On a cold January evening in Guildford, I sit down to launch a Zoom call with award-winning, BAFTA-nominated, Oscar-nominated writer Hossein Amini. He answers.

JU: So I'd like to start sort of at the start of your career—with your first short film, Catch.

HA: Yeah, I wrote and directed it actually when I was studying at Oxford. There was the Oxford Film Society, but we managed to get money from various people and made a very small, low-budget film and it won this student film prize—which is sort of what gave me the encouragement to keep going a little longer than I would’ve done otherwise.

JU: It was a thriller about a hitman hired by his wife to do away with her husband.

HA: It was anything we could do, literally set all in one house—we borrowed a friend's house, unfortunately we didn't hire—we sort of asked a director of photography at the National Film School who did it for a speak through then kind of went into all the plugs and things at my friend's house that we'd borrowed and completely trashed it.

JU: All for the art I'm sure.

HA: It was, yeah.

JU: I was really interested by a list you've made of your favourite films. I've picked out three which I really like as well. So, there's L’Avventura, and then I guess in many ways its polar opposite, La Dolce Vita, and then The Third Man. I just picked three at random so you must excuse me, but I'm wondering how they influenced you and bore upon your work and your approach to screenwriting.

HA: L’Avventura was a film that, when I saw—when I was younger, I didn't really get it. It was in my forties when I really fell back in love with it in a proper way and had a better understanding of what it was trying to say and what it was about. I mean, I think I loved it visually because he was cool and naughty when I was in my sort of twenties, but I didn't really kind of understand what he was trying to say until much later.

It's not because The Third Man is about plot. I admire the plotting, but also one thing The Third Man has which has always influenced certainly the way I've written villains is the Orson Wells character, who is very much the hero of his own story, and he's charming and he's charismatic and you know in a way he could easily have played the hero. And that's always made me think that villains really have to be three-dimensional. And quite often I've had conversations with actors where you talk about villains and they often feel the same thing—which was, they don't just twirl their moustaches or whatever, they only do evil acts for their families or their kids or someone they love—or greed even, greed is usually about something else.

It’s giving villains humanity that The Third Man really taught me, and giving them charm and charisma as well, and so I think—in a way—the greater your villain, the greater your film, really. I remember doing a rewrite on Gangs of New York—and I was one of many writers—it was an uncredited rewrite but it was so much fun writing Daniel Day Lewis’ lines because his character was just so compelling and Welles—again, they’re two people who normally play heroes, and in this case, they're both kind of heroic villains. And then with Antonioni I said initially it was the camerawork I was really obsessed with—probably more than the writing, it's his filmmaking—I think there's something about Antonioni, and all of his films really. I guess the sense of despair is something that I took from the writing part of his filmmaking, in terms of—for example, in La Notte the husband and wife—the marriage break-up—but it's almost done without words and it’s incidents and they ignore each other and they're at a party and they're almost like ships passing, and L’Avventura as well has that same falling out of love idea.

I guess those emotional extremes in films are what I find quite interesting. And La Dolce Vita again, the idea of a hero who's the existential hero who’s sort of lost his way and lost the meaning and stuff—I think that's such a fundamental thing of why we tell stories, it’s to figure out why we're here, what we're doing here and stuff—and I just thought that film captures that sense of a hero trying to discover why he’s here, and there’s the extraordinary last shot where he's looking at this very young, innocent girl who sort of represents life, where he sort of almost comes to represent doom and gloom and death and—there was just something so beautiful about that juxtaposition. But, you know, there are definitely moments that you borrow or steal, and I think that's true of all my favourite films. It's just—they sort of, I think, define the sort of screenwriter or filmmaker you are. In my case, they’re obviously mixed up with personal and other stuff—of books and things like that, but they definitely—they've all probably in some botched way found their way into my writing.

JU: It’s such a brilliant moment, so iconic at the end of that film. And this question just occurred to me as you were talking, sort of obviously in that film the structure owes much to Dante's Inferno, and—I guess you can say of film what Sam Mendes says of theatre, that you could treat every play like it's Shakespeare—I'm wondering in your approach to screenwriting, do you use Shakespeare much to help structure your films or do you blend it with other interesting novels?

HA: It's funny because I've studied here in England and Shakespeare was central, but I also studied Italian so Dante actually—weirdly—has probably had as big, if not bigger, an impact. I mean, that whole idea of—well, in terms of structure, but also the idea of souls going into hell is just something that I really remember, and the whole idea of all these demons and people and crowds—I found those images from Dante always stayed with me. Milton’s Paradise Lost probably has had as much of an influence if not more than Shakespeare. Again it sounds really gloomy, but it was definitely the tragedies—the guilt of Macbeth, or that sense of age with King Lear or Hamlet. But Hamlet is one where I've sort of gone up and down about loving it. It's not been my favourite and then it's gone up again. But with all those classic tragedies, what I've found is—it's more in terms of character. I think less in terms of structure. I think that what I love about Shakespeare, what he does better than anyone else—it's that complexity of character. I mean also—well, a character in The Third Man can be Shakespearean, in a sense.

