Movie Sneaks:  Oscar Isaac set to simmer in ‘A Most Violent Year’

About midway through 2013, director J.C. Chandor began dropping by the Williamsburg home of actor Oscar Isaac. Chandor had written a script for a film about an up-by-his-bootstraps Latino immigrant who ran a heating-oil company, setting the movie in the urban Wild West of early 1980s New York.

The character was a complex mix of upstanding and corner-cutting, and Chandor, an effusive sort, would take walks with Isaac and excitedly describe his vision, pointing out fuel tankers and other vestiges of the neighborhood’s industrial landscape.

There was just one snag: Isaac didn’t have the part.

“We were hanging out quite a bit, and I said at one point, ‘Are we going to keep dating or, are we, you know?’” Isaac laughed in an interview in downtown Manhattan recently. “It was like, ‘Hey, I’m old-fashioned too, but at some point, things have to happen.’”

As it turned out, Chandor had been attempting to put together the independent production —Javier Bardem was previously attached — and he was trying to energize ‎his new actor even as he lined up financing, now without Bardem’s bankable name.

Eventually the money came through (from Participant Media and Abu Dhabi’s Image Nation), Chandor and Isaac hooked up, and the result is “A Most Violent Year,” which opens AFI Fest on Nov. 6 ahead of its limited release in theaters Dec. 31.

The film is a quietly simmering character study about an immigrant named Abel Morales (Isaac) and his wife, Anna (Jessica Chastain), who attempt to grow their business under the shadow of an imminent criminal indictment and physical assaults on the company’s drivers, presumably orchestrated by Morales’ rivals.

Chandor, who previously wrote and directed “Margin Call” and “All Is Lost,” again investigates questions of masculinity and morality. Abel is a native Colombian ‎who, for reasons as much pragmatic as moral, seeks to avoid violence, though he’s not above his share of white-collar peccadilloes.

“This is a guy who is the embodiment of the promise of the American dream, and yet in order to succeed in business he believes you have to hustle and play the game,” Isaac said. “Abel does follow standard industry practice, as he’s always saying. It’s just some of that practice is criminal.”

The actