Thomas McCarthy

photo by Jo Jo Whilden

Thomas McCarthy’s first film, The Station Agent, gave top billing to good actors who don’t normally anchor movies. The excellent results likely encouraged him to try it again with The Visitor, a wonderful story about a late-blooming widower played by character-actor Richard Jenkins. We sat down with McCarthy at Sundance to find out how he came up with the story.

McCarthy: I usually don’t have one eureka moment; it’s a collection of ideas over maybe a year … that I slowly string the story out of. I had spent some time in Beirut, a couple of visits there with some filmmakers, artists and musicians, and I think out of those visits the character Tarek was born, this Syrian musician who comes to New York to take a shot at plying his trade. He starts a little jazz trio and does what a lot of people want to do—play music. And then I sort of had this other character that Richard Jenkins is playing, Walter Vale, this aging economics professor, and I think I started with those two characters and thought, ‘How do I bring these guys into the same world, and what would that story entail?’ And from that, the script was born.