On the studio's male comedy list there are some real big hitters in box-office terms. Comedy is king in a way, and there are certain $20 million players whom studios want to get in any comedy. In the context of Will Smith, Adam Sandler, Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy and Robin Williams, Brendan could get overlooked. When you think "comedy," your first instinct is not to put Brendan up at the top of that list. But I looked at his body of work and the tremendous variety of it and his sincerity and vulnerability and technical ability. I have little kids, so I saw "George of the Jungle," believe me, more than once, many times. And I thought, "What a nutty heroic performance this is." Then I saw "The Mummy," where he was thoroughly convincing and charismatic in an "Indiana Jones" role. I thought, "Gee, this guy is great." Meeting him just cinched it. He is a completely wonderful person on every level.

It's hard for an actor to deliver something authentic when up against special effects.

He is so game, and he is so dedicated. Belief is very important for him, too; even his less successful films are grounded in some meaning or message. He's very much about the quality of his work. And doing these different makeups and prosthetics -- for every one of those characters he was in the chair a minimum of three hours. Even the writer character he plays has an extra nose tip, a more refined nose than Brendan's real nose. It looks surprisingly like the nose on Frances O'Connor [who plays Fraser's romantic ideal]; when they stood together in that scene I thought they were a great couple.

In "Groundhog Day" you depicted a guy who needed to relive one day numerous times to find himself. In "Multiplicity" the hero had to experiment with cloning before he could set healthy priorities for his life. Here you have someone who tries on alternate identities. Are you consciously exploring the fractured nature of the way we live today?

Of course I'm conscious of it, but I might have said as much as I want to say about it now, in the films. "Groundhog Day" came to me as an original script from Danny Rubin, but the core of the movie was always there. It was the Nietzschean/Buddhist premise of eternal repetition and what we could learn from it. And the response from the spiritual community to that movie was unbelievable. I literally got letters from every known religious organization and discipline, from yogis, Hasidic Jews, Jesuits, psychoanalysts -- all claiming the movie, all saying you must be one of us because this movie so perfectly expresses our philosophy. That one for me was about getting off the wheel of comedy by losing yourself, which is a purely Buddhist idea: The hero stops thinking about himself and starts performing service. That's what Mahayana Buddhism is all about.

And "Groundhog Day" hooked into a more general idea that people really respond to: What if you could do things over again? Danny Rubin actually took Elisabeth Kubler-Ross as a model -- her five stages of death and dying -- and we used that as a template for Bill Murray's progress.

Then "Multiplicity" came to me as an original from Chris Miller and his wife; I had worked on the "Animal House" script with Chris. To me, that one was about the divided self. I had been doing a lot with the ritual men's movement -- the Robert Bly stuff. A lot of Jungian archetypes were floating around in my head. Chris' original story was much more about the social dilemma of being too busy in the world and needing to split ourselves because we have too many conflicting desires and responsibilities. I thought that was a great start. But from a psychological point of view I began to wonder why we are so divided about what we want to do in life. I broke it down into: We men have a deep masculine self, and we have an inner feminine self, and we have an inner child, and they all demand attention in a certain way and all have conflicting wants and activities. Being a working father with a career and my own desires -- I'm bringing up the rear, a distant third. That's just what it is. It seemed like a great contemporary dilemma to examine in comic terms.

Manohla Dargis [of the L.A. Weekly], after "Groundhog Day," "Stuart Saves His Family" and "Multiplicity," said they were all films about the problem of being a good man in the '90s. That made sense to me.

On the recent "Frontline" show about Bush and Gore, a friend of Bush's said their college life was just like "National Lampoon's Animal House." As one of that film's writers, how do you feel about that statement?

I'm sure it's accurate; it just proves our point. We were celebrating what most people go through when they go to college -- this energizing dose of liberty and license.

But I'm pretty sure Bush himself wouldn't say that today.

Well, he wouldn't. Part of the point of the movie was that young people in college are inherently countercultural -- and are supposed to be.

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