Interview

A Review and Interview by Stan Schwartz

Jonathan Nossiter's haunting and impressionistic film Sunday (Cinepix Film Properties), which won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Film at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, has just opened in New York and is scheduled for a roll-out opening in the coming weeks across the country. Hypnotically atmospheric, beautifully acted, mysteriously elliptical and poignant all at once, Sunday tells the story of two strangers who meet by chance, thanks to an instance of mistaken identity, and forge a fleeting romance over the course of a single winter Sunday in Queens, New York. David Suchet (the brilliant English stage actor most known here for his starring turn in TV's Poirot) plays Oliver, a middle-aged American who has lost his job and family thanks to corporate downsizing, and winds up in a Church-run shelter for homeless men. On this particular Sunday, early on in his daily wanderings, he comes across Madeleine (Lisa Harrow, herself having spent years with the Royal Shakespeare Company), an out-of-work British actress in exile in Queens, separated from her American husband, and who now spends her time collecting plants. She mistakes Oliver for a famous film director she had worked with years before and immediately invites him to a meal at a nearby diner. The down-and-out Oliver accepts, and plays along with his new-found identity. There follows a Pinter-esque cat-and-mouse game where it is never quite clear how much Madeleine knows about the true identity of Oliver. The melancholic poignancy resides in the fact that these two lonely and affection-starved people need each other's company desperately, if only for a day, and they will play out whatever fantasy is necessary to achieve some degree of true, albeit short-lived, emotional intimacy. The central couple's on-and-off-again moments of physical and emotional contact is constantly punctuated by cutaways to the diverse wanderings of the other homeless men in the shelter. As the deliberate backdrop for this mysterious 24-hour courtship is the working-class, immigrant-filled borough of Queens, never before rendered on film so evocatively, painterly, lyrically. The densely-layered, overlapping soundtracks of language (many languages, in fact) and sounds all contribute to an overall dreamscape that is as mesmerizing as it is touching. Director Nossiter and I chatted about Sunday and Queens on a Wednesday morning in Midtown Manhattan. He's a bright, articulate young man who, as son of the late journalist Bernard Nossiter, spent his formative years in France, England and Italy, among other places. His is extremely funny, down-to-earth, self-deprecatory almost to a fault, and generous of spirit (he is constantly down-playing his own importance for Sunday in favor of the contributions of his co-writer James Lasdun, the actors and all the other designers and technicians). Nossiter studied art before getting into film-making and he's fluent in five languages (hence the importance of the multiplicity of language in his film). And to top it all off, the young director is, most incongruously, a trained wine expert and sommelier. But if I had to chose one word that best describes him, it would be passionate. Nossiter is fiercely passionate about everything he does and says (and sometimes shouts). And given the diversity of his interests, he is utterly democratic with this passion. Nothing gets short shrift. The effect is exhilarating and strangely at odds with a film which ultimately leans towards the melancholic. But whether it's a function of melancholic exhilaration or exhilarating melancholy, Nossiter's vision has resulted in a film which has quickly put him on the indy film map in a big way, and with good reason. It's a fascinating film and he's a fascinating guy. Here are some excerpts from our conversation.

SS: One has the impression from your very varied background that you didn't actually set out to become a filmmaker . . .

JN: No. I started in art school in the Art Institute in San Francisco and the Beaux Arts in Paris, but I discovered I was not destined to become much of a painter. So then I went to college to study ancient Greek.

SS: No Truffaut-like childhood spent watching movies, then.

JN: Not at all. I sort of looked into movies by accident when I was in college. And I was overwhelmed. And I think I was lucky not to have had a movie culture as a kid, because at 18, when I looked at this stuff, it looked fresh to me. I wandered into Fellini's 8-1/2 by accident and it got me enraged because it looked like nothing I knew before. I was convinced it was pretentious, phony and disingenuous. And it got me so angry I had to see it again. The second time I got irritated. The third time, of course, I woke up and said "Wow. The world is amazing and this is amazing." That probably sounds a bit cliched, but it's also probably the only thing that really felt like a specific moment where something happened where I felt this is something I really wanted to do. From that moment, it was certainly my ambition to become a filmmaker.

SS: Where did the story for Sunday come from?

