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Interview |
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Nossiter: Biography | | Photos Sundance turns 'Sunday' into surprising success by John Hartl Jonathan Nossiter wasn't just shocked when his film, "Sunday," took the top prize for drama - plus an additional award for best screenplay - at this year's Sundance Film Festival. He was amazed it got accepted in the first place, partly because the tape he submitted to the programmers was in such bad shape. Nossiter had no money to enter a more professional cassette. "You couldn't make out half of what was in the film," he said during a Seattle visit. "We shipped it off, the editor and I had a glass of wine and laughed, thinking they're never even going to look at this. We really expected nothing. When I found out the day before Thanksgiving that we'd been accepted, I screamed like a little girl." Nossiter feels that Sundance is partly about "buzz and parties and who you know" - which means the kings of independent distribution, Miramax and Fine Line. That's why he appreciates the fact that a few influential critics, such as Cinemania's Sheila Benson, paid attention: "We knew there'd be people looking at it, but it's a small film." "Sunday," the story of a chance meeting in Queens between a homeless American victim of corporate layoffs (David Suchet) and a middle-aged British actress (Lisa Harrow) who mistakes him for a well-known director, doesn't sound very sexy. Oddly enough, that's not true of the James Lasdun short story that inspired it. The story of twentysomething Londoners who spend a day in bed after they've met, it probably could have been sold as another "sex, lies and videotape," but neither Nossiter nor Lasdun were interested in that approach. They didn't think anyone wanted to hear about the problems of their generation, so they made the characters older. "It's a little jewel of a story, but it's self-contained," said Nossiter. "What interested me was the idea of two decent and honest and moral people who find themselves in a situation where they have to continue to build on a series of lies and misunderstandings. Because these are two characters who are around 50, there's much more at stake for them. They're making life-and-death decisions, and that makes their story so much richer." That applied to the actors as well. Suchet, a stage-trained British actor best-known for playing Hercule Poirot on television and colorful villains in such big-screen movies as "Executive Decision" and "The Falcon and the Snowman," was required to gain 48 pounds for his role. "His doctor told him this was not medically advisable," said Nossiter. "It's not as easy to lose weight when you're over 50." But Suchet was the filmmakers' first choice for the role ("I had no doubt he could do the accent"), and he wanted to play it enough to take the risk. "He responded to the script very strongly," said Nossiter. "I could see the depth and tenderness he could bring to it, without getting sentimental." Nossiter decided on Harrow, another British stage veteran imported to Queens, after watching her in Gillian Armstrong's Australian film, "The Last Days of Chez Nous." He could see no other actress in the role, even though "her film career had never quite taken off. She has a luminous movie-star beauty, but it's not the kind of beauty that pushes you away." The location was something he'd had in mind for a long time. He thinks Brooklyn has been sentimentalized in movies, while the Bronx has been used to "fetishize violence and demonize the underclass." But he thinks Queens, thanks partly to the influence of immigrants, is unique in its resemblance to the rest of the country: "It's the only part of New York where I feel I'm in America." Nossiter began his movie career at 24, when got a job as Adrian Lyne's assistant on "Fatal Attraction." He followed that up by directing the 1992 documentary about Quentin Crisp, "Resident Alien," and a new documentary about Arthur Penn that may be turning up on Bravo. The son of the late journalist, Bernard Nossiter, Jonathan grew up in France, England, Italy, India and Greece, where he will shoot his next picture, "Signs & Wonders." Fox Searchlight is already committed to backing it, and his "Sunday" co-writer, Lasdun, is again collaborating with him on the screenplay. "I can't hack it as a writer on my own," he said. "I wrote about a dozen bad scripts before I discovered James, who I think is predisposed to writing for movies. He'd only done poems and short stories; he's not used to the sprawling narratives and interior monologues of novelists. He pares things down. "When I first met with him, he said he'd work with me as long as I didn't try to impose myself on him as a