(continued)

It's only par for the course that people are trying to get me to say who I'm voting for 'cause everyone's trying to get everyone to say who they're voting for.

You said you feel like that's not your place to say who.
I know it's not my place. But Rebecca [Pidgeon, the actress who is Mamet's wife] and I went to see Jackie Mason last night in the show he's taking to Broadway. It's spectacular; I mean he just bashes all of them.

He does?
He makes kind of coleslaw of every candidate.

You hadn't really delved into politics since you wrote the film Wag the Dog, which is about a president getting into trouble—a sex scandal—and trying to distract the American public by staging a phony war in Albania. What made you want to jump back into the political arena?
Well, no, I had done a bunch of blogs for Arianna Huffington, and then I did a bunch of political cartoons for her and other people, and wrote several essays on politics.

I saw your cartoons on the Huffington Post. What made you start doing those?
I started doing cartoons a long time ago 'cause my best friend was Shel Silverstein. I started drawing and he said, "Oh, Dave, keep drawing," and so I kept drawing. I said, "But, Shel, I can't draw," and he said, "Nonetheless." So I've been doing cartoons forever. I adore it. It's my favorite thing.

It is?
Yeah, it's much more fun than writing.

Why?
'Cause you don't have to write.

In Hollywood, there are the politics of screenwriting. One blog was talking about how you don't like working with big studios since you refuse to kowtow to studio execs.
Well, nobody likes kowtowing to studio execs. But one has to bring one's pics to market. I'm just not very good at it.

Making movies must be more fun without the big studios.
Doing a movie is fun. It's just fun flat-out. I was doing a movie with Gene Hackman, Danny DeVito, and Rebecca called Heist, and we were up in Montreal. And, as always, running hard. I said to my great colleague and assistant director, Cas Donovan, "Geez, wouldn't it be fun to do a movie with a vast budget sometime?" And she thought a second and said, "No, we'd just make more expensive mistakes." And I'm sure that's true.

I'm curious about your thoughts on the Internet.