JN: I had met James Lasdun, the film's co-writer, briefly at dinner, and thought he was interesting. I went out and bought his collection of short stories and found I was very taken with his writing. I read this short story and there was this plot twist which was very interesting to me. In the film, we adapted very freely, it's rather changed from the story. But still, there was this case of mistaken identities, and what happens to these two people who are interested in forging a connection, but the more they do, the more they're forced to lie. And given American culture's tendency to confuse truth and fiction in a very peculiar way, that seemed interesting to me. So I called James up and said, "Look, this plot twist would make an interesting film."

SS: But then you brought to it your own interest in the geographical location of Queens . . .

JN: Yes, then came my obsession with Queens. I had spent 9 years taking photographs there obsessively - and there seemed to be some sort of dove-tailing there with James's concerns. I mean, how do you locate this human problem, which is: if you're on the edge, and you're looking for a way to find love through exchanged tenderness, but you're in a position where you're ironically forced to be deceitful, how do you situate that? So for us, it started as a human problem, and then you fan out from there. I myself felt very much the pull of this physical context, and then I tried to find a social and political one.

SS: It's interesting that you had taken lots of photos of Queens, because some film directors start out with one single core image that sticks out in their mind's eye . . .

JN: Well, there was also this one image I carried with me from London from ten years before of a very fat man crossing the street in a chocolate brown suit and chocolate brown shoes. At a crowded square, all the cars were stopped, and everyone looking out the windows at this very fat man in a badly cut chocolate brown suit who was crossing the street. There was something very heroic about him. I'm not trying to be sentimental. It was as if he had to summon up all his courage just to cross the damn street in front of everyone and he was sort of saying "I know I'm fat and badly dressed, but fuck all of you," no, not even "fuck all of you," because he was much more gracious than that. That's something I would have done! There was something about that image that just made him my sort of superman.

SS: So clearly, you don't view David Suchet's character in pessimistic terms.

JN: No. I'm surprised by certain reactions to the film, people seeing it as not necessarily optimistic. But I see it as optimistic. I see all these characters as very heroic. David Suchet's character could have easily given up, given everything that's happened to him. That would be a pessimistic film, a cynical film. But that's not what this film is about. This guy is not particularly brilliant, not particularly talented necessarily. And he's been kicked in the head, kicked in the face, kicked in the ribs, and he's still standing. He's still doing something. He's still engaged with the world.

SS: David Suchet is amazing in the role . . .

JN: And what [he] did as actor . . .!! He put on 48 pounds for a low-budget film by a first-time unknown director in a place he never heard of. Talk about being heroic! And that's just a physical indication of what he did as an actor and human being. And Lisa, the same thing. Both of them took enormous risks as human beings and as actors to invest the film with something more than just . . . I mean, they are good enough actors technically to have just walked in and done it (snapping his fingers) - and still have done a hell of a lot better than most. They could have walked in and not paid much attention to me, because I am not an experienced director. But they didn't do that. They walked in and said, "This is a script that we will take seriously, and these are people that, whatever their age and experience, we will engage with seriously." It was very rich.

SS: Speaking of Lisa Harrow -- who, I hasten to add, is equally wonderful - it came out in my conversation with her earlier that her own interpretation of how much her character knew at any given moment in the film was very different from my own. Which brings up the whole theme of ambiguity, a very important aspect of your film. Regardless of any ambiguity or mystery that the viewer perceives in the final film (which, of course, is not a bad thing), don't you as director have to have a fairly set, unambiguous take on exactly who knows what when, in order just to direct the piece?

JN: Interesting . . . My feeling is that there is a lot of in and out. There were shifts in the character's understanding of what she was believing of who he was and who he wasn't. I think there is a circuitous path back and forth with varying levels of belief and non-belief. It's a mixture of the two. What kept it fresh for us, the film-makers, from the writing, through the rehearsing and shooting, even through the editing, was the notion of being constantly surprised by new ideas. Not gratuitously having my mind changed for its own sake, but to see if there wasn't something else there that I hadn't seen. That's why the making of the film was interesting from start to finish. It never felt like I was going over old material. So I changed my mind all the time about what was going on, and that for me was a good thing.

SS: There's no question that Sunday is purely and beautifully cinematic, but I also felt some theater thing going on. Specifically, Pinter came to mind, if only because of the theme of real versus fake identity. Can you comment on that?