director. Once I got over my bruised ego, we got along very well." Down and Out in Queens (but the Accent Is French) By Joan Dupont International Herald Tribune 'Sunday,'' although it is set in Queens, hardly looks like an American film; more like a French film, except that the language and actors are English. ''I've been accused of making a movie that should have subtitles, but doesn't,'' said the director, Jonathan Nossiter. ''In the U.S. that's pejorative; I take it as a compliment.'' An American who grew up in France, Italy, Greece and Britain, Nossiter came to Paris at age 2 because his father was a correspondent for The Washington Post and later The New York Times. ''Sunday,'' which won prizes at the Sundance festival and in Deauville, France, was also shown in the category ''Un Certain Regard'' at Cannes. ''In America, we got great reviews everywhere, except in The New York Times and The Washington Post,'' he says. ''In France, the film is getting a bigger release because I have the support of Marin Karmitz, who is releasing it at his theaters.'' The producer and distributor Karmitz, who runs the 14 Juillet movie houses, also threw a grand avant premiere with the director Claude Chabrol and actress Isabelle Huppert in the audience. The film has opened well in Paris and the rest of France. ''I'm stunned by the response here,'' he said. ''It's a small movie, made in five weeks on so little money that I'm not allowed to mention the budget.'' Scripted with the English writer James Lasdun, the film is a brief encounter between lost souls in a Dantesque limbo. The camera opens on a shelter for homeless men, and follows Oliver, a newcomer. Shielded behind thick glasses, he lunges blindly down the street, not noticing Madeleine, who is frantically trying to get his attention. A British actress past middle age, she takes Oliver for Matthew Delacorta, a famous director, perhaps the man who will save her. They spend Sunday telling each other stories, making love, and never quite revealing their true selves. More than a story about mistaken identity, the film is an investigation of what identity is in dire circumstances, of what goes into that flash of recognition that can make for falling in love. ''The case of mistaken identity was the only thing that remains of James' original story,'' Nossiter said. ''We invented the rest: the people, Queens, a kind of no-man's-land.'' The director worked in a shelter for a year and a half, preparing the movie, getting the men used to the camera. He feels that his actors, David Suchet, who plays Oliver, and Lisa Harrow, who plays Madeleine keep the mystery of the characters intact. ''The English have this restraint. These actors are mature people who have the courage to exist in all their nakedness. It was a challenge because I had to try to match their bravery.'' Suchet put on 49 pounds (22 kilograms) for the part. ''He's amazing, a Royal Shakespeare Company actor for 30 years who played Iago and just won every award as George in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf,''' Nossiter said. ''He's a chameleon, an artist who inhabits what he does; here he plays a schlep from Queens, but you feel he is Shakespearean in his stature, in his ordinariness. I was terrified working with such experienced actors because they could have eaten me alive. But he never pulled rank.'' Nossiter just turned 36, and it looks as though he has always been a precocious connoisseur of the fine arts - almost everything he did, he did early. ''I was kicked out of the Ecole Pascal at 4,'' he said with a touch of pride. ''It was my brutal introduction to the French educational system.'' The youngest of four brothers, he grew up with an interest in wine. ''I started working in restaurants when I was 15. Then I became a sommelier, got a degree, and in New York, I make a living composing wine lists for restaurants.'' He speaks fluent Greek, as well as French and Italian; at Dartmouth, he studied ancient Greek and happened upon film. Out of college, he had his heart set on movies, which he thinks are a perfect refuge for marginal personalities and misfits. He made a documentary, ''Resident Alien: Une vie de boheme New Yorkaise'' (Life of a New York Bohemian) with Quentin Crisp, John Hurt and Holly Woodlawn, that Karmitz plans to release in Paris next spring. In his young career, he also got to work as Adrian Lyne's assistant on ''Fatal Attraction,'' about which he has little to say. ''I was a bad painter at the Beaux Arts and at the Art Institute in San Francisco,'' he said, ''and I think that filmmaking is a great repository for multifailures. There's something comforting about being able to apply your mediocre talents. If you have a passionate background, if you're visual and interested