Vintage ‘97, Nice Aura, Quite Seeable Now

NEW YORK — Director Jonathan Nossiter gets more excited about wines than he does about movies. He’s seated in a fashionable SoHo restaurant called Balthazar, rhapsodizing about the wine list owner Keith McNally allowed him to set up. He’s wearing a gap-toothed grin and a short-sleeve tropical shirt with a pin where a button should be.

“This list,” he says, running his eyes down the menu as if it were the Gutenberg Bible, “I started working on this list in October. Normally this much wine is presented in a book. It looks bigger and thicker and more intimidating. We deliberately chose this [menu] format because it seemed less pretentious and daunting. There’s so much snobbery associated with wine that I can’t stand. Wine is something that I love, and it gives me great pleasure to turn people on to the beauty of it.”

He orders a cheeseburger and a carafe of Muscadet. “Twelve bucks,” he says after taking a sip. “I feel pretty happy about that.”

For years, Nossiter, who began working in restaurants at 15 in Paris, has helped make ends meet as a sommelier--that is, until his feature film debut, “Sunday,” won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in May. It was a bit of a shock because there was no buzz about the movie during the festival. Perhaps that’s why even now Nossiter won’t give up his sommeliering.

“I literally fell off my seat,” Nossiter says. “I thought it was a joke. Honestly, it took about four months before I stopped checking my mailbox here to see if they’d sent me a letter saying they’d made a mistake.”

“Sunday,” which opens Friday in Los Angeles, didn’t fall into the twentysomething dysfunctional family/fluid sexuality themes prevailing among the movies in competition, and that may have swung the jury in its favor.

It’s a two-character piece about a homeless former white-collar worker, Oliver (British actor David Suchet, star of PBS’ “Poirot”), who, drifting around Queens one Sunday, is mistaken for a film director by Madeleine (Lisa Harrow), a middle-aged, out-of-work English actress. They bond very briefly. The central mystery is who is fooling whom.

“Sunday” plugs into themes of exile (Oliver from the middle class, Madeleine from England), about which Nossiter knows a lot.

As the son of Washington Post and New York Times reporter Bernard Nossiter, he was raised along with his three brothers in England, France, Italy and India, among other places. As a consequence, he speaks five languages but is not really at home anywhere.

“I think there’s a whole culture of international mongrels like me,” the 35-year-old Nossiter says. “I was actually talking with some people the other day who’ve had a similar bizarre upbringing, and we agreed that we all belong to our own country.”

He says he attended “about 30 schools” and “got kicked out of about four of them.” He went to the San Francisco Art Institute with aspirations of becoming a painter, realized he wasn’t good at it, then attended Dartmouth, majoring in ancient Greek. It was there that he first became interested in movies, when he took a class in filmmaking conducted in Italian. The only reason he took it was because he was homesick for Italy.

“I was very skeptical of movies,” Nossiter says. “I thought they were an occasional entertainment. I was that naive, since I grew up with books and painting and music. And the first class, I had to see Fellini’s ‘8 1/2.’ After five minutes, I knew it was a total phony. Where the hell is the story? Why should I be remotely interested? It angered me so much that I went back the next day and asked the projectionist to show it to me again. I wanted to make sure. The truth is obviously it got under my skin, but it was so radical I couldn’t deal with it on first viewing. And I ended up seeing it three times that first week. By the third time, I was gone. I said, ‘There’s nothing else in the world I want to do.’ ”

Nossiter gave painting one last try at the Beaux Arts in Paris but spent most of his time going to movies. Returning to Dartmouth, he finished his degree and then decided that if he was going to make films, he ought to learn how to direct actors. He worked in the theater as an assistant director both in New York and London and then landed a job moving furniture on, of all things, “Fatal Attraction,” which came out in 1987. He became director Adrian Lyne’s assistant and right-hand man.

Lyne, speaking on the phone from France, calls this extraordinary promotion “instinctive” on his part. Nossiter calls it something else: “He likes to provoke a bit. One day after he saw a couple of people really reaming me for nothing in the best Hollywood style, he had an announcement. He said, ‘Oh, by the way, I’ve made Jonathan my assistant.’ Really as a joke, just to see the reaction. So I got up on the stage and thanked him and gave a little speech. He looked at me like I was out of my mind. And then he whispered in my ear, ‘OK, I’ll give you a week and then we’ll see what happens.’ ”

Lyne is a little nervous about discussing Nossiter’s role on the project. With apologies to “Fatal Attraction” producer Stanley Jaffe, he says Nossiter was a sounding board, which is ironic, given that Nossiter’s cinematic sensibilities are 180 degrees from his. It’s Sundance versus “Flashdance.” But Lyne’s instincts--or impishness--proved sound.

“He has no mask,” Lyne says. “In other words, whatever he’s feeling, it shows instantly all over his face, which is really refreshing. It’s invaluable for you because you know that you’re not being BS’d. One is so used to in Hollywood never knowing what the hell people really mean. And Jonathan goes into contortions over stuff because he really cares. He kind of went to war with me and agonized as I did over everything, whether it was casting or the script or whatever. We were very close on it.”

Aside from receiving a directing tutorial from Lyne, Nossiter also was introduced to Quentin Crisp, author of “The Naked Civil Servant,” who was cast to give the film a little color but ended up on the cutting-room floor. (According to Nossiter, they became acquainted at an alcohol-filled lunch with Lyne that ran an hour and a half late, prompting Jaffe to nearly strangle Nossiter when they returned to the set.)

“I started to spend time with him and the people he hangs around with,” Nossiter says of Crisp. “And I realized that his circle was so flamboyant and extravagant that basically they lived their lives as if they were in a film already. I thought I’d do a documentary and it would have the same effect as a fiction film because these people are virtual fictions. So that took a couple of years.”

The film, “Resident Alien: Quentin Crisp in America” (1992), was well received but hardly a moneymaker. Then Nossiter met writer James Lasdun at a dinner party. As Lasdun recalls, Nossiter expressed an interest in adapting a short story of his, but the director wanted the location changed from London to Queens.

The Queens setting was very important to Nossiter. With its mix of races, horizontal architectural styles, car culture and elevated trains, it conveys a sense of being nowhere and everywhere, appealing to his international mongrel heritage. In fact, Nossiter spent nearly a decade taking pictures from Queens street corners.

“He’s been haunted by it for years,” Lasdun says. Nossiter also wanted the protagonist changed from a louche Englishman to a fattish, middle-aged American. The setting eventually was based on a homeless shelter in the East Village in which Lasdun had worked; Nossiter joined him there and shot video.

They collaborated on a script, some of it culled from actual dialogue they heard, and cast a mix of actors and nonactors, including Suchet, who gained nearly 50 pounds for his role, and Jimmy Broadway, who ran the shelter. Parts of the film were actually shot there.

Now, after the critical success of “Sunday,” Nossiter is being haunted by another neglected urban area: Athens. After accompanying “Sunday” to this year’s Cannes Film Festival, he and Lasdun traveled to Greece, where they intend to set their next movie, again dealing with the theme of exile.

Nossiter happens to have brought photos taken on that trip. He spills them out on the table amid the empty carafe and wine glasses. Pictures of air conditioners, sandwich ads, pigeons, pedestrians, priests. It’s a magpie approach to movie making. Or perhaps that of a small, discriminating vintner.