"King of the Hill" and "Beavis and Butt-Head" creator Mike Judge works with real live actors these days. His latest film -- "Extract" -- is out on DVD today.

The comedy mines a different kind of workplace from the one Judge explored in "Office Space" -- the blue collar factory environment. Jason Bateman plays the owner of a flavoring extract factory who's plagued by an indifferent wife who ends up cheating on him, the world's most annoying neighbor, an attractive female grifter and an assortment of goofy employees.

Director Judge recently sat down at a "virtual round table" and took the media behind the scenes of "Extract." There's no hobnobbing with celebrities and their handlers, no free food and no airplane trip involved.

Instead, participants tap out questions on their keyboard from the comfort of their work stations: Here are some of the questions:

Q: What were the challenges of filming in a fully functional working factory?

Mike Judge: Because we were on a tight budget, we had to shoot a lot of stuff while they were still working -- they were really bottling. A lot of the background that you see in the movie is actually real people working -- not extras. It was loud enough in there that they couldn't hear us yelling "action" and "cut" and they just kind of got used to us being there, so I got some pretty natural acting in the background.

Q: There's a dignity to the characters -- and the work itself -- in your film. Talk about establishing that element while at the same time finding the humor in the colorful characters.

Judge: That's pretty important to me, because I've worked these kinds of jobs, and I remember feeling like Hollywood was sometimes out of touch with us, and always appreciating it when it felt like a movie or TV show got something right. I also used to feel like a lot of characters in movies and TV seemed to have endless cash and free time and you either didn't know much about their job or they didn't seem to have one.

Q: Animation or live action -- which do you prefer, and why?

Judge: I think they're more similar than you might think from the point of a writer/director. I liked animation when I was just doing short films myself -- doing everything myself. That was really satisfying work -- making a film one frame at a time, getting it back from the lab and watching it for the first time. That was about as good as it gets, I think.

Q: Did you shoot the film digitally? If so, how did you like/dislike the process of working in digital?

Judge: I shot it all on film. In fact, we didn't even do what's called a "D.I.," which is how most films are finished nowadays. So if you saw it in the theater, you saw a print that was struck right off a negative. I actually like what happens to the look of film when you put it through that process.

Q: While so many other comedies tend to shoot for these big company stories, you tend to reside in settings with small-town folks as the main characters. What draws you to these small town stories?

Judge: I would say my stuff resides in suburbs of big towns also, or small towns that are near big towns. I guess that's because I've mostly lived in places like that -- Albuquerque, N.M., Richardson, Texas, etc. I think that a lot of writers in film and TV in the past have tended to come from New York or big East Coast cities, and there has also been great stuff written about really small hick towns, and so I feel like I can maybe bring a different perspective on things with a suburban setting.

Q: You've talked about working at a music merchandise factory. Was that experience and the people you dealt with similar to what we saw of the factory workers in "Extract"?

Judge: There were some similarities from when I worked in a factory, but I probably got more inspiration from working on "Beavis and Butt-Head," where I felt like I was running a factory and having to deal with all its employees. It was a Butt-Head factory, basically.

Q: Why vanilla extract? Any symbolism or subtext there?

Judge: No symbolism or subtext. I try to avoid that sort of thing.

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