Slightly surreal and gently melancholic

"My prime motivation to write stories," Keret said, "is that I want to read them. I would be very happy if somebody else had done it, but they're all lazy . . . , so I have to write it all by myself." As he tells it, his decision to direct "Jellyfish" was a similar story of picking up the slack from the goldbrickers out there.

"My wife wrote this wonderful script, and I said, 'I really want to see this film.' She showed it to one director who said it was never going to work. She showed it to another who said, 'This is boring.' The third one said, 'This is completely confused.' . . . The moment I suggested directing the film I looked at my wife's eye and knew if we didn't do it, this film will never be done."

Asked about the experience of making a film for the first time, what Keret describes is a DIY approach that any self-respecting punk rocker might have envied. He tells a story about a scene in the film in which one character looks at an old photograph that comes to life before our eyes, the clothing on the people in it flapping in a nonexistent breeze: "The special-effects guy said, 'It has to flap more, because half of the [audience] is going to miss it.' I said to him, ' . . . them! This moment isn't for them. It's for the half that will see.' "

Keret went on, "I want it to be so that the person who watches it will have the slightest doubt that maybe it didn't happen, that he will look at the guy next to him and say, 'Did you see that?' " Keret was unmoved by the special-effects man's insistence that he didn't understand film. "I said, 'It's a good thing, then, I'm keeping my day job.' I don't give a . . . if this film is going to fail. It's not my career. I'm just coming here to do what I want to do. My wife and I said, 'If people are crazy enough to give us money to do the film, we're going to do what we want to do.' "

For the last few years the literary world has been taken with bemoaning the decline of reading in a visual, digital age. (It's a bogus argument resting on the assumption that reading is always active and viewing always passive, and it also, as Mikita Brottman points out in her new polemic, "The Solitary Vice," ignores the fact that reading is a visual activity.) Keret appears to find the argument irrelevant. What he likes in art, he said, is ambiguity.