Comedy auteur Mike Binder discusses his body of work and his 2001 film The Search for John Gissing, available for the first time on DVD through The FreeBird.

In my opinion, you are making some of the best comedies out there today. But you have Man About Town, which goes direct-to-DVD. You have The Search for John Gissing, which you are self-distributing. What it is about your films that might make them appear unmarketable to some people?

I don’t know. People like my work, but the industry doesn’t think a lot of me. I don’t know why that is. Maybe it’s because I never had a hit. I’ve never been the flavor of the week. I have a movie written called The Emperor of Michigan, and I have a great cast attached, but I can’t find anyone to finance it. You could have worse things happen in your life, but I’m just in a situation where you go, “Now what?”

The Upside of Anger, that was slapped with an R rating. Is that a problem?

I don’t think so. I mean Knocked Up has an R-rating, doesn’t it? The 40-Year-Old Virgin. I don’t know. It’s a good question. I know that when I made Gissing, a lot of people said, “He shouldn’t have put himself in the role,” that I should have had a movie star in the role or someone else. They also said it was a “tweener.” It’s not an art house film, but it’s not a studio film. I think if I had come out with it today, it would have got distributed. But I’ve had offers (from distributors) to put it in two theatres and then they would own it forever.

In John Gissing, it’s not like you didn’t have any names. You had Janeane Garofalo, Alan Rickman. In Man About Town, you had Ben Affleck and Rebecca Romijn. Those are pretty big name. What is it that draws the names to your films?