Best known for writing Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive, Hossein Amini makes his directorial debut with the ’60s noir-ish throwback, The Two Faces of January, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith. Set in Greece in 1962, the film follows a vacationing American couple, Chester (Viggo Mortensen) and his wife Colette (Kirsten Dunst), who get intwined with a small-time conman named Rydal (Oscar Isaac) when he witnesses Chester committing a deadly crime at their hotel. Rydal offers to help the couple flee to Athens, and as the three evade the authorities on the streets, Chester is forced to compete with the younger Rydal for his wife’s affections.

In media roundtable interview conducted at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, we spoke to Hossein about the film’s ’60s influences, his attraction to weakness in characters, Highsmith’s fascination with male competition, silent storytelling, the film’s period set and costume design, and more.

The Two Faces of January is out this Friday in San Francisco.

Your film resembles a lot of suspense noirs from the ’60s. What were some of your inspirations?
Hossein: I’m a total film nut, and I love film noir, so I couldn’t wait to get to Turkey to shoot that. I wanted to, in a way, recreate that period of [’60s cinema]. It was important to not be too contemporary with the camera moves. It was such a novel period in filmmaking, with the French New Wave and Italian cinema. I watched a lot of European movies from that time. But I always go back to ’40s and ’50s American film noir, because that was my first real movie passion. I remember seeing Kiss Me Deadly on the big screen, and it blew me away. It was the first time I fell in love with movies. Hitchcock is an influence as well. The French talk about a “film soleil” as opposed to a film noir, which is a film noir shot in the sunshine. I kind of love it. It’s that idea of oppressive heat and dust in these landscapes.

Did you feel that the more rugged landscapes revealed the real nature of the characters?
Hossein: That was absolutely the intention. We wanted to start off [Viggo] with this beautiful suit, and [Kirsten] with this dress, and gradually, as those layers are stripped off, it starts to reveal who they are. I remember liking those characters as I read the book. They’re so fragile, and I think it’s rare when you get movie characters who are weak. We make films about bad people or villains, but I think villains that are actually human are rare. I know how difficult that is; we did test screenings and the audience said, “I don’t have anyone to root for.”

I have to accept that, but I think that’s what makes [Patricia] such a great writer. She just strips these characters naked. She’s kind of cruel and compassionate to them as a writer, and that’s something I capture in the movie. I like Chester. I don’t know what other people think, but he was the character when I read the book that really made me want to do this. I felt he was jealous and drunk–all these weak human qualities–and yet there are sometimes moments of dignity.

Talk about the challenge of being an homage to those films without becoming “retro”.
Hossein: It is a fine line. Some people do find it goes too far into the Hitchcock pastiche, which wasn’t intentional. The characters are so modern; that would be my defense of what makes it contemporary. [Patricia] was so ahead of her time in that her characters change so quickly from being kind to cruel, from vicious to suddenly having remorse. It doesn’t happen in scenes; it happens almost within moments. One example is when they’re all sitting around at dinner and there’s dancing going on. Rydal is flirting with Colette, and then he remembers her husband is there, and he’s almost apologetic. That’s something about her writing that I found…it’s almost how I behave. That doesn’t say particularly good things about me, but I can suddenly be mean to my wife and feel terrible about it the very next moment. She captures this very modern psychology.

There’s a big father-son theme in the film.
Hossein: When I read the book I thought, what does The Two Faces of January mean? One is the idea of the god, Janus, that has got the two heads facing outwards. I thought it was interesting, because no matter how much [Chester and Rydal] hate each other, they’re twins, and they’re tied together. Also, it’s about the new replacing the old. Back in early times, the son would have to kill the father in order to become a man. There’s something about the sense of competition and admiration going together between a younger man and an older man. Highsmith is so fascinated with the relationships between men. I think she’s much more interested in that. In Ripley, she gets rid of Marge fairly quickly. The father-son thing is a way for her to show a love story and a hate story between men.

