Miguel Arteta is responsible for some of the nastiest, most squirm-inducing, warm, lovely, humanistic indie comedies to come out in the past 20 years.

Sometimes the first impression of an artist whose work one will later grow fond of drops anchor in the unlikeliest of places. Such was the case of Miguel Arteta, whose latest, Beatriz at Dinner, opens Friday. The director’s debut feature, the gritty indie comedy Star Maps, opened in Chicago at of all places a multiplex hellhole located smack dab in the middle of the city’s haughty Boul Mich (Michigan Avenue) district. I remember it well.

Located on the city’s Magnificent Mile, Water Tower Place — part skyscraper, part shopping mall — occupies a square-block of prime Gold Coast real estate. Once there was a multiplex, seven screens to be exact, dwarfed in size by any of Snow White’s companions. It was the first movie theater in the city to ask that patrons leave the comfort of their living room to sit in a theater that in many cases wasn’t much bigger than their living room.

More thought went into designing the glittering lobby than any of the auditoriums. What did Water Tower have in common with Wrigley Field? Both sold obstructed-view tickets. Two of the houses had floor-to-ceiling support beams sticking up in the back rows that effectively blocked two-thirds of the screen for those unfortunate to be parked there.

By the time 1997 rolled around, afternoon showings in the city proper all but dried up for eight months out of the year. Matinees went into hibernation the second the school year commenced and didn’t return again with any regularity until Spring. Chains couldn’t justify the amount it cost to heat the auditoriums for the 20 or so schmoes that bought tickets. The Water Tower Cinemas, so tiny that 20 patrons would practically constitute a sellout, ran matinees daily.

John C. Reilly as Dean Ziegler in Cedar Rapids

Imagine a movie theatre, even one as puny as this, situated within spitting distance of your front door and the joy of not having to button up an overcoat to survive a frigid mid-January trip to the cinema that came with it. If your husband croaked and willed enough dough to afford a condo — or perhaps a room at the adjacent Ritz Carlton — seven cinemas were but a climate controlled elevator ride away!

Don’t get me wrong — I hated watching movies in such a degraded manner and did so only when no other alternative presented itself. Location is everything, and in its heyday Water Tower played home to numerous exclusive engagements. This could have been the one and only week the film played town for all I knew. This meant having to put up with the yenta brigade, a passel of chatty, blue-haired, and black-gloved widow women invariably in attendance for the first-day, first-show matinee.

What drew them to Star Maps? Could it have been the title’s vague hint of nostalgia or were the 30 or so ladies who joined me on opening day really expecting the long-awaited big-screen reunion of Junes Haver and Havoc? What they got was a sweet-natured, bracingly black comedy about a young male prostitute who joins his father’s stable.

Before it was over, the cheese sat alone, not one of the 30 who began the journey lived to see the film’s happy ending. It wasn’t the first time a film brought about a house-emptying mass exodus such as this. You should have heard the sounds of shock and indignation coming from behind as two-by-two the gals fled a morning presentation of Bernardo Bertolucci’s delirious incest opera, Luna. Only David Elliott [former Reader movie critic] and I remained, and to this day we consider it one of the high points of our moviegoing friendship.

I haven’t paid a return visit to Star Maps since opening day. Oddly enough, it’s the only one of Miguel Arteta’s films I don’t own a copy of. I recall the curtain shot — our hero and his mother both clad in spacesuits and floating off to heaven — and thinking the guy who made it was either crazy or a crazed original. Maybe both.

That was 20 years and 6 features ago. Arteta doesn’t simply create characters, he celebrates them, proving once again that if you’re going to drag your actors through scenes of despair and hopelessness, it’s always best to do so in an honest, upbeat, and frequently hilarious manner.

If given a choice to take but one Arteta film to accompany me on my journey to hell, it would be Cedar Rapids, which is exactly where we begin.

Scott Marks: Talk about brazen! Who saw a demand for a comedy about insurance salesman? Didn’t that subject as a topic of comedy go out with Joe McDoakes and mother-in-law jokes? You son of a gun, you go and smuggle in a great film about nothing less than America. I was really touched by John C. Reilly’s Dean Ziegler. He is one of the most finely crafted jagoffs to hit the screen in ages. To me, he’s your ultimate comedic creation to date. Was he one of your creations?

Miguel Arteta (Laughing): No. The writer, Phil Johnston, had met a guy that he based the character on. He just had that manner of speaking and he fell in love with him. I think they met at an airport or something like that. He was the inspiration. I’m so glad that you love him. I love what John did with the character, the way he laughs in the swimming pool while wearing the trash can on his head. He had so much fun. It’s really hard to be an actor and laughing and feel like it’s honest. Laughing is very hard to portray in an honest way and the way John did that was unbelievable.

He turned to me at one point during the making of Cedar Rapids and paid me the greatest compliment. It was late, like 3 o’clock in the morning, and we were in a bar shooting a scene and he said to me, “This might be the dumbest character I’ve ever played.”

SM (Laughing): That all changed with the release of The Step Brothers. Ziegler has heart. The fact that you were able to endow this reprobate with a human streak speaks volumes about your humanistic leanings.

MA: Yes. He does have heart. And once he’s your friend he’s your friend for life. I adore him.

SM: For me, one of the great indicators of a director’s heart and knowhow can be found in their handling of secondary characters. Alia Shawkat’s Bree in Cedar Rapids comes to mind. Given the situation, there’s not much room in Beatriz for secondary characters. The closest you come is Evan the waiter.

MA: You try and get good people who are willing to commit. Alia is brilliant as Bree. In fact, I just finished shooting another movie with her.

SM: You’re not talking about Duck Butter, are you?

MA: That is Duck Butter.

SM: It was my last question on the list, but since it came up first I don’t mind going out of order. What can we expect from a film with such an odd title?

MA: Alia and I became very close friends while making Cedar Rapids, and I was like, Let’s write a movie together, and we decided to do a little poem to disastrous relationships. We shot a movie in a very experimental way. Two women meet and decide to spend 24 hours without sleeping together, having sex every hour on the hour. We did it in real time. We shot it in 27 hours. It was a very odd and wonderful experiment.

SM: Let’s talk about Beatriz. From the barebones nuts and bolts of telling a story, there isn’t much in here that couldn’t be achieved on a stage. But this is far from canned theatre, one of those Fathom Events where they surround the stage with a bank of cameras and photograph actors delivering dialogue. This is about camera placement, and lighting, and cutting, movement, how many characters are in the shot at any given time…it’s a textbook example of how to open up material like this for the screen. What was your greatest challenge when it came to making the material cinematic?

MA: Thank you! It was all about calibrating…I wanted the movie to have a mounting anxiety for the audience that was kind of delicious and fun so you’re like, How the hell is this gonna end? I had to keep it moving forward, making it more and more tense as it went along. I tried to make the house feel more and more claustrophobic as the time went on…and to understand how to frame Salma and John as they square off. And we keep cutting to the other actors until they become a Greek Chorus. The other characters are also working to relieve the tension.

SM: Beatriz is also responsible for creating a little tension all her own. She has this way of administering really awkward hugs.

MA: In a physical way I find the fact that she has no idea how these people want to spend their evening gliding the chit-chat along the surface. Salma does it very realistically. The fun in this movie was not going for the obvious laughs but playing things realistically. I want the movie to entertain you while making you feel tense as hell. Eventually it invites you to think about the state of our world.

SM: So I finally get a chance to talk to the guy responsible for some of the sharpest, funniest comedies of the past two decades, and it’s on the occasion of a film in which the titular character has no sense of humor.

MA (Laughing): That is correct! That’s the one difference between Salma Hayek and Beatriz. Salma shares all the qualities that make Beatriz who she is. She’s intelligent, she’s compassionate, she’s hard working, and has no problem sticking truth to power. The one difference is that Salma’s very funny in real life. When first discussing the character with her I told Salma, “All that you have inside of you is right, just shut down the sense of humor. And wear these ugly bangs and ugly pants and we’re ready to go.”

[We spend a few minutes talking about the film’s ending. Don’t worry. No spoilers ahead.]

MA: We wanted the film to end on a reflection of our frustration, not to give a pat answer or smugly suggest that this is what we think because only we know the best way to deal with a cultural disaster. We didn’t want to do that. There’s enough crazy evidence that backs up the frustration and despair people feel every day that the world is going to hell in a proverbial handbasket.

SM: The film lover in me hears the name Strutt and thinks of the Martin Gabel character in Hitchcock’s Marnie. Any connection or are you using strut in the literal sense of walk pompously, like our current president.

MA (Laughing): You have to ask [screenwriter] Mike White for the definitive answer, but my feeling is there’s a musicality that goes well with the name Doug Strutt. I don’t think Mike wanted to make such a direct correlation to Donald Trump even though strutting and trumping sound familiar.

SM: Mike White began work on the script began before Trump announced his candidacy.

MA: Yes. I don’t think Mike was trying to make a direct correlation to Trump, even though the names sound a little bit alike, like you’re strutting or trumping. Unlike Trump, Doug Strutt is actually a very confident guy. He has strength of conviction. He sleeps like a baby believing everything he’s doing makes sense in the natural order. Mike White gave him good arguments to offer that John Lithgow went to town portraying.

SM: These have got to be the best performances of both Salma Hayek’s and John Lithgow’s careers.

MA: Salma is always leading with her beauty and glamour, but she’s also a great actress who can portray incredible levels of complexity, as evidenced by this performance.