Exclusive Interview: 'Drive' Screenwriter Hossein Amini on Making a Post-Modern Noir with Ryan Gosling

James Sallis' Drive is a slim, time-shuffled novella narrated in shards; Nicolas Winding Refn's film is a chrome-plated fairy tale that won him Best Director at Cannes. The man who built the bridge is screenwriter Hossein Amini, and he's the first to say the job was subtraction.

Amini straightened Sallis' fractured chronology but kept his radical spareness: the script runs barely 80 pages, and Ryan Gosling — cast before Refn came aboard — cut his own dialogue further. 'Most actors ask for more lines,' Amini laughs. 'Ryan kept handing them back.' What remained is a protagonist defined by toothpick, scorpion jacket and patience.

The writer describes the film's genre as 'a knight story wearing a car movie' — the Driver as a courtly-love figure who mistakes himself for a getaway man. Sallis, he says, blessed the approach; the novelist's own prose runs on the same mythic engine under the noir chassis.

Amini, a longtime adapter (The Wings of the Dove, Jude), calls Drive the rare case where fidelity meant keeping the silence rather than the sentences. Novel and film are cataloged together here — read one, watch the other, argue about the elevator.