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US director and writer Alex Ross Perry from the movie "Listen Up Philip" poses during a photocall at the 67th Locarno International Film Festival in Locarno, Switzerland, Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2014.Urs Flueeler/The Associated Press

With his last movie, the 2011 feature The Color Wheel, writer-director Alex Ross Perry yanked the viewer into uncomfortably close quarters with obnoxious road-tripping siblings J.R. (Carlen Altman) and Colin (Perry himself). With a tagline pitching it as an "objectionable comedy," The Color Wheel situated Perry as filmmaker unblinkingly preoccupied with wounded psyches of unpleasant people.

Perry's latest, Listen Up Philip, sees him working with more money and a sorta-star-studded cast, including Jason Schwartzman as a monstrously arrogant young novelist of the film's title. But Perry's preoccupations remain attuned to the objectionable.

Do you ever worry that you might create a character so repellent and un-charming that it would alienate an audience?

I would never worry about that. When you look at our culture's favourite films, you have movies like Taxi Driver, A Clockwork Orange. I don't think people need some cuddly, warm centre to enjoy a complex film. But in 2014, some people have decided that the only way they can enjoy fiction is if they personally like the characters. I don't understand it as a viewer. And I certainly don't understand it as a filmmaker.

The film's loaded with coded and not-so-coded references to real authors: Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace. Was there a certain kind of male novelist you had in mind making this movie?

I'm interested in all those writers, just as a fan. All that post-war, East Coast American fiction is just a body of work I really enjoy and respect. I'm always trying to figure out what about these people I find so fascinating. I think the film is sort of my final question to myself about what it is about that male novelist ego that has captivated me.

At the same time, the film takes these authors to task for being so narcissistic and self-loathing and cruel to people in their lives, especially women. And not only that, they're very aware that they're doing it.

That's true. It'd be a very different ask of the audience if the characters in the film were not in some way saying, "Yes we're aware of this behaviour." A guy who acts like Philip but is totally oblivious would be a totally different thing.

The film depicts New York as a smothering place that you need to escape from. It's not like the magical metropolis of a Woody Allen movie or something. As a New Yorker, did you want to deflate this idea of New York City as some narratively or thematically rich playground?

I wanted to do my New York movie. I can watch a movie that depicts New York as a romantic, creative playground, and that can make me happy and excited to live where I live. But then I walk out of the theatre, and some horrible person is in my face bugging me about something. And then it's like, "Oh right, this is what it's actually like to live here."

The film has a lot of narration that's omniscient, revealing things about the characters that they might not even understand about themselves. Did you want a film about writers to have this literary feel?

As Jason [Schwartzman] said, Philip's the kind of guy who walks around narrating things in his head. It's a device that tells you something about what it's like to be a guy like Philip, who models his life around the fiction he's so inspired by. Even if it's miserable, it's exactly what he's always wanted.

Do you think this is a value that the culture puts on literary genius, where you have to be nasty and miserable and treat other people like garbage in order to be taken seriously?

If that is a truth, then I think what we're seeing is Philip aware that this is an expectation, and that if he is going to be a great writer, he has to act that way out of some sense of destiny-fulfillment. He sees a guy like Ike, with his broken marriages, and subconsciously or not, thinks, "Well, if you want to be great, this is what you have to be."

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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