“Life is both tragic and funny, both absurd and profoundly meaningful. More or less unconsciously, I’ve tried to embrace this double aspect of experience in the stories I’ve written – both novels and screenplays. I feel it’s the most honest, most truthful way of looking at the world, and when I think of some of the writers I like best – Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dickens, Kafka, Beckett – they all turn out to be masters of combining the light with the dark, the strange with the familiar.

“The Inner Life of Martin Frost is a very curious story. A story about a man who writes a story about a man who writes a story – and the story inside the story, the film we watch from the moment Martin wakes up to find Claire sleeping beside him to the moment Martin stops typing and looks out the window, is so wild and implausible, so crazy and unpredictable, that without some doses of humor, it would have been unbearably heavy. At the same time, I think the funny bits underscore the pathos of Martin’s situation.”

“I wanted to create an other-worldly ambiance, a place that could be anywhere, a place that felt as if it existed outside time. The action unfolds in Martin’s head, after all, and by choosing the house I did, a little domain cut off from the rest of the world, I felt I would be enhancing the interiority of the story.”

“The story of Martin Frost, a writer, and a mysterious woman who turns out to be his muse. A fantastical story, really, more or less in the spirit of Nathaniel Hawthorne. But Claire isn’t a traditional muse. She’s an embodiment of the story Martin is writing…”

Paul Auster