Jason Bateman, who directs and stars in the upcoming movie “Bad Words,” recently participated in a conference call with various college newspaper outlets, including Student Life. For more than 45 minutes, he answered questions ranging from what it is like to curse in front of child actors to the directors who influenced his style.

Bateman’s directorial debut follows Guy Trilby (Bateman) as he attempts to win the Golden Quill spelling bee, entering through a loophole in the rules. He encounters contest officials, parents and a reporter, Jenny Widgeon (Kathryn Hahn), who follows his story as he attempts to crush eighth-graders’ hopes and dreams.

Bateman’s down-to-earth sensibilities and nice-guy attitude were apparent throughout the call as he kindly greeted interviewers and took time to answer their questions thoughtfully and fully. The interview began with a question regarding the difference between acting and directing.

“With acting, you’re trying to convince people that you’re someone different,” Bateman said. “[But] with directing you’re trying to create a completely fake world for the audience and trying to shape an experience for that audience for two hours.”

He went on to say that directing has been a more gratifying experience for him as it has presented many more creative challenges for him to solve. Bateman spoke enthusiastically about working with a team of professionals to create an engrossing experience for the audience, saying he enjoyed working with everything from color tests to storyboarding.

Bateman said that what drew him to screenwriter Andrew Dodge’s script was, “I have the same kind of dark sense of humor. It just really made me laugh.” He continued, saying that it was also necessary to “counterbalance [the dark humor] with something more sophisticated. You’ve got to earn those big uncomfortable comedic moments for people.”

The movie also traces the relationship between Trilby and fellow competitor Chaitanya Chopra (Rohan Chand), and Bateman spoke about working with a child actor. Bateman himself was a child actor, and he said that his own experiences helped him communicate more effectively with Chand and the other young actors on set. Regarding cursing in front of children, Bateman said that all the parents and children had read and approved of the script, so he did not feel too bad using crude language and exhibiting immoral behavior in front of them.

One interviewer asked what films influenced Bateman’s directing style since “Bad Words” is his first film in the director’s chair. Bateman said that his major influences were the movies of Paul Thomas Anderson, Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, the Coen Brothers and Alexander Payne, explaining that their muted sense of humor spoke to him.

“Specifically,” Bateman said, “the sort of palette I was working with was ‘Being John Malkovich.’ It was called a comedy, but there are not a lot of jokes in it. There’s some melancholy, loneliness and existential issues. But it’s all dealt with in a sort of measured way, with people who are pretty serious about what they’re going through. The mix of that yields a lot of comedy.”

Bateman’s influences are clear in the muted colors and raw feeling of “Bad Words” as well as its plotline, which focuses on a specific set or type of people, much like the films he mentioned.

Bateman, who often plays the comedic, likeable straight man in his roles, said that playing a darker character like Guy Trilby was also an enjoyable experience. He explained that playing so many likeable characters has left him with a few tricks that help him to make viewers relate to his character even when he is doing something immoral.

The directing chair seems to have helped Bateman reach a more sophisticated sense of comedy and better understand the ways in which dark humor plays to an audience. He spoke enthusiastically about honing Trilby’s tough-guy exterior onscreen.

“There were times when we were acting the scene and it felt like it was so sweet that I could go harder, or it was a little bit too hard so I could go sweeter. Once we cut it all together, there’s a rhythm to it,” Bateman said. “Maybe a whole section feels a little too caustic, so we had a little bit of a crutch with the narration where I could go in and calibrate it a little.”

Bateman will also be directing and starring in “The Family Fang,” which is still in pre-production. He said, “I would direct full time if they would have me” but that more realistically, he would try to strike a balance between acting and directing, similar to Ben Stiller, George Clooney or Ben Affleck.

On directing as a whole, Bateman said, “It’s just something that asks me to use everything I’ve soaked up in X years of being an actor and asks me to do everything that makes me really excited about what movies are.”

“Bad Words” opens in St. Louis theaters Friday, March 21.