The great White way: Mike White is the writer of some of the best comedies of the last decade. Now the fiery-haired son of the Reverend Mel White has decided he wants to direct. Year of the Dog, starring Molly Shannon. proves he's good at that too.

Mike White has worn so many different hats in his career--writer (of films like School of Rock and The Good Girl), actor (in the gay comedy Chuck & Buck, he played the latter), and television producer (Freaks and Geeks, Pasadena)--that when the out talent finally donned his director's ball cap for the Molly Shannon comedy Year of the Dog (Paramount Vantage), he knew it was now or never.

"I realized that I had become such a backseat driver on my films that I was going to make myself crazy, so I felt like I should just do this," he says. The result, about a woman's erratic journey toward self-realization after the death of her dog, received accolades at the Sundance Film Festival this year and led many to wonder just what had taken White so long to helm one of his own screenplays.

"It's funny, because one of the reasons I haven't directed already is because I thought it would be so stressful," he explains. "And it, weirdly, wasn't stressful. I mean, I was stressed for four days coming into it, and then I realized, This is actually kind of fun!"

That's a marked contrast to the time White spent as the creator of Cracking Up, a short-lived Fox series whose transformative failure provided the inspiration for Year of the Dog. "I signed on to do this quirky show that I would want to do, and they weren't happy with what I was doing," White says. "All these cool people like Molly and Jason Schwartzman were in it, and I had all these cameos from cool actors doing the show, but I felt like I had thrown this party that I thought was going to be fun and then it turned out to suck and it never ended."

The last straw for White came during a Christmas break he'd intended to use catching up on scripts--that is, until a familiar stray cat passed away behind his house. "When you're doing these shows, you're so stressed and emotionally rundown that when this cat died, I completely spun out about it," he says. "I ended up writing the most depressing half hour of television that made the studio go, 'What? We're not doing this.' And so I got even more behind on scripts and basically had kind of a nervous breakdown."

While White unraveled, Fox executives shuttled the show from time slot to time slot until they eventually shut production down and canceled it. Still, even though he describes these events as "a horrible personal experience," White called upon them to write Year of the Dog. "It was kind of an interesting idea for a movie: someone who has this relationship with a pet and then the pet's death somehow has a real transformative effect on their life," he says.

In the film her dog's death leads office drone Peggy (Molly Shannon) down a path of animal activism and inspires her to take up a vegan lifestyle. White went vegan two years ago (though he still sometimes eats fish) and can still remember the floridly titled book that inspired him to make the change.

"The Pig Who Sang at the Moon," he says, smiling. "It sounds cheesy, but it was about the emotional lives of farm animals juxtaposed with the way they're treated in corporate farming. I was in Salt Lake City, and I picked it up in the airport and read it on the way home and someone in my family had just died, so it was really just an emotional experience reading this book. I have two dogs that remind me of pigs, so I was like, 'I can't eat my dogs!'"

Another element in Year of the Dog that will amuse gay audiences is Peter Sarsgaard's character, Newt--a sweet-natured animal activist who nevertheless frustrates Peggy when she attempts to spice up her life by dating him. When the effeminate Newt keeps turning down her advances, Peggy decides he must be gay--but his real answer is even more surprising.

"There's always so many movies and TV shows that have the ambiguous gay guy," White says, "and I just thought it would be funny to have a guy that's just like, 'I'm celibate. Whether I'm gay or not, I've just decided not to have sex.' A guy with a fanny pack who's celibate and Peter Sarsgaard ... that's definitely a match made in heaven."

Peggy's journey also reflects that of gay audiences if read as a coming-out metaphor. Though her friends balk at the changes in her life and worry that she'll never get married, Peggy presses on, undeterred. "In a very sort of explicit way," White says, "it's about someone discovering what their love is, recognizing it, and finding like-minded people."

White's coming-out experience, though, was anything but typical. His father is the Reverend Mel White, a former speechwriter for the religious right who later came out of the closet and founded the gay rights organization Soulforce. In the sense that the Reverend White rebelled against a repressive society and followed his own path, he could almost be a character from one of his son's screenplays-something not lost on Mike.

"For me, I always knew that my sexuality was not the status majority's," he says. "My dad's gay, and I knew he was gay since I was about 10. There was definitely a benefit to that because I knew I wasn't going to lose my parents' love [by coming out]. I could just be the person I was supposed to be and figure it out myself.

"I think one of the great things about being different in that way is that you're able to be free of some of the more conforming instincts of the majority's culture. And so as far as my sexuality and how I identify myself, it's been fun to really embrace a nonconformist way of approaching relationships and sexuality. My coming-out, I guess, is still in progress. It's not like 'Here's the thing' and then it's done--it's a life experience."

It's that sort of philosophy that informs White's projects, which often pit an outsider against a confining institution that tries to suppress them. Whether it's Jack Black loosening collars with the power of Deep Purple in School of Rock or Jennifer Aniston struggling to escape her small-town anomie in The Good Girl, White says these are the types of struggles he finds most compelling.

"I feel like one of the things I get out of movies is the encouragement to let your imagination about your life and the way you see yourself expand," he says. "When your values are in conflict with the values of the status quo, what you do about that is something that's always going to be interesting and satisfying to me."