Wallace Shawn’s play-writing career really took off when he met rebellious theatre director André Gregory in 1970.

Now recognizable everywhere for his round face and musically squeaking voice, Shawn started his life in movies at the end of that decade, when Woody Allen cast him as Diane Keaton’s intimidating first husband, Jeremiah, in Manhattan. Since then, he’s had featured roles in more than 160 movies (The Princess Bride), TV shows (The Good Wife), and especially cartoons (Toy Story, Family Guy)—where his munchkin-esque enunciation is especially prized.

In 1981, Shawn and Gregory captured their own tabletop conversations in Louis Malle’s My Dinner With André. Shawn played Uncle Vanya in the late French director’s last film, Vanya on 42nd Street. And the gangly Gregory handled productions of his much smaller friend’s prizewinning plays over the years. But it took until now for these celebrated diners to reunite for cinematic purposes.

The result is A Master Builder, their modernized version of one of Henrik Ibsen’s final, and most confounding, plays. They’ve actually been working on it for more than 14 years, and have mounted their adaptation several times on Broadway.

“It’s the kind of thing you have to keep going back to,” Shawn declares, in a call from his Manhattan home, “because you can never get on top of it. I’ve come to think of art as being about ways we strive for a kind of ecstasy that is not possible to reach.”

The play is about a fictional architect who, near the end of his life, confesses that he has benefited unduly from the weaknesses of others. No Ayn Rand he-man, the master builder reaches out for human consolation from, among others, a rival architect (Gregory) and a stifled wife, played by Julie Hagerty. (They could call this Atlas Hugged.)

Could the movie, which opens here Friday (September 12), also be seen as a coded tribute to his father, William Shawn, a quiet tyrant who worked at the New Yorker magazine for 53 years, more than half of them as editor?

“My father was a very powerful man,” says Shawn, who’s 70, “but I think this character is true to anyone with power, especially when addressing the fact of imminent death. Some personal feelings could have crept in there; the way André works with actors makes us draw on whatever is available for the character.”

This is not to say that Ibsen’s characters necessarily behave in true-to-life ways. Shawn reframed the story so one central personality would become a spectral visitor from the past instead of a strange human being.

“There’s more than normal human psychology at work here. It’s true that Ibsen returned to poetic roots later in life, and turned away from realism. But I’m not sure if André will concur on that. He frequently disagrees with me.” Not really.

Born in Paris in 1934, Gregory attended Harvard and then led several avant-garde theatre companies throughout the 1960s. In 1975, he directed a play by Shawn, and later he left the U.S. to study with Polish experimentalist Jerzy Grotowski and others. When he returned, he talked about this during his Dinner with Wally (as everyone calls him), and subsequently directed The Designated Mourner and other plays by Shawn, revisiting Ibsen along the way.

“I’ve changed a lot, mainly because I’ve got older,” admits Gregory, now 80, on the line from a vacation place in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. “But that’s given me new insight into these more difficult works, like [Beckett’s] Endgame, [Shakespeare’s King] Lear, and Master Builder. You can never completely get to the bottom of them. That enigma is part of what adds complexity to an artist’s later works. Wally’s plays are like that; they have no bottom, and that’s part of why I rehearse so much. After years of work, I feel the need to show people everything I’ve found so far.”

Obviously, Gregory loves to chat about changes he’s seen in the theatre world, but he feels one constant is Shawn’s talent.

“I honestly feel he is one of our greatest character actors; I would classify him just under Philip Seymour Hoffman. And I don’t think there’s another modern playwright who holds a candle to him, in terms of depth, insight, and beauty of the spoken word. He’s also the most difficult. Not as a person. We’ve never had a fight in all these years. It’s just that his writing is thorny and controversial; he talks about things that are already here, but we can’t see it because we’re right in the middle of them.”

On the other hand, he’s still up for a good comedy, and had a particularly good laugh in 1996, after walking into a movie theatre with no idea what would be coming.

“I was having a bad day with a difficult lady friend,” Gregory recalls, “and we decided to go see something to change the mood. It was Waiting for Guffman, and when that scene came up with Christopher Guest showing off his My Dinner With André action figures—well, I can tell you with absolute certainty that the tone of the day brightened considerably!”