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How do you like to watch movies?I tend to watch them at home, but frankly, I don't watch many. I hardly go to the theater because it's kind of a pain in the ass, and many movies are overrated. When I do go, I take my children. You see, I love making movies. I'm just not crazy about watching them. I like music better.

Your new coffee-table book, Billy F. Gibbons: Rock + Roll Gearhead (MBI; motorbooks.com), is filled with lavish photos of two of your favorite things: cars and guitars. Indeed.

Josef, that is a cool publication you work for.

Well, thank you very much. I like Sound & Vision. I'm not quite the home theater guy, but I'm aspiring to be [laughs].

How did a nice Midwestern guy like you end up playing an urban Jewish professor in The Squid and the Whale? Hmmm. The short answer is I guess I understood the part - I could see the comedy in it. When I expressed that to [writer/director] Noah [Baumbach], he said, "You're one of the first people to tell me they think it's funny.

The finale for Season 5 of Nip/Tuck just aired [on February 19]. Are you happy with how the year went on the show? Yeah. The overall tone of this season was pretty cool. I grew to like the direction they took it this year.

Football season's over, but you'd never know it from the legions of gamers who've made EA's Madden NFL a year-round obsession. [A shorter version of this interview was printed in the May issue.]

In a recent interview about The Aristocrats, you said, "It's the singer and not the song." I see the Aristocrats joke as having a Grateful Dead/Phish kind of vibe where people start within the same framework, but then go off in their own directions. It's very much improvisational, though it's more bebop jazz than Phish.