Wrestler writer channels `nerd rage'

When director Darren Aronofsky sought a screenwriter to turn his idea about a broken-down wrestler seeking one last shot into a movie, he turned to writer Robert Siegel.

The Wrestler went on to be nominated for a slew of awards last year, including Oscar nominations for its stars, Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei. And the script for the original film that drew Aronofsky to Siegel, Big Fan, is finally hitting Toronto theatres Friday.

Big Fan "has a similar vibe" to The Wrestler, said Siegel, as he talked with the Star in a downtown hotel dining room this week. "At least superficially they are stories of guys on the fringes of the sports world."

Comic Patton Oswalt (who voiced Remy in Ratatouille) plays Paul, a 35-year-old parking-lot attendant who still lives with his mother in Staten Island, N.Y. A rabid New York Giants fan, Paul can't wait for his nightly calls to a local sports radio station, where he reads carefully scripted rants loaded with sports clichés.

But when Paul finally comes face-to-face with his hero, Giants star linebacker Quantrell Bishop (Jonathan Hamm), after following him to a Manhattan strip club, he ends up crashing into reality with heartbreaking results.

Siegel has once again penned a script that features a very believable anti-hero. But this time, he's also directing the dark film, which drew comparisons to Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

"I like writing character-driven stuff. Character interests me even more than the story," explained Siegel, 38, former editor-in-chief of the American newspaper satire, The Onion.

Siegel started working on Big Fan when he was still at The Onion, but he left after nine years on the mock paper to take some "low-level Hollywood writing jobs" to pay the rent while he finished the Big Fan script. Soon it was making the rounds in Hollywood, and directors – including Aronofsky – started calling.

Aronofsky was one of several "high-profile" directors interested in the project, said Siegel. But although the two met and talked at length about Big Fan, Siegel was reluctant to relinquish control of the movie. "I just wasn't that excited about somebody else directing it," he said. "It sounds cheesy, but I felt maybe the script was just waiting for me. I was pretty ambivalent about having some big-name director involved."

But Aronofsky was clearly impressed with Siegel and came back to him for The Wrestler script. That project took Siegel away from Big Fan for two years.

Unlike The Wrestler, which Siegel wrote "with Mickey Rourke in my head" even though the actor hadn't even been cast, Siegel didn't have anybody in mind for chubby loner Paul. He knew he didn't want to cast obvious choices like Paul Giamatti or Philip Seymour Hoffman, and he needed an actor in his 30s to play the role.

He sent the script to Oswalt.

"I didn't test him, I didn't ask him to read," said Siegel. "I knew he was a very smart guy and I knew he was funny and I knew he understood the psychology of nerd rage, based on his comedy."

Siegel has a soft spot for Toronto; The Wrestler was picked up for distribution at TIFF, a day after winning the Golden Lion top prize at the Venice Film Festival.

But he added that people are mistaken if they think critical success equals a big payday. "People think if you have a successful movie, money just falls from the sky," Siegel said with a smile. "There's an opportunity for me to make lots of money, but I would have to write Ice Age 4 or The Hangover 2. I would have to come up with an idea for something with vampires and Seth Rogen.

"It's hard to get any movie made and it's even harder when you don't have Johnny Depp attached and you don't have aliens."