifically on the economic and cultural state of things then?
AC: Yes.

SFBG: Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday feels more political than Repo Man. You've said that you had a lot of bad experiences with Universal on that film. Did you have to make a lot of changes to it, or were you just making a different project? Or am I just wrong that it was less political?
AC: What? Repo Man or Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday? Neither was changed by Universal, in any case.

SFBG: When asked about the Repo Man/Waldo mythology, do you hate the question "What the hell's going on?" If not, what the hell's going on? Feel free to focus particularly on the issue of Old Waldo on Mars and Otto/Waldo's serious change in temperament. The grumpy, impetuous punk of Repo Man is suddenly a courteous punk with a pretty philosophical attitude toward his lot.
AC: Who asks what the hell's going on? In what context?

SFBG: I've read that as a teenager you were a big fan of the San Francisco underground comics scene. Is that right?
AC: Yes.

SFBG: In the introduction to your upcoming book X-Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker (Soft Skull Press, 304 pages, $17.95), you say that the fight for artistic integrity in filmmaking is irrelevant "because the feature film was the original art form of the twentieth century. It can't be the original art form of the twenty-first, as well. Something that goes beyond it will displace it - some medium equally visual and visceral, but interactive, with multiple narrative possibilities." Do you feel like you'll be, or are, part of that new something?
AC: That remains to be seen.

SFBG: You've written dozens of screenplays, many of which are available to read on your website. How does it feel knowing most of them aren't getting made? I wonder if maybe the Internet is making the screenplay a more accepted form in its own right, something that can be considered a fully-realized project. Or is it really just a big collection of resentments?
AC: Do you detect resentment there? Or do you wish me to feel resentful? If so, what specifically should I resent, or whom?