JN: There is a weird mix of cinematic things, because my background is more visual, and theater or language things, because James is a poet. And because James is English (but he lives in the States) and I grew up to some extent in England, and then the presence of David Suchet and Lisa Harrow as well, it was almost inevitable there'd be an emphasis on language and the suppleness of language. Which is maybe not part of American culture but it still found its way in to the film. But at the same time, James, as a poet, is predisposed to see the world in terms of movies, because what a poet is doing is trying to distill down to an essence. I think novelists make difficult screenwriters, because they are used to a sprawling narrative and interior monologue. But a narrative poet like James sees the world and tries to distill experience and narrative into something very narrow, with words and images. There has to be images. Which is what I think film is about. James is a natural screenwriter.

SS: What about the on-going reference to The Duchess of Malfi?

JN: That was definitely a James Lasdun thing! One of his personal obsessions. I resisted at first. I wanted to do The Jew of Malta. I'm more obsessed about Jewish identity than James is and I thought that would be more appropriate. But I think James was interested in the Jacobean emotions and extremes, and that line that keeps coming up -- the notion of being cast out into the wilderness -- had a resonance. I actually frowned upon it at first. I didn't quite feel the connection. But now, I'm glad that he won. You know, it's very much James's film as well as mine.

SS: Did you do any research into the world of homeless shelters?

JN: Yes. James spent a couple of years in the shelter we shot it and I spent a year and a half there, and we built up relationships. James took notes, and I shot video after awhile. A lot of the film's characters and their dialogue is built out of what we saw and heard, which is quite journalistic in a way. That's why I wouldn't repudiate any journalistic influence of my father. I admire the way my father kept up his curiosity throughout his life about anybody at all. When we lived in India, for example, he made absolutely no distinction between interviewing a cabdriver in Calcutta and Indira Gandhi. He didn't give a damn. If they had something to say, he'd be interested in listening. That's something to which I would like to aspire.

SS: The Tower of Babel metaphor and the multiplicity of language seem important to the film . . .

JN: It is important. It's an essential part of the film. There is a strong reason for putting the film in Queens. Queens has a kind of small-town America quality. And it's where all the new immigrants are. The Lower East Side used to be all the Irish, and Jews, and Italians, and now it's in Queens, together with the Rumanians, and Thais, and South Indians, and Russians. There's an energy there, but it's not obvious. You have to dig a bit. Dig visually. It doesn't immediately give you Venice at sunset. But still, there is a beauty there and for me a kind of visual power. And yes, there is this polyglot thing going on. Now, we didn't want to have a character from every country in the world, but through building the soundtrack and oblique exchanges, we tried to build a sense of all the immigrants and the American dream not going sour, but derailed. Which reflects the kind of truth at least James and I have seen happening. Not just down-sizing, but just what happens to these new immigrants, and how easily or not so easily they are able to fold into American society. So there is a kind of Tower of Babel, a cacophony of voices.

SS: There's also a jazz quality, it seems to me . . .

JN: The film felt very much like a sort of jazz score. We established certain harmonies and melodies, but it was very open. It changed in the writing, and rehearsing, and shooting. For example - there's this obsessive shooting of twilight in the film which is not natural (it drove the continuity person crazy). And that came out of specific conversations with David Suchet about his character. The whole film takes place in one day, so every part of the day has meaning. And I asked him "What is the key part of the day for you when everything comes together psychologically and emotionally?" And he came up with the idea that it was twilight, that this was the most desperate hour of the day for him, on any given day, and on this particular Sunday it had an extra intensity. And I thought, "Damn, that's interesting." So I talked to the DP and the production people and said we're going to have to re-arrange shooting -- and this was just ten days before starting - because I want this scene through this scene to now take place over twilight. We're going to stretch and exaggerate twilight. All this comes out of cross exchanges, and we build from there.

SS: Since you have an art background, perhaps a painting metaphor is more apt than a musical one - I mean, your film seems kind of cubist . . .

JN: There is certainly an aspect of that. Trying to show different sides on a flat surface . . .

SS: Which extents to the use of sound as well�

JN: Absolutely. We spent a lot of time constructing the sound design. I told the sound recordist at the beginning of the shoot that he was going to be the composer of the film. It ended up being him and the sound editor. For the whole Oliver and the glasses business, we had 48 tracks at our disposal. And nine of them alone furnished the "bed" of Oliver's consciousness. Greek goat bells . . . we went out into the hall and bashed metal pipes against each other to create an echo effect that we then built back in the film . . . that's part of the fun of making a film.

SS: And now the question I've been putting off until the end. A lot of people seem to find it amusing, if not downright odd, that in addition to everything else, you are a trained wine expert and sommelier. Do you see any connections at all between wine and film-making?

JN: There are actually a lot of overlaps. In the wine world, there has been this kind of disease, or cult of stars which has completely distorted what the nature of wine is. To me, the beauty of wine is the same as beauty in film: it's about details and specificity. To me, the greatest wines are often peasant wines. I'm not talking about expensive wines, I'm talking about wines which express a relationship between a human being, a physical environment, and a culture. There are parts of the Loire Valley in France which were founded by the ancient Romans, with soil which has had several millennia to adapt to these specific grapes, and then cultivated by in some cases, awful people, in other cases, really interesting people, who are aware of the history of their culture, but who also bring something personal to it. And these are the wines which are interesting to me. But there's an incredible con going on in this country. I think American wine-drinkers have been suckered, like some American filmgoers have been suckered, into getting something ersatz slammed down their throats. Now I'm probably going to make a lot of enemies with this but it's something I really care about a lot. You know, the idea that most people now have been brainwashed into thinking that white wine is California Chardonnay. Most California Chardonnay is a scandal!!! It's bubble gum liquefied. Sorry, but I've started this, so I might as well finish it. Chardonnay comes from Burgundy. It's a very different climate, different soils [from California]. It's actually a very neutral grape which is very good at expressing the climate and soil. And that's why white burgundy is interesting. But what it's been used for in California is a kind of . . . well, it's exactly what they do with the worst kind of cynical, big-budget Hollywood movies. They will take a marketing idea - it's easy to market Chardonnay - and apply a formula just like a formula film - which is growing the grape a certain way to maximize the fruit so you get the Welch's bubble gum sugary thing going. Then beef up the alcohol, which is just like ultra Dolby sound and fast cutting and getting your head banged in. And then they'll whack new oak on it, which gives it a kind of spurious sort of sweet vanilla thing, which is the equivalent of a happy ending. So you get all the cheap formulae of the worst kind of Hollywood films. And then, its rammed down the public's throat. And then, you get these people who've made millions and millions of dollars and buy themselves a winery - it's the same thing the Medicis were doing in the 16th century - just for prestige, they'll slap their name on the label and they'll charge forty bucks because they see that French white burgundy costs forty bucks (which often are over-priced but at least it's coming out of a certain tradition). I really think it's a scandal and Americans have been brainwashed.

SS: What about this snobbery attached to wine?

JN: I hate it. The beauty of wine is its simplicity, and I think the same thing is true of movies. Good movies and good wine should both be immediately accessible and comprehensible, and the interest should grow from there. But I do feel optimistic, there are great upstate [New York] wines from the Finger Lakes that costs seven or eight bucks, beautiful wines. Sorry for the tirade.

SS: What's next?

JN: A film called Signs and Wonders, I'm writing with James for Fox Searchlight. It's a psychological thriller set in Greece. Eighty percent set in Greece, and twenty percent set in Jersey, for an exotic change of pace.

SS: You've been around a lot, and presumably, given the settings of your next project, you will continue to get around. So I wonder: where do you feel is home?

JN: Wherever I'm about to go to. Wherever I just came from. No, I came upon this great phrase just the other day: For pre-modern man, who you are is where you come from. But the modernist ethic is: who you are is where you're going. And finally, the post-modern: who you are is actually no one in particular! Actually, I live in Little Italy [in Manhattan].

SS: You wound up your wine and film diatribe by expressing a certain optimism about New York wines. Extending the analogy appropriately, I'd like to say that with a movie like Sunday, I myself am optimistic about American cinema. Thanks very much Jonathan.

JN: Thank you.

SUNDAY

The media made much of SUNDAY's Otherness in a field dominated by twentysomething filmmakers and their tales of youthful discovery. Nossiter's film was deemed "adult," an accolade that falls just short in its double-edgedness to a free subscription to Modern Maturity. Certainly there is a contrast to this year's young Sundance filmmakers whose work reflects preoccupations with emergent identity and the process of individuation -- the themes and issues of young folk the world over, no apology necessary. And Nossiter does seem less interested in projecting his own demons on screen. "I don't see film as a form of psychotherapy," he said when we spoke the week after the Festival. "I'm much more interested in exploring situations and problems of other people. I know that I'm bored by my own problems; I have the misfortune of living with them every day." So instead of telling the incredibly true story of a Soho wine consultant who, against all odds and the advice of friends and family, forges a career in the treacherous trenches of independent film, the director found inspiration in a short story by the poet James Lasdun.

