Watching Babel, 21 Grams, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and Amores Perros might lead audiences to believe that the screenwriter behind all three, Guillermo Arriaga, is a dark, brooding man with an equally bleak outlook on humanity. His directorial debut, the drama The Burning Plain, employs a similar, non-linear structure as his other films, and it also returns to a few of his recurring themes, including redemption and regret. When I sat down with Arriaga at a roundtable interview, I was surprised by the warm, gracious man who seemed to be so incongruous with the surface of his films.

“I’m basically an (optimist),” explains a smiling Arriaga. “I think that all the films I write are extremely optimistic films. Almost feel-good movies. Why? Because, for example, The Burning Plain is a movie where someone who can go to the verge of the abyss of destruction can always come back to hope. Always. So, I think in the end it’s a very optimistic point of view. And, of course, there are situations in life that you can witness that are very extreme.”

Arriaga’s first turn in the director’s chair doesn’t initially seem like the work of an idealist, and the “extreme” situations seem to be the most prominent elements. Heavy themes rule this multi-narrative script, including grief, pain, and terminal illness. Charlize Theron gets top billing, playing Sylvia, a cold restaurant manager in Portland, Oregon, who quickly takes men to bed but is far less likely to let anyone know who she really is. The rest of the threads take place farther south. In Las Cruces, New Mexico, a cancer survivor named Gina (Kim Basinger) finds both solace and new life in an illicit affair with a Mexican-American man. After a tragedy, her daughter Mariana (Jennifer Lawrence) bonds with a similarly grieving teen, Santiago (J.P. Pardo). Finally, in Mexico, a young girl (Tessa Ia) finds her existence with her father is thrown into jeopardy when an accident threatens the life they have made, where they depend only on each other and her father’s best friend.

Although people do a lot of damage to each other in The Burning Plain, there is also healing found through connections with others. Guilt may seem to be a primary theme in his films, but Arriaga asserts that the often-Catholic associated emotion isn’t present in his work. “I don’t come from a Catholic family,” he argues. “I’m an atheist, I come from an agnostic family. My mother is not a believer. I had never heard or seen the world ‘guilt’ in my life…. It’s not guilt. It’s not guilt. It’s the consequences of our actions. Since I’m an atheist, I don’t believe in other world where you will get free of everything. It’s here where you have to solve things, to arrange all your problems.”

Like Arriaga’s other work—and unlike most films from other screenwriters—The Burning Plain employs a narrative construction that doesn’t rely on a single plot told in a time-dependent fashion. Instead, the script weaves together four different, interconnected stories spread out over several decades. What’s most impressive about Arriaga’s writing isn’t necessarily its innovative structure; it’s his method. His scripts are written in the order they appear on screen, meaning that he doesn’t write each story and then cut and paste them together. Not only does the screenwriter proudly proclaim the help of his ADD in his writing, but he also questions the nature of storytelling. “I have never met in my life, never, in any culture, anyone in real life, who tells a story in a linear way,” he says. “Never. I have never listened to conversation in a linear way. I have never head someone recall his past linearly. Everything goes back and forth. The natural way to tell stories is like that.”

He also addresses his detractors who question his distinctive style. “The unnatural way is to tell them linearly,” he says. “There have been some ridiculous critics who say that this is a trick, critics who praise the three-act—page 30, page 60, page 90—that’s a trick. That’s a trick. That’s unnatural, that’s artificial. But most of critics tend to defend the status quo. And cinema is very young. Cinema has only 120 years. We’re finding the language for cinema.” With The Burning Plain, Arriaga has continued forging his own way into the language of cinema, but reforming the basic construction of how films are written doesn’t seem to be an issue. He pays particular attention to the words in the dialogue: “The structure is easy to find, but the beauty of the language is difficult. And I have always considered that writing screenplays can also be a literary form. And I take care of the language as much as I take care in a novel.” The writer-director began his career as a novelist, but the revelation that his first film script was a comedy is a surprise. “It’s eleven stories, in real time, of people going to watch a house on fire,” he explains to a roomful of laughter. Since he finds hope through painful experiences, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that tragedy can make a good basis for comedy, too.

