With A Most Violent Year opening in cinemas this Friday, star Oscar Isaac tells TEN's Harry Guerin about his powerhouse performance opposite friend and former classmate Jessica Chastain in the JC Chandor-directed thriller.
Set in New York in 1981, A Most Violent Year tells the story of Abel Morales (Isaac), a home heating oil supplier who together with his wife Anna (Chastain) faces a crucial three days in his professional life.
Harry Guerin: I would've thought you'd had enough of traipsing around New York in the freezing cold after Inside Llewyn Davis?
Oscar Isaac: [Laughs] I know! I just keep doing movies where I brood around New York City when it's very cold outside.
One thing that really struck me about your character Abel in A Most Violent Year is that, as much as he's a businessman and a husband, he's also a performer who can hold an audience.
It's interesting, because I don't think I thought of him as a performer in that way. But what I did latch on to at a certain point is that he is a salesman. And part of his whole philosophy is presentation - presentation is everything. That's basically what he says to his prospective sales recruits. He says, 'We're never going to be the cheapest, that's why we have to be the best. And our trucks are the cleanest and the newest and our sales people are approachable'. And that's all about the presentation. So at that point I definitely did think of him as someone who is incredibly calculated and very much aware of presenting a persona.
Like you, I saw him as a good guy who had bent the rules. What has been the reaction from other people who have seen the film - has that been the predominant reaction?
No, you know, it's split, I'd say. What's interesting about him is that he's able to compartmentalise to such an extent that he's still able to convince himself that he's on the "path that is most right". I think that's the great thing about the movie, and what's great about JC Chandor is that he writes it with enough ambiguity, and he shows enough of the flaws, the weaknesses and also the strength, that the audience can bring their own experience to it as well.
JC Chandor has talked about wanting to get the energy of a Sidney Lumet film for A Most Violent Year. Did you re-watch any Lumet films to get into that vibe before you started filming?
I've watched Sidney Lumet films since I first started watching movies - him and the Coens are basically my favourite directors. I've probably learned just as much from watching Dog Day Afternoon as I have from going to Juilliard! So I've got that in my DNA at this point so I didn't actively reference it for this film, because I think that could've been a danger. You don't want to go into places [such as] mimicry or trying to recreate something they can film. Usually, you want to look to life for actual inspiration, at least I do. Actual people, or also try to come at it from a left field, so I try to find the opposite of that.
Abel is a great character because he's so conflicted. For me, he brought to mind that great saying, 'There's roguery in every trade'.
That's true. That's part of the question. Over in the United States the idea of 'the hustle' is bred into us, where it's like, 'You've got to hustle to make it'. And it's a tricky thing, this hyper-capitalist system where everyone says the hustle is all. How do you maintain some sense of ethics and some sense of right and wrong and not just this self-serving idea of getting more and more and more?
With Abel - and maybe other people don't see it this way - I didn't see it even as really about the money. I thought it was more about a man trying to put as much distance as he could from where he started out - it was like the thrill of the deal more than anything.
Yeah, I think there's something to say about that. I remember when I was doing the preparation I would ask JC all about specifics about heating oils and he'd always be pretty vague about it. And then one day he finally said, 'Look, it doesn't matter that it's heating oil'. And of course as an actor I was shocked to hear that because for me it's always about those specificities! He said, 'It could be anything - for him, it's about the sales; it's about growing'.
And so the actual commodity... Clearly it was very strategic to get the heating oil because what is the last bill that people stop paying when it's cold out? That's heat, especially when you live up here in the north-east. Today is a perfect example - it's very cold today! And so that's a business Abel wants to get in because failure is not an option for him. His genius lies in, I'd say, his confidence in his vision and in his strategy and not wavering in that, regardless of how much pressure he's getting from the outside and also from the inside from his wife.
As much as the film is a thriller and a commentary on business, it has an awful lot of power as a relationship drama - the compromises of married life and how people live with each other. I thought the chemistry between you and Jessica Chastain was fantastic. You go way back as classmates at Juilliard, so how long did you develop the two characters together?
I'd say we had about a good month to talk about it. Jessica and I would get together and basically just go through every inch of the script, dissecting it to get a sense of their history, because so much is implied or not really said at all. So we really wanted to solidify that for ourselves. And we were able to build a shared history together.
The fact that we do have a shorthand, that we've known each other for so long, allowed us to be very honest with each other. Often when you work with another actor you don't know what their process might be so you have to be respectful of it. But with Jessica... We already had a lot of respect for each other so we were able to just be very blunt and say whatever we wanted, no matter how wrong we might be! It was great because it allowed us to get a lot of work done in a short amount of time.
When the two of you were classmates at Julliard did you ever say, 'Someday we're going to end up in a film together'?
We did. We always were such fans of each other's work and have supported each other from the get-go. Jessica came to the first few premieres of the very first few movies I did out of school. I did the same for her. We've always kept in touch with each other. It is funny, because you never know how it's [acting] going to go. The fact that we'd wanted to do something together and finally we were at the place in both of our careers where we could do basically the dream movie, which is this Seventies-style, 'Golden Era of Film' relationship drama... I just keep not being able to believe my luck!
Do you think a big part of the attraction of A Most Violent Year for you what it said about the immigrant experience?
I do. And I think what's amazing about JC is that he was able to make a film about a type of immigrant experience that you don't, if ever, see in American cinema. It's a Latin American immigrant who is not a villain or a gangster, who is non-violent. He's not a sidekick. He is powerful and flawed and wholly human and quintessentially American. It's what a lot of this country is built on. And so, to make a whole story about a person like that, it was so unique and un-clichéd. I really commend JC for having the guts to do that.