Lasdun's story revolves around a young British theater director and an older woman, a case of mistaken identity and one steamy afternoon in the sack. Nossiter was interested in the germ of the idea, but had his own thoughts for a film adaptation. "I had met him [Lasdun] briefly, read the story, was stuck by a plot twist, sent him seven pages about how I thought I could transform it into a film and asked him if he wanted to work with me. He called up and was very English [the writer is English but lives in New York], saying how flattered he was. He felt extremely touched. Then he came here to my apartment, sat down, looked at me and said, 'I think your ideas are really stupid.' I wanted to throw him out at first, and then we ended up spending fourteen hours together without actually moving. And he was right. He said, 'I'm going to throw my story away, if you throw your ideas away and we start together from scratch."

In the end, the director and his poet/screenwriter found a way to hash out their creative differences and create something that expresses their shared vision. "We found a way of working together that felt very free and democratic. Our spirits coalesced. But James is a pure writer, a true writer, and I'm not. I'm not illiterate, but I have more of a talent as a director, to be able to work with a writer shaping a script. All the dialog that's really good is James'. But the shaping of the scenes and the characters, this is stuff we did together. Certainly for me, it's the greatest collaboration I've ever had, remarkably free of conflict. And because James is a poet, he's used to conceiving of the world in images, but also in terms of expressing things at their absolute essential level. It's sort of a weird combination, the idea that a poet could be a screenwriter. But actually, I think that a good a poet is predisposed to thinking in terms of cinema."

That certain poetic sensibility lapped over into other areas of the production as well. The creative team as a whole collaborated in making SUNDAY a film that does not shy away from the impressionistic, one that can will fully disobey the strictures of reality in favor of filmic impact and emotional truth. "The film is not literal," Nossiter says. "This is not meant to be a literal day. In a sense this Sunday is being reinventing by every character. The entire nature of the film is subjective; it's subjective to everyone's point of view."

So partly by design, partly by the coincidences of a low budget and compressed shooting schedule, SUNDAY takes form from many days -- overcast, snowbound, bright and clear -- as if to reflect its fluid perspective. One character, a slightly off-center homeless man, sits on a freeway overpass as snow falls gently all around him, a climate not evinced elsewhere in the film. "For him, he's living in this magical land. It's inevitable that snow is going to fall around him, and it won't fall on other people." Lack of continuity is not a problem; it's a device. The same approach allows for an endless twilight at the close of the day. Tinged in melancholy and the hint of promise, sun goes down forever, lingering like SUNDAY's lost-and-found characters, reluctant to let the moment fade.

Similarly, Nossiter and his collaborators employed a range of filmic elements in unexpected ways in an effort to bring forth the sense of their story. "We looked at the soundtrack as a total palette; we didn't feel restricted by what was the plausible sound. Because the film is very much about how people see themselves and see each other, and how distorting that lens is, how we deal with the world aurally is also a very conscious, subjective thing. And so we tried to construct each person's aural experience. There are a whole series of sounds that we picked out to describe Oliver's experience. Half the time you can't even hear them; they're almost subliminal."

It is the newly homeless Oliver, played with quiet depth by David Suchet, whose experience enfolds the audience in the film's potent opening scenes. With disjointed edits, chaotic sound and selective focus, the film creates the claustrophobic, invasive world of the men's shelter, and attaches to it a subdued but palpable feeling of the loneliness and longing of this scene. The film's editor Madeline Gavin, for whom SUNDAY is a first feature after work on several documentaries, cut together an erratic array of shots to bring together this world and Oliver's place in it. "The whole point is that you're actually trying to build an psychological and emotional moment," says the director. "And because Madeline has a background as an actress, she was very conscious of constructing performances scene to scene, of how things were working for the actors."

All this attention to character dynamics, the subtlety of psychological and emotional truths is fine enough, and might well be what motivated the Sundance Jury to its decision. So Sundance was kind to SUNDAY? In part. "The first couple of days we were riddled with anxiety, and felt a degree of envy when we would see these other filmmakers who had buzz," says Nossiter, now reflecting back with what has got to be charity given the outcome of ten demoralizingly un-hyped days in Utah. "We saw that they were being trailed around and going to meetings all the time and we could see they mailboxes were packed. It was slightly lonely to know that no one really knew us. Then we sort of got used to it. And because the audiences who did come to the film seemed to be enjoying it, there was real warmth that was happening. We could feel it in the Q&A's, and that's one of the real joys -- to see it with an audience and field their questions. To me the healthiest sign is when they start talking about the characters in the film as if they're real people."

