The best thing about my new film, the Cormac McCarthy adaptation Child of God, is the performance by my old friend Scott Haze. Everyone who has watched the film, from Wes Anderson to P.T. Anderson to Gus Van Sant has said, “Who the f*** is that guy?” Which is a testament to Scott. It is a full transformation into a man who has lived isolated his whole life and is an autodidact of the ways of the wild Tennessee backwoods. He speaks like an inarticulate beast, he moves like a hunched cave-dwelling goblin, and he shoots his rifle like a champion; his hair is dirt-caked, his beard is uneven and hard as Brillo, and snot flies from his nose in streams and gobs. These are the traits that the character developed because he has no one in his life to care for him, to tell him to shape up, to love him.

He is un-socialized, an outcast. But these characteristics are not just for show, not just external trappings to indicate that the character is “scary” or “bad,” these are physical manifestations and products of a man alone since birth. They are in fact the character’s great obstacle, because he, like everyone, the title suggests, is a child of God, meaning that underneath he shares many of the things that make us human: mainly the need to connect with another being outside of himself. Deep down he just wants love; the problem is that he is incapable of being intimate with another living thing because he can’t get beyond the barrier of his own crazy incarnation.

I know that mental illness is something that consumes a person’s entire personality, and that the illness becomes part of the personality, but in the case of Lester, at least in his early stages, I feel that he is an innocent buried underneath the mantle and mask of a monster. The little child of God inside wants to get out and love, and be with people, but like Frankenstein, his efforts to connect read to others as the aggressive moves of a demon. Eventually Lester turns into the monster everyone suspects him to be because he must kill in order to collect “friends,” meaning, murder is the dark necessity he must undergo in order to find the intimacy he seeks (he can only find intimacy when the other being is without a consciousness, so that he would not be judged, so that he can fill the blank head with his own animating imagination). He is a monster indeed, but his motives are universal, human, and pitiable.

The legends of Scott’s preparation have grown: he went to Tennessee and lived in caves while listening to Eminem. I have no idea. All I know is that when I showed up to the set to shoot and saw Scott for the first time in four months, he was a new person, he was Lester. And he didn’t come out of being Lester until we finished shooting. Not to say he went around snarling at the crew, but when he wasn’t filming he would stay to himself to preserve the character he had so dearly created. So, essentially all I had to do as a director was point Scott in the right direction and film him as if he were the subject of a documentary. The movie portrays one of the best performances of the decade.