Lonesome Jim (2005), which he directed from a Steve Coogan script, is a comedic drama about a failed young man returning to his Indiana hometown — again, a character who might easily become either an object of contempt or an object of unearned sympathy, and again treated as a person with recognizable motivations and genuine flaws. Interview (2007) was a remake of a Theo van Gogh film, built around a single extended conversation between a political journalist and a celebrity actress, starring Buscemi and Sienna Miller.
The directing work and the acting work share an approach: character first, situation second, tone as a consequence of character rather than a decision about genre. This sensibility was formed in the downtown New York arts world of the 1980s and has remained consistent across a career that has also included large commercial productions, animated films, and mainstream television work. He is not purer than his commercial output; he is simply also the person who made Trees Lounge.
## The FDNY Culture and What Buscemi Carried From It
The culture of the New York City Fire Department is worth describing in some detail, because it explains aspects of Buscemi’s behavior before and after September 11 that might otherwise seem like individual idiosyncrasies.
The FDNY is the largest municipal fire department in the United States and one of the busiest in the world. It responds to over a million emergency calls per year across the five boroughs. It is organized into companies — each company operating from a specific firehouse and covering a specific geographic territory — and it maintains a rank structure that runs from probationary firefighter through a series of officer grades to the Fire Commissioner, a mayoral appointment. The work is organized around shifts, typically twenty-four hours on and forty-eight hours off in the earlier period of Buscemi’s service (scheduling has evolved since), which creates the pattern of extended communal living followed by extended absence that defines the firehouse experience.