Transsiberian, the latest film from The Machinist and Session 9 director Brad Anderson, is set on the titular railroad that cuts through Russia's snowy wastes. Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer are an American couple riding the train who get caught up with a shady and mysterious younger couple. Meanwhile, Ben Kingsley is a Russian narcotics officer looking to bust a drug operation. Their paths slowly begin to converge on that train.

I've been struggling for the last week or so to transcribe an interview I did over the phone with Anderson. I've been struggling because the recording is riddled with feedback from my phone, and the squealing and hissing makes Anderson's replies almost completely inaudible, especially for the first two minutes. I've transcribed the interview to the best of my ability, but I just couldn't get those first few minutes, where Anderson talks about why he set the film on that train - he took a trip on it some years ago, and the experience stuck with him. I bring you Brad Anderson, mid-thought about why he chose this location.

It was an exciting adventure for me. I always felt that once I became a filmmaker and started pondering what kinds of films I wanted to make, that setting would make for a great story. My co-writer Will Conroy had the idea to do a train story, like they did in the 30s and 40s, those Hitchcock films, Murder on the Orient Express. An old-fashioned train movie. It was then like what would the story be, and we wanted to do something that was kind of forbidding, and the idea of being stuck in this claustrophobic environment for a long period of time with no way to get off seemed like a good setting for a story about paranoia, and for suspense. Once we settled on that, we started to establish what happens in the story. You start with the location and build the story around the location instead of coming up with an idea and then finding the location. This way you have a much more visual way to tell the story. With Session 9 we wrote the script based on that specific location. This movie was different in that we wrote it around the experience [of taking the train].

You have a terrific cast. With a film like this you have a thriller story, but when you have a cast like this how much freedom do you give them to find their characters and to improvise?

It depends on the story and the actors. With these guys, Ben Kingsley and Woody wanted to do it because they liked the script and they liked working with me. When I direct a movie I try to give the actors as much free space to work as possible so they can feel comfortable to toss an idea in there if they want. But with this one, especially with Ben Kingsley, they were very much about what was on the page. He said that he learns his lines and he says those lines. He doesn't try to recreate the wheel. For him it was about the character in the script, and that was what he did. We didn't have a lot of room to play, but when people could add a fun bit we did a little of that. It was a pretty difficult shoot and we didn't have a lot of time to do it, so you have to get it down as it is in the script because you have to move on to the next scene.

You were shooting on location in Eastern Europe -

We shot this in Lithuania.

When you're on location in a foreign country... the early part of the film is all about the paranoia of not being able to understand what people are saying, not fitting in. How does that work for you as a filmmaker, working with a foreign crew?

It's complicated and it can be frustrating, but I love the experience and I like to travel. There's always difficulty in communication and when you're directing a movie it's all about communication - if you can't communicate your vision, you can't do it. Fortunately, my crew was international. The crew was a combination of people from all over Europe, and sometimes it would be difficult but these days the lingua franca is English. In Lithuania almost everyone speaks English, so you can communicate. But there are cultural differences. Things take longer. When you make a movie in the States things happen like clockwork it seems, but when you go to Eastern Europe it feels like it takes weeks to get things ironed out. We were lucky we shot in Lithuania, though. We looked at a bunch of different places to shoot it, even Russia. But Russia would have been difficult with the bureacracy, and it's very corrupt, so we eventually settled on Lithuania, where we could match the look of Russia. There are a lot of Russian-speaking people, there are a lot of Russina-looking buildings, and the climate isn't that different. It's cold. The main thing is that they gave us a train, they gave us a Russian train and forty kilometers of train track to use at our discretion. It was like having your own life size train set. We could stop it and start it, we could stage a crash sequence, we could do stunts. We couldn't have done that if they had tried to do the movie in Canada. We needed to be in a location that wasn't that different from the real thing.

You did Masters of Horror, and now you're doing Fear Itself. Do you find it more difficult to do Fear Itself with the restrictions that come from being on network TV?

Not the violence, because mine is more psychological. There's not a lot of gore, so I didn't have to dial back on that. I'm more interested in the psychological horror than the horror horror. Most of the restrictions at the network are about that. Masters of the Horror had more freedom, but again my episode, they didn't find a lot of things in the script problematic. The only problem with a show like that is that every ten minutes there's a commercial break. One of the things with psychological horror is building up a mood and a tone and making the audience start to get anxious. When you're doing that and all of a sudden you cut to a McDonald's commercial, it eats away everything you've been trying to do! That's the biggest problem.