As real as his characters is Nossiter's present sensation of his films -- and his own -- currency. Instead of returning to New York with a kind Variety review, his dignity and little else, Nossiter now fields a copious call load as distribution offers (of a type that almost certainly would not have been presented without the benefit of Sundance honors) and directing gigs dial in daily. He's now shooting a documentary segment on Arthur Penn (a personal favorite of his for 1975's NIGHT MOVES) for a series on American directors, and is weighing his next project with poet-cum-screenwriter James Lasdun.

"There's something inherently contradictory about a film festival for the participants," he reflects finally. "Because I think the whole reason why you feel such an insane impulse to do something like a film, you do it because you have this sense that you want to communicate in your own peculiar way, and you feel marginal and different and you feel that you are the Other. So it's sort of weird: you have eighteen people together who are the Other.

One day with the Sichel sisters [ALL OVER ME] and another New York filmmaker, Vin Deisel [STRAYS] we were sort of lumped together by the New York Post, we were sort of trotted around town having our picture taken together; four people who really have very little in common. But it was quite a congenial atmosphere: I think we all felt similarly out of place."

The Independent's Day

Is Jonathan Nossiter the latest hot filmmaker or the latesthot restaurant wine consultant? Actually, he's both

By Ted Loos
May 15, 1997

At 35, Jonathan Nossiter finds himself at the corner of Hollywood and Vine.

In January, his second directorial effort, Sunday, won the prizes for best film and best screenplay at America's biggest independent film festival, Sundance. This month it's headed for the most prestigious competition of all, the Cannes Film Festival.

In the parallel universe he occupies as a restaurant wine consultant, his biggest and most ambitious wine list yet - 150 wines, all of them French-is set to debut at Balthazar, a new restaurant in New York's SoHo district. His lists for two other downtown Manhattan venues, Il Buco and ? Tapas Bar, have both earned the Wine Spectator Award of Excellence.

"My life's been turned upside down," he says of the effect Sundance has had. "It's all part of an amazing transformation. All the clich?s are true. One day I had 150 faxes--in one day. I certainly know why people have personal assistants." But he declines that option for himself. "That's not really my style," he says. "I ride around on a bicycle."

Shortly after hopping off the bicycle for lunch in downtown Manhattan a month after his victory, Nossiter jokingly refers to himself as "a filmmaker who drinks too much wine," and steadfastly refuses all praise for his multiple talents. He manages to be modest and earnest at the same time.

"I see my wine life and my film life as being inextricably linked," he says. "People were convinced that, after Sundance, I would drop the wine side. I can unequivocally earn a decent living in film now, but I will never give [wine] up. It means too much to me."

While some people would be reluctant to mix and match the terms of the two very different disciplines, Nossiter quite naturally compares his favorite European directors with their wine counterparts, like auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder and vintner Charles Joguet of the Loire's Chinon district.

"With a Joguet wine, you have to work a little more," he says, preferring to be "provoked and stimulated" both in the glass and on the screen. But, as in filmmaking, "You have to find the perfect combination of provocation and pleasure."

Born into a family of journalists--he himself has written about wine for several publications--Nossiter grew up all over Europe and was exposed to wine early. "I started working at restaurants in Paris when I was 15," he says. "I've worked on and off in the wine trade since then."

At Dartmouth College, Nossiter made student films but majored in ancient Greek. "I drove people in the film department crazy, because I wasn't one of them," he says. "I've always been an outsider." He got a student fellowship to translate Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound from Greek to English and turn it into a screenplay. After securing funds for the production, he turned out "15 minutes of one of the most absurd films ever made." But, he says, "I was hooked on film."

After a couple of years directing in the theater in both New York and London and simultaneously working in restaurants to pay the bills, Nossiter got a one-week job moving furniture for the production of the hit 1987 film Fatal Attraction. As a joke, the director, Adrian Lyne, called a crew meeting one day and announced that Nossiter-the lowest man on the totem pole by far-as the new assistant director. Instead of turning red and hiding in a corner, Nossiter got up and thanked Lyne.

