No one working in Hollywood knows how to make audiences' dreams come true quite like Gary Ross, the two-time Best-Screenplay Oscar nominee who wrote and directed the enchanted new comedy Pleasantville. Ross makes his directing debut with Pleasantville, which transports two teenagers and audiences across America into the make-believe world of a '50s TV show.

In Big, for which he received his first Oscar nomination, Ross granted children everywhere their fantasy, letting them pretend to be "grown-ups" without ever having to grow up. Five years later, Ross followed up his success with Dave, another feelgood movie, this time aimed at an older audience. In Dave, an ordinary American gets the chance to sub in for the President while he recovers from a stroke.

Granting unspoken wishes once again, Ross gives us the opportunity to experience "life" in Pleasantville, the film's namesake, an imaginary television show about the ideal middle-American town, reminiscent of shows like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. Blending fantasy and reality, mixing color with black and white, Ross ends up with a movie that stands out as the most creative Hollywood film in recent memory.

Earlier this month, the Austin Film Festival featured a sneak preview of the film as its opening night event. After the screening, Ross met with The Daily Texan to discuss the film. Ross described his earlier two screenwriting projects as "pure wish fulfillment," but claimed that he was trying to do something more with Pleasantville.

"I'd had this idea of going inside a kind of modern Alice in Wonderland, of two kids going through this looking glass of a TV set," Ross said. "This is that nostalgic world as we remember it, not necessarily as it was. We heightened it in our memory. We sanitized it to make it perfect."

In Ross's film, the teenage twins, David and Jennifer (played by Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon), unknowingly unleash trouble in their picture-perfect black-and-white surroundings. Ross toys with his utopian setting, where the books are filled with blank pages, toilets aren't necessary, and sexuality is incomprehensible.

But all that changes when David and Jennifer appear, bringing a modern "enlightenment" to the stale TV town. Every time one of the Pleasantville residents discovers an intense emotion, random objects burst into vibrant color. According to Ross, audiences will have trouble trying to find a pattern among the changes that Pleasantville undergoes, including colorization and the introduction of elements such as fire and rain. "The color is all part of a virus that's spreading," Ross explained. "No one knows what it is, but it's in the air, and it bleeds all over the place. It's a virus of unpredictability, and as such, you can't explain where it will show up next. Why is his comb orange when his hair isn't? Why does her tongue turn, but not the rest of her? It's all part of the virus, and it's one that's going to spread in an unpredictable way."

Behind all the unpredictability, Ross is still the puppet-master. When the story seems to be moving in unforeseeable directions, Ross has everything under control. He explained that, while the story required that he play God over the TV-show universe, he was often surprised by the directions in which his creativity led him.

"Yes, I feel godlike in a way, but also I feel a sense of wonder in seeing it just bloom like that," Ross said. "It's kind of thrilling. By shaking up a world like that, you yield ideas that are big. I think these people are a victim to a kind of conformity. They're all susceptible to not wanting to change but being forced to by their world. This is an imperfect universe, and they have to try to make it Eden again."

Sometimes Ross's symbolism makes his messages a little too clear, as in the scene that features David and his Pleasantville girlfriend sharing a colorized apple picked at Lover's Lane. As "No Coloreds" signs appear in shop windows and the movie reaches its climax in a melodramatic courtroom scene, some audiences may find Ross's approach a little too heavy-handed. Essentially, Ross is giving us additional fodder for conversation, while staying true to his main theme.

"I think all of us are closed to change," Ross said. "Everybody puts up a little picket fence around one part of their life or another and tries to sanitize it and hold on to safety. People try to repress what scares them, not necessarily because it's something bad. As a result, things like racism, sexism, and fascism erupt. We try to create a homogenous universe, which is sort of what we look for in these old nostalgic television shows. Ultimately, the '90s world is just as empty as the '50s world, but cynicism is no answer."

At the heart of Ross's parable lies an imaginative story that has proven immensely popular with audiences. Meticulous special-effects work allows color and B&W to share the same frame. Like a postmodern Wizard of Oz, Pleasantville brims with everything audiences love about the movies. But when it comes time for there to be "no place like home," audiences might be surprised by the decisions some of the characters make.

"Reese['s character] to me is like a recovered alcoholic just recently sober," Ross explained. "She can't go back to the bar yet. Her new identity of self-respect is pretty new to her, and she doesn't really trust it yet. She feels so much more alive, and so much more fulfilled in this world than she did in the other. In a movie where the moral is that nothing can really be tied up in a neat little bow, I thought, why cheat the character of that just to have a perfect, uniform Hollywood ending?"

For Ross, making magic starts within the boundaries of Hollywood traditions but travels far beyond the realms of convention. By basing his creativity on the common ground of shared daydreams, Ross gives all audiences something to enjoy. While the message hidden behind the layers of fun might not work for everyone, the movie acts on so many levels that it seems guaranteed to entertain even the most jaded viewers.