"I WAS ACTUALLY HELPING MIKE MYERS LOOK FOR directors," Jay Roach tells me when asked how he got the gig as director of the Austin Powers franchise. "I was suggesting people I thought would be really cool to do the first one, like Tim Burton or Sam Raimi. I had already given him notes on the script, and without telling me, he put me up for the job. I had to go in and do a very elaborate presentation." Mr. Roach, who met Myers through friends, didn't go in as a stone-cold novice, though, having worked as a screenwriter, a sound recordist, an editor, a cameraman, basically as everything outside of the art department.

"We felt like in the first one we were just discovering the characters," he says, "and we were just trying to figure out what was going to be funny about them. Certainly the story was important, but we were trying to just make people laugh. So the story is something we wanted to be better, and we wanted to try to get license to do even more outrageous things." In that--with the introduction of Mini-Me, the feral midget clone of Dr. Evil, and the grotesque, self-explanatory character Fat Bastard--they have succeeded.

Seattle residents will enjoy the fact that Dr. Evil's headquarters is in a Starbucks at the top of the Space Needle. Says Roach, "Number Two [Robert Wagner] decided a more strategic way to take over the world is through investments, stocks. He reveals that a while back they invested in a small, Seattle-based coffee company, and tries to sell him on the idea of taking over the world through Starbucks. To Starbucks' credit, they completely got it. It wasn't at all a cross-promotional thing. We wrote it into the script because we thought it was funny, and thank god they got it."

Next up for Roach is an adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or Spy vs. Spy or a "great script" called Meet the Parents. Unless he finds his next project in the stack of scripts he brought along with him. First up, though, is a little time off.

The outrageous comedy Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me is now playing at the Meridian, Metro, Oak Tree, and outlying theaters.