A lot of the storytelling in your film is told through the actors’ eyes. Some of the most significant scenes are silent.
Hossein: As a screenwriter, I’ve always felt the dialogue is there to set up those silences. It’s about the space between the lines. If you have a scene where a woman is on the phone with her lover, and then she goes to her husband and talks about the weather, it can be the most moving, powerful scene. The dialogue is irrelevant, really; it’s the subtext and the looks between them. In marriage scenes, the couple rarely talks about the problem, but the undercurrent is always there. I think that’s what I love about movies–the close-ups, the silences, the way you feel people’s pain. Quite often, we’d cut to who’s not talking in those three-way conversations, because I think that’s where the drama is.

I struggle so much with dialogue as a writer. I find it very hard to write. If I could write like Tarantino, I’m sure I’d be huge! [laughs] I find silent storytelling more interesting than people saying what they actually think.

Are you angling for a silent picture next?
Hossein: One of my favorite directors, [Jean-Pierre] Melville, who did Le Samorai and Le Cercle Rouge…there’s almost no dialogue in those.

Colette sort of fades into the background about halfway through the film. How does this compare to the book?
Hossein: The book has that thing of her disappearing from the picture. That was always there. When I wrote the script, I thought I needed to make it more of a triangle, and we shot it like that. In the book, it isn’t; Highsmith isn’t that interested in her. When I was editing with the editor, and when we test screened it, we found that Highsmith’s DNA came back to reclaim [the film]. People were more interested in the relationship between the men, the same way as an author she had been. We felt after a while that going back to the book and making her the catalyst and object of competition for the men [is better]. Kirsten resists that kind of thing, but I do think that her part was a struggle than the movie. She was better than the part, I think, and we both struggled to make that part better. But in the editing, the shape of the movie pushed it to her being watched as opposed to being in the center.

Talk a bit about the set and costume design. That must have been a fun experience to watch that come together.
Hossein: As a writer, my favorite thing about writing a script is the research. We went through a lot of ’60s photographs, which you can find on the web. It’s amazing, just home photos of people from that period. Then there are the movies from that period, like Alain Delon wearing a white suit. What I liked about directing for the first time was that everyone knows what they do so much better than you do, and it’s fantastic to watch how good other people are. If you let them, people really want to help you. I wonder if that happens on the second or third film, because maybe people step back. But here, being open to that was really helpful.

The Los Angeles Film Festival continued its Gala screenings Tuesday with The Two Faces of January. First time director Hossein Amini has proven he understands the art of calculated and slow-building periodic drama as the screenwriter of subdued gems The Wings of the Dove and Jude. He’s even proven he can handle drama of a more fast-paced nature with his script for 2011’s Drive. But Amini’s directorial début seems to hint at a possible film truth — that perhaps writing talent and directorial talent come from two different places.

Set in Greece in 1962, The Two Faces of January is based on the Patricia Highsmith novel of the same name. She who gave us the inspiration for similar film adaptations The Talented Mr. Ripley and Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. Highsmith weaves thrillers involving characters that fall into one of two categories: those who have and those who covet. The Two Faces of January is no exception, telling the tale of American couple Chester and Colette MacFarland (Viggo Mortenson and Kirsten Dunst) on vacation in Greece, both the epitome of American wealth and refinement. The two catch the eye of part-time tour guide and sometime swindler Rydal (Oscar Isaac), an American who has been living in Greece, avoiding his family to the point of missing his own father’s funeral.

After catching Rydal staring at them, Colette investigates and Rydal charms them into an outing at the flea market, and later dinner. Enamored with the young Colette, and clearly in awe of the stylish Chester, Rydal rushes to return a bracelet Colette left in the taxi after their evening out. When he gets to the hotel he finds Chester in a precarious position involving an unconscious man. From there Rydal’s ambition and daddy issues pull him into the mounting troubles of Chester and Colette, while his increasing attraction to Colette forces him to travel into darker and darker territory to protect them.