As a screenwriter, Arriaga has worked with Alejandro González Iñárritu as well as actor-turned-director Tommy Lee Jones, but The Burning Plain presented an opportunity to make his own foray into directing. The film’s veteran producers, Walter F. Parkes and Laurie MacDonald, suggested a number of talented filmmakers for his script, but with each name, Arriaga disagreed, “He’s not going to understand. He’s a good director, but he comes from another place.” Geography is often key for the writer’s works—Babel is set on three continents, while The Burning Plain’s locations inform its characters’ behavior—and Arriaga grew up in Mexico City, giving him an edge over the other contenders.

Though Arriaga was concerned about his inexperience with filmmaking’s more technical aspects, he didn’t let his fear keep him from the job. He bought a T-shirt with the famous Albert Einstein quote “Imagination is more important than knowledge” as encouragement, and took to heart the advice of producer and friend Michael Fitzgerald: “Don’t worry about the technical things. There will be people that will know better than you. Concentrate on the screenplay and the actors. The rest, there is someone who will know much more than you.” Arriaga surrounded himself with talented people, and he’s quick to pass on the credit for the film. “Everyone worked hard, passionate,” he says of his experience. “And I always say that I didn’t have a crew, but a group of filmmakers.”

He is especially admiring of his director of photography Robert Elswit. “My first meeting with Bob (Robert Elswit), I was amazed that he never talked about filters, lenses. He only talked about story…. He was always there for me. I learned a lot from Bob, and from everyone.” Having Elswit as his director of photography pays off in The Burning Plain. The cinematographer previously worked on There Will Be Blood and Syriana, and his experience shooting dry expanses gives scenes in Arriaga’s film an impressive scope. Due to a scheduling conflict, John Toll took over the shooting duties for the film’s scenes in Oregon, and he nicely picks up the grays and greens of rainy Portland.

The director credits his happiness with the film not only to his Elswit and Toll, but also to his talented cast, which includes experienced actors Theron, Kim Basinger, Brett Cullen, Danny Pino, and John Corbett, as well as younger performers such as Jennifer Lawrence, J.D. Pardo, and first-timer Tessa Ia. Oscar-winning actress Charlize Theron was always his choice for the role of Sylvia. He explains, “When you cast an actor, it has to do with three certain things. Talent, which is obvious. What the person gives to the character, their own persona. With this, I mean how they sit in a chair, how they walk, how they move their bodies. And the most important for me is taste. The rhythm of how they deliver the lines, how they express emotions, and she’s a very contained actress.”

Though Theron is the film’s star (and one of its producers), she recognized the importance of casting another one of the film’s roles, Mariana. She warned Arriaga that miscasting the part of the teenager would endanger the entire film, but the director found Jennifer Lawrence in the first day of casting. “(Lawrence is) going to be nominated, maybe not for this film, but in the rest of her life, she’s going to be nominated several times,” Arriaga praises. “I have worked with Sean Penn, Charlize, Benicio (del Toro), Tommy Lee Jones. She’s up there.” The actress seems to portray angst, coldness, and anger with equal ease, but the filmmaker states that the real test is a surprising one: “And one place where an actor or actress shows talent is in ADR (additional dialogue recording). ADR is very intimidating, and most of actors take one hour, one hour and a half for a couple of lines. She did it—all of them—in the first take. The guy in sound was like, ‘This is an alien. That’s not possible.’ So I think she is gonna be a big thing. She’s already a big thing.”

He is equally complimentary of his other Oscar winner, Kim Basinger, despite others’ objections that she was too associated with her previous work. “But for me, the moment I saw her on set, I say, ‘She’s Gina,’ and I have no doubt about it. And I think that no one will say, ‘She is (the) 9 ½ Weeks woman.’ She is Gina, and I’m very proud of her and how she portrays the character.”

Though one might suspect that his experience as a director will change his approach as a writer, Arriaga disagrees. “I have wrote already two screenplays after directing,” he says. “And I must tell you that no, because my commitment as a writer is with the work, to make it make sense, narratively. If I begin to think in directing and producing, I will be compromising what the narration needs.” Though no plans have been announced for his next film—either as a director or a screenwriter—Arriaga has already produced a number of works that challenge the conventions of traditional scripts. I’d love to see what he’d do with a dark comedy. With Amores Perros and The Burning Plain on his resume, something tells me that an amputation will be involved…