JU: You were involved in the BAFTA Screenwriters Lecture Series. And regarding Drive, which you've mentioned, you talk about the importance of visual writing, do you still love writing with pictures principally or has your writing style evolved into something different?

HA: I love visual storytelling, but it's also because I don't really believe that people say what they mean. In terms of dialogue, it even comes down to a look. I mean, I love writers who write those beautiful speeches which sort of reveal their hearts and souls, but I don't quite believe it enough to write it myself. And so I think the writing—the dialogue that I’m interested in is when, because of the way you've structured the story, you think they could talk about absolutely anything, and it's working on a subtextual level. And so I kind of quite often like throw-away dialogue, and—for example, I remember there are a couple of scripts I've written where the dialogue was written to be thrown away and they were actually directed in a very stiff way—where every line mattered and it really didn’t work—and I think that's something where I feel quite often, apart from very few moments, dialogue should be quite throw-away and there shouldn't be too much emphasis on it. The film I think is different from theatre. But I do think the human face should be telling us more than what they're saying. So the close-up, for example, or the idea of someone sitting in a shopping mall and suffering after a heartache and watching people, for me, is more eloquent in cinema than someone telling someone that they've just been dumped and how upset they feel in a long speech.

JU: You were a BAFTA member?

HA: I was, I'm not a member of BAFTA anymore, but I was for a little while. I'm a member of the American Academy which is essentially the same, I was cheap and didn't want to pay another seven hundred pounds for BAFTA. I’m actually ashamed of myself really. I should be supporting the British film industry.

JU: No it’s fair enough. But through that I gather you got to work with young actors and young writers.

HA: I love doing that. I've been doing it recently with some of the writers for the BBC writers’ programme as well and I just think—partly because you learn so much from younger writers too—but particularly it was getting to my age, there’s a danger that you fall behind in storytelling, which changes all the time and people’s interests—the way people speak even. So I think, you know, there are things I guess I can help them with, but I can also learn a lot at the same time. So I think it’s a very valuable, mutually helpful arrangement. Where I can really help is in terms of bad experiences, like who to avoid—like, as a screenwriter starting out, there are a lot of sharks out there who basically claim they can do stuff and producers who get you to write for free. I can help with those sort of experiences and writing discipline and habits and whatever. Having that creative conversation between generations is really important.

JU: You've worked with some of the crème de la crème, you mentioned Daniel Day-Lewis, and I really loved McMafia with James Norton—so magnificent, one of my favourite series to be honest, I rewatched it a couple of times.

HA: Oh brilliant, thank you.

JU: What were these experiences like? He’s just a real talent.

HA: Well, very smart, very nice, and also very lovely. And I think like I said with actors, you're always learning something new about what they're interested in, why they do what they're doing. I love actors. And again it was really directing that I understood quite how vulnerable they were and how much they expose, you know, that thing of performing and digging into your deepest emotions in front of a hundred crew who were thinking about when lunch is coming up or whether that light screw’s being fixed-in properly or whatever. And still to be able to—I mean they’re pro, I think, they're real artists and it’s what I love about, for example, being in film rather than writing novels or whatever; the collaboration with actors is probably what I've enjoyed the most.

JU: Did you meet Daniel Day-Lewis or did you meet him in character?

HA: I was in Rome rewriting but yes, I did very briefly, but by the time they'd started shooting he was very much a character. But absolutely brilliant.

JU: Absolutely. And as a last question, I'm wondering what your advice would be for young creatives who may read this article and are attempting to get into the industry?

HA: The key is persistence, because—it's what I was saying in the beginning. It’s so easy to give up, it’s so easy as it’s a very slow industry, lots of people will tell you they can do stuff on their cards, you can get rejection emails and whatever from people who could never have said yes in the first place, so you’re constantly up against disappointment and rejection and all that, and you have to be really tough and that is as important, almost, as that drive—of just—carry on for as long as you can until it becomes absolutely pointless. I think it’s really important because the longer you stay in the industry and the more you write, the more of a chance there is that people will read what you write and half of it is just getting seen and so, if you’re going to give up after the first screenplay, the chances are very slim. But rather than waiting for an answer to come, you know, rejection or acceptance on the first screenplay you send out—get onto the next one. It’s just really that idea of persistence and caring, it's very much a part of the process, even when you get one in every three scripts made, it still has a pretty good return. So you sort of have to just ride the disappointment of something not getting made or it getting made badly or getting bad reviews, you just have to get up the next day and write. And that’s sort of what I've always tried to do is, regardless of highs or lows, just to write the next morning.