THC: The character you play in Magnolia is based on one that you improvised in doing a Cops-parody with Paul Thomas Anderson. But I imagine that it was much more of a caricature at the time.

JR: It was basically, Paul and I, before he got the money to do Boogie Nights, and after Hard Eight had been absconded by the first studio that produced it, we were just kind of going crazy. My way of dealing with it was just growing a mustache for no reason, and Paul's way of dealing with it was, "Come on over here and we're going to shoot something on video," and all of a sudden we're doing a Cops parody, and yeah, the only point in doing it was to make each other laugh and just entertain each other, so it was a little bit more over the top, but, that said, a lot of the dialogue from those improvisations ended up in the movie. And I think Paul deepened the role in other ways, but a lot of the kind of haplessness of the character that I created in those improvisations did end up in the movie.

THC: Was it hard to get inside a guy like Jim Kurring once you'd already parodied him? Was it hard to take him seriously?

JR: Well, when I improvise, it's not like I'm making fun of the person. In some ways I felt like I totally already knew the character, but in other ways, Paul had synthesized that character into the script and added a lot more weight to him, and a whole romantic angle, and so I had to flesh it out at the same time. And then, also, I spent a lot of time with policemen... After we did those improvisations and I started to prepare for the movie I went out policemen in North Hollywood and drove around with them, and just...the crushing humanity of it all... It's a lot more serious than I even imagined.

THC: Jim is one of the more conventionally motivated characters in the film because he's so firmly grounded in laws and structure and rationality. But this film is really about the unavoidable subversion of all of those things. How does that constrast reflect on Paul's vision of the film, do you think?