Movies

In 2000, Richardson's David Gordon Green released his debut film, George Washington. Arty and elliptical, with an amorphous narrative, it featured Mr. Green's friends from the North Carolina School of the Arts in front of and behind the camera. It was a modest little family affair.

Elizabeth M. Clafffey/Special Contributor

Sam Rockwell (left) says director David Gordon Green brings a spirit of collaboration to his films

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Fast-forward eight years. Mr. Green's new film, the dark drama Snow Angels (opening Friday), features Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale. His next film, the wild buddies-on-the-road comedy Pineapple Express , is part of the ever-expanding Judd Apatow comedy empire, with a script from Superbad scribes Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. But both movies feature a bevy of Mr. Green's old George Washington buddies, including cinematographer Tim Orr and producer Lisa Muskat.

He's come a long way, and he's playing with the big boys. But he still keeps a cozy, collegial set that puts an emphasis on interaction.

"It's rare these days that you get to really collaborate with a director, and this was a real collaboration," says Mr. Rockwell, hanging with Mr. Green at the W Hotel during the AFI Dallas International Film Festival on Tuesday. "We were always talking about the character and the subtext. We talked about the wardrobe and about the book. We created this character from the bottom up."

Hollywood is many things, but easygoing is not one of them. The laid-back Mr. Green, who likes to improvise and create on the fly, has a way of attracting like-minded talent that needs a break from the Hollywood shuffle.

Take the story of how he joined the Apatow family ("I'm part of the cult now," he jokes).

One day Mr. Green went to visit some crew friends on the set of Knocked Up. "I just started talking to Judd and Seth about what they wanted to do, and what I wanted to do," says Mr. Green, whose braces make him look younger than his 32 years. "We came up with the experiment of taking half of their crew and half of my crew, and we make a movie.

"The next week I had a script on my doorstep."

And now he's made his first comedy, due in August. There's a studied seriousness to much of Mr. Green's work, a quality that couldn't be further from the Apatow movies. But listening to Mr. Green describe the Apatow vibe is like listening to others talk about Mr. Green.

"He lets people know that you can loosen up a little bit, and you don't have to be tied to script," says Mr. Green. "You get the right actors, and you let them invest themselves in the material, and you collaborate with them on a role, and you don't have to be so heavy-handed in your design. They do the same thing we did in a movie like Snow Angels ."

Mr. Rockwell offers an example of the loose Green set. One scene called for his character, a heavy-drinking lost soul, to dance with a woman in a bar. The selected music was upbeat, but then Mr. Green grew enchanted with a slower, less rhythmic tune on the boombox of his longtime production designer, Richard Wright, "a song that no one would know how to dance to," says the director. He reconfigured and changed the mood of the scene on a whim, and it turned out to be one of the most affecting passages in the film. "I like those kinds of happy accidents that come up on the set," says Mr. Rockwell.

Those happy accidents, and the mutual trust that inspires them, can be the stuff careers are made of.