Amini, while clearly capable of writing great characters, falters somewhat in getting his actors to help push the story along. The tacit tension between the three of them is certainly evident in their spectacular performances, however the film’s pacing is lacking, each of their misery only adding to the heap and not building off one another. Viggo Mortenson has made a believable transition from the smoldering heroes he’s played in the past, to an older cocksure man of leisure. Oscar Isaac continues to be the best part of almost every movie I’ve seen him in of late (even the recent and truly stunted In Secret, another film of wasted performances), his chiseled face and hungry expressions always conveying his lust for the sort of life he thinks he wants. Kirsten Dunst seems to be the deficient element, though not likely by any fault of her own as she’s given us plenty of remarkable performances over the years. Instead Amini underutilizes Dunst’s character, rather than allow the story to flow from her anchor as the strongest link between the three of them. As a result, Rydal’s infatuation seems unwarranted, Chester’s growing jealousy equally so.

With a distinctly classic feel, the soft lighting and bright colors of Greece are a stark contrast to the darker moments of vulnerability and madness woven through the few days the film covers. Cinematographer Marcel Zyskind (Dancer in the Dark) could hardly make the exotic locales of the film look anything but beautiful. Amini’s ambitions are clear, often utilizing distinctly Hitchcockian motifs. A closing foot chase scene through the pebbled streets of Istanbul could have been pulled straight out of a 50’s black and white film-noir. Steven Noble’s costume design is distractingly sophisticated. Clearly Amini has all the pieces: the looks, the feel, the music, the actors, but where he seems to falter is where Hitchcock most excelled — delving into the psychology of his characters.  Where Hitchcock would dig deeper, Amini has only given us surface level and thus being truly invested in their collective fate is rather hard to muster. The story plays out melodramatically, instead of thrillingly.

Leveraging nostalgia and star power, the film is enticing even as it makes one hungry to put on an older classic. He may not yet be a writer-director double-threat, but this is an elegant first film from Hossein Amini.

It was a packed house at the Castro Theater in San Francisco last night for Opening Night of the 57th annual San Francisco International Film Festival. I should know–I had to sit in the nosebleeds! (It’s that damn SF parking. 2 hour limits can suck a…never mind.) Despite my undesirable vantage point of the beautiful silent era theater, I was excited, as there was a definite buzz in the air for the SFIFF faithful, many of whom are members of the San Francisco Film Society (SFFS), the organization responsible for making the festival happen in addition to their other remarkable contributions to the national film community.

When Noah Cowan–an accomplished veteran of the Toronto International Film Festival and newly appointed executive director of SFFS–took to the podium to kick off the festival, a thrilling rush of applause practically blew his hair back. The San Francisco film community was saddened when Ted Hope stepped down from the position just recently, but when SFFS named Cowan as the new head honcho, overseeing SFIFF as his first major task, we couldn’t have been more happy. His inaugural address felt like a new beginning for the festival, and he felt the love. “Thank you for the warm San Francisco greeting,” he said with a humble grin. Needless to say, we Bay Area residents look forward to a bright future for the festival, and to Cowan we give our full support.

The reality is, however, that Cowen’s only been in town for about six weeks. We owe this year’s incredible festival lineup to Rachel Rosen, SFFS’s Director of Programming, and her team. Rosen stepped onstage next to Cowan, I got goosebumps at the thought of what the two will accomplish together in years to come.

Following the festival introductions, director-screenwriter Hossein Amini (he wrote Drive) stepped on stage to introduce his film, The Two Faces of January, an adaptation of a novel by Patricia Highsmith (other adaptations of her books include The Talented Mr. Ripley and Ripley’s Game). A throwback to ’60s murder romances like Hitchcock’s most touristic pictures, the film is set in 1962, following Chester and Colette (Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst), an American couple vacationing in Athens who meet a swindling tour guide named Rydal (Oscar Isaac). Rydal gets caught up in a sticky predicament with the couple when he becomes a witness to a fatal hotel room accident, and the three attempt to flee the country before the police can sniff them out.