in the spoken word, filmmaking lets you put it all together and come up with something. I look forward to making a film in which actors set a challenge that becomes the primary focus. I'm beginning to get scared and that's a good sign.'' Every Day is "Sunday" for Jonathan Nossiter Distribution Co. Written by Nina Davidson LOS ANGELES - The long, lazy Sunday afternoons of Jonathan Nossiter's childhood inspired him to direct an anything-goes fantasy. When a middle-aged actress mistakes a homeless man for a famous film director, a melancholy meditation on love results from their chance encounter in the drama "Sunday." "Sundays, generally, you wake up in the morning and you still feel you're in the weekend. And as the day progresses, you feel this terrible weight closing down. Maybe from my childhood, when you had to do homework, and you had to go back to school," he said. "Sunday is also kind of a day of reckoning, it's got a weight attached to it. But Sunday's also a day that's a kind of blank canvas that allows you to invent because you don't have the day-to-day pressures that you have on other days of the week." With the diffident air of a college professor behind his horn-rimmed glasses, Nossiter expounds on his feature film debut that garnered both the Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Scott Award in Screenwriting at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival. The son of international journalist Bernard Nossiter, he grew up globe-trotting France, England, Italy, Greece and India. Despite his world travels, he set "Sunday" in the most prosaic of New York's boroughs, Queens. "I think that it's an area, it's a part of New York that's often neglected. It's the most overlooked, and that instantly appeals to me because generally when something's overlooked it usually means there's something else there worth hunting down," he said. "Manhattan has been exhausted as a place to film, at least for me. There's been so many great films that have explored Manhattan as a place, and Brooklyn, and the Bronx. My eye gets tired walking around there, whereas Queens is sort of virgin territory. I think what's unique about Queens is that it's got sort of a small-town America aspect, and yet it's right on the edge of Manhattan." The down-and-out denizens of Queens include downsized IBM accountant Oliver (David Suchet) and struggling actress Madeleine (Lisa Harrow). The lethargic pace of Oliver's daily stroll is interrupted when Madeleine hails him from across the street as a long-lost friend. With nothing before him except his return to the homeless shelter, Oliver goes along with her mistake. Soon they are both constructing fantasy lives for each other, and breaking society's taboos of behavior along the way. "I think that when you break a taboo, when you break a routine, when you try and move beyond what you think you know, I think those are the moments when you're most alive," he said. "I think those are the moments when you're most receptive, most receptive to love, to tenderness, to your own imagination, to the imagination of other people." Although both characters live on in Nossiter's imagination, he remains optimistic about their fates, despite the bleak ending of the film. Based on a short story by James Lasdun, who also served as co-writer of the film, "Sunday" profiles two ordinary people with extraordinary tenacity in the face of despair. "The people in the film are people who are in trouble, but I think they have phenomenal sort of courage. And the fact that they're able to preserve their dignity, that they're still struggling to express love and tenderness even in adversity," he said. "To me, they're more superheroes than Batman and Robin. I have more admiration for these characters. No, I feel very optimistic about them, but it's a kind of optimism that's not dime-store optimism, it's not like a manufactured happy-ending optimism. It's something you have to fight for." Nossiter also had to fight for his film when funding ran out two weeks early. The lead actors Suchet and Harrow, both British, were stranded in the United States while the producers scrambled for the money to finish the film. The extra effort paid off when "Sunday" screened at Sundance, and Cinepix Film Properties picked up the film for distribution. For Nossiter's next project, he draws upon his degree in Ancient Greek from Dartmouth College. "I'm working with the same writer, James Lasdun, and actually a lot of the same people from 'Sunday.' We're doing a film with Fox Searchlight this time, it's a psychological thriller set in Greece called 'Signs and Wonders.' We're going to be shooting in Athens, in the North of Greece, on the Albanian border." |
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