“It’s been awhile,” director David Gordon Green said as we shook hands on Sunday. Indeed it had.

It was, in fact, 10 years almost to the day since I’d interviewed Green at the Sundance Film Festival, and the trajectory of his career has been little short of unprecedented.

In 2003, Green was in Park City with “All the Real Girls,” one of a series of small, contemplative films that had some people thinking of him as the next Terrence Malick. Instead, he became celebrated as the director of the big-budget stoner action-comedy “Pineapple Express.”

Back then, Green expected he would direct an independent version of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces”; instead, he ended up with the Jonah Hill comedy “The Sitter,” the James Franco-starring “Your Highness” and a thriving business directing commercials.

But to spend time with Green is to realize that writing about his path this way is to not see the forest for the trees. The director views everything he’s done as of a piece, as being in the service of what he calls “my collective adventure.”

“I’m not one of those people who wants to do the same thing every day - I love experiences, going to new places,” says Green, 37. “I’d like to conquer the world in my own quiet way, or at least take a bite out of it. I wouldn’t change one day of my professional career.”

Green says he respects filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and Paul Thomas Anderson but sees himself as different. “They shoot for perfection,” he says. “I have an instant-gratification work ethic. It’s more about movement, about getting things done.”

That attitude led directly to “Prince Avalanche,” Green’s current Sundance film, a low-budget, deadpan comedy starring Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch as genial misfits painting lines on a deserted stretch of Texas highway. Its genesis was, by conventional standards, totally backward: The story it tells was the last thing Green came up with.

Everything started with that now-famous Clint Eastwood-starring Chrysler commercial “It’s Halftime in America” that Green directed for last year’s Super Bowl. “The production was very stripped down and minimal, but it played so epically - 100 million people saw it, and that was very inspiring to me,” he says.

“I thought there was no reason we couldn’t make movies that way, pulled off with simplicity and pleasure and not having to deal with egos and trailers.”

After the concept came the location. Watching that Super Bowl with Green in Austin, where he lives, were members of the band Explosions in the Sky. The band’s drummer had just returned from hiking in nearby Bastrop, where a catastrophic fire had created an unusual landscape that appealed to the director.

Backdrop in hand, all Green needed was an idea, which came via a friend in New York who told him about a two-person Icelandic film called “Either Way.”