Amini exhibits old-fashioned cinematic style, riffing on tried-and-true noir, love triangle, and suspense machinations to entertaining effect. Isaac, Dunst, and Mortensen are game performers, and they all have natural chemistry with one another. Most engaging is Mortensen and Isaac’s relationship, which sits somewhere between a testosterone-driven rivalry and a father-son companionship. Dunst’s role lacks the same depth. The cinematography by Marcel Zyskind is clean and crisp, and picturesque, but the score by Alberto Iglesias emulates the great Bernard Hermann too closely. The film pays homage to a specific era in cinema without feeling retro, which is its greatest accomplishment. It’s greatest disappointment is that it doesn’t insert itself as a formidable entry into the sub-genres it evokes, a feat proven possible by gems like Shaun of the Dead and The Artist.

For more SFIFF57 coverage, stay tuned to Way Too Indie.

Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive is a gloriously brutal love letter to action movies of the 70’s, featuring a lead character that doesn’t even have a name, a fantastic synth-pop score and soundtrack and very well stage action set pieces. Drive is one of the best films of the year. Not even wasting a second to get started, the film opens with a fantastic scene involving our hero at work as he drives two thugs to a warehouse somewhere in L.A.

Our hero is quickly put to the test when the cops catch a whiff of his trail. Showing exceptional driving skills he leads his fare out of trouble. Refn then throws out the style. Bold, bright, italicized Pink colored credits accompanied by a slow pulsating pop song with way too much swag leads us through a night drive in L.A. with The Driver.

The Driver (with no name) is played by Ryan Gosling who is this year’s it boy for film. The guy has been around for years but it seems like this is his year to break out, and boy what a film to do it in. Gosling plays the driver as a quiet, cool and calculating young man who mostly stays to himself. But don’t be fooled. His Driver explodes with intense rage when pushed to the limits. Probably the most famous scene from the movie is proof of this as he is forced to protect the girl he is smitten with.

The girl is played by Carrie Mulligan who probably couldn’t be any cuter if she tried. She lives in the same building on the same floor as our hero. He soon forms a kinship with Mulligan and her young son. We find out that her husband is in jail and will soon be released. This doesn’t faze Gosling. When her husband is released, he almost immediately gets in to trouble with his crew. Gosling offers to help for one time and one time only.

Up until this point, the movie has been pretty tame. There are some moments of uneasiness, but nothing quite boils over. That is until Gosling ‘s offer to help. Gosling offers his services as a driver for Mulligan’s husband on one last job. The job goes completely awry and from here on out the movie is on fire. Along with the brutal elevator scene, Refn stages an unbelievably violent set piece in a hotel.

The first time I saw Drive at the Toronto International Film Festival, the audience was cheering and whistling when the hotel scene reached its apex. I’m not a champion of violence, but when something is done right I know it’s worth applauding and Refn’s action sequences are a stand up and cheer from the banisters type of effort.

I know every other critic has done this but I must echo their praises, Albert Brooks. What a performance. He’s been funny for decades. Here he plays completely against type and nails it. Here is a three dimensional villan that is so sinister, yet so, I don’t know the word for it. Understanding maybe? He doesn’t want to do the things he has to do, but he knows they are a mean to an end. I can’t wait to see his name called for an Oscar nomination in 2 months.

With all these great stars in Drive, it’s easy to forget that the real star of this film is director Nicholas Winding-Refn. The Danish director has quite the eclectic palate of late. His last 3 features couldn’t be more different. His film Bronson was an intense performance piece by the brilliant Tom Hardy. His film after that Valhalla Rising was a slow esoteric and extremely bloody look at Vikings in the highlands of Europe.

Now comes Drive, his Hollywood breakthrough. A highly stylized and a very confident film that completely stands apart from anything else released this year. Bright and colorful, full of gloss and extreme ire, Drive is a breath of fresh air. I cannot wait to see what Refn does next.