Although neither of director Mike Judge's previous live-action films—Office Space and Idiocracy—found much success in theaters, both became cult favorites on DVD. His latest film, Extract, was also a bit of a dud at the boxoffice, but as it is about to be released on DVD and Blu-ray, it just might be ready to find its audience.

Often, the reason for Judge's almost cult following is his ability to somehow tap into the lives of the average American worker. His most successful movie to date, Office Space, became a favorite of many because all those who had worked in an office could identify with its characters and situations. Personally, I even had a friend who was inspired to quit his job after watching the movie.

How does he know us so well? Well, it turns out the director is just one of us. During a recent online roundtable for the DVD release of Extract, the director explained that he "based Office Space on my own experience working in the cubicle world."

Whereas Office Space took place in an office setting and focused on the employees, Extract takes place in a factory environment and focuses on management. This also was based on the director's own experience, but where he got that experience is probably not where you might think: "I based a lot of this on my own experience being a boss and running what was basically an animation factory on Beavis and Butt-Head."

Having been in both roles, the director doesn't see much difference: "I think when you go from complaining about The Man keeping you down, to becoming The Man, you realize that being The Man is no picnic either."

The director is definitely the boss now and believes that what makes a good boss is enjoying what you do:

For me, I enjoy directing movies, making animated TV shows, and in order to do that, you sometimes have to tell people to do things they don't want to do, or make choices that people don't agree with. And I really don't enjoy telling people to do things they don't want to do, but it goes with the territory. I think there are some bosses out there—and these would be bad bosses in my opinion—that are in it because they actually get off on telling people to do things they don't want to do; they get some kind of weird pleasure out of making people do things for the sake of making them do things. They get off on the power of it all or something.

The director admits to pretty much having full control of his films nowadays ("I take full responsibility"), but what aspect of filmmaking does he enjoy most? "I mostly like the writing and the editing, and I like when it's over."

His enjoyment of the writing process is evident in his films, especially when it comes to his characters that often seem a bit too familiar. Are these people based on people he knows? "No one is based specifically on one person, but I think most writers base characters on people they have known." In Extract, the character that stood out most to me was the annoying neighbor Nathan played by David Koechner:

The character of Nathan wasn't any one specific person, but I did have a neighbor—a woman—who was a nightmare. It was in a gated community, so there was only one way out, and she would flag you down and just park herself in your window and just start talking. She would basically make it so you had a choice of either listening to her forever, or being rude and interrupting her, or even worse, pulling away while her arms were rested on your window.

Judge wasn't the only one on set pulling character traits from people they've encountered and he talked about when he met Ben Affleck for the first time: "He started telling me about a guy he knew growing up in Boston and he started imitating him and I just thought it was great."

Judge's films tend to be good solid entertainment, but has he ever thought about delving deeper? "No symbolism or subtext. I try to avoid that sort of thing." This writer doesn't see any problem with that.