"He was horrified, but he was sporting about it," Nossiter says now. "I think he admired the chutzpah. He whispered in my ear, 'We'll give it a week and give you a whirl.'" Although the circumstance was "unheard of," Nossiter served in the position for the remainder of the film and still refers to the experience as "my film school."

His first feature film, Resident Alien, was released to modest art-house success in 1992. This quasi-documentary chronicled the famous-for-being-famous life of Quentin Crisp, the quotable British dandy and sometime author who moved to New York in his 70s and became a minor media star.

But it is Sunday that has earned Nossiter his stripes. The movie, written with the poet James Lasdun and based on a Lasdun short story, was shot entirely in Brooklyn and Queens. The intense, thoughtful and sometimes unsettling film chronicl es the one-day affair of a recently dispossessed homeless man and a minor actress. Visually accomplished and punctuated by moments of humor, Sunday is certainly too complex for the multiplex, but it will be released nationally in the fall.

Wine, not surprisingly, plays a role in Sunday. The actress offers the man a "grisly" California Chardonnay to suggest that it might be poisoned. And in one of the film's most uncomfortable moments, the man, a Jew, undergoes Communion at a Greek Orthodox church and drinks the sacramental wine. "I'm Jewish, and I tried in the year up until the filming to take Communion, and I was terrified," says Nossiter. "I could not do it. I have too much respect for it--both for wine and for the sacramental aspect of religion."

The film's acceptance at Cannes makes a certain amount of sense for Nossiter, a New Yorker who was raised partly in France and speaks five languages. In fact, he had never even been to Los Angeles before his Sundance awards made him a hot commodity there. Not that he ignores California wine; he admires many of them and calls the Navarro Gew?rztraminer from Mendocino California's greatest white wine.

While tasting some wines for the Balthazar list on a Sunday night in his small, skylighted SoHo apartment, the bathroom of which is completely wallpapered with wine labels, he shuffles through sheafs of papers from various suppliers and considers each one. "It's got good length, doesn't it?" he asks the guests who are helping him decide. "If you wandered in and picked this out, you'd be happy about it." Another wine, though, may have been overmanipulated "in a way I don't dig."

Nossiter, a member of the Sommelier Society of America, says he has an obligation to the owner and to the customer: "It's my responsibility to check out everything thoroughly." The six-month process of picking Balthazar's wines included shopping at auction for everything from Joguet's wines to Ch?teau Lafite Rothschild 1964. "Even though this will be a hot, trendy place, the idea is to make it a wine lover's paradise," he says.

Part of that strategy comes in offering more than 40 French wines, almost all of them from lesser-known producers that Nossiter admires, for under $30 each. "You get these films whose frames of reference are other films, videos and marketing," he says. "I think we get a lot of wines that are constructed in the same way--with a marketing plan; with all the money behind them, but a disregard for tradition, for soil, for terroir."

"I really respect his opinions on wine," says Keith McNally, Balthazar's owner. "He's not pretentious. He's incredibly down-to-earth about the whole thing." Nossiter also did a small list for McNally's bar Pravda, a vodka-and-caviar-themed spot popular with the downtown glitterati. Balthazar will be the fifth restaurant or bar that Nossiter has consulted for in a several-block radius of his apartment. "It's a little fiefdom," he says.

At Tapas Bar, owner David Selig gave him license to put together what they call America's best Sherry list, with around 30 selections. Selig recalls Nossiter regaling him with stories about people behind the wines that were going on the list. "There's a human aspect that overlaps film and wine," says Selig, "and Jonathan can sit in the middle and find the human side to both."

Nossiter's high-minded attitude, however, doesn't preclude some old-fashioned basking in recognition these days. "I'm having a great time," he says with a wide grin, recounting one of his jam-packed days this spring--running from late-night film editing to wine-and-food-pairing sessions, from early morning conference calls with contacts in Paris to screenings of other directors' movies.

When not being flown to Hollywood and offered "an extravagant amount of money" to direct a big-budget remake of a famous '60s film--which he turned down--he continues to work on restaurant wine lists. "It's a very New York thing to find strange intersections of pleasure," he muses. So how does he fit it all in? "Time expands for the amount of pleasure and pride you take in something." Having just finished a documentary on the director Arthur Penn, his next film will be a psychological thriller set in Greece.

"I couldn't imagine my life not drinking wine," he says, when asked if he'll have to give up his restaurant consulting or his directing, since offers for both are pouring in. But Nossiter refuses to choose: "As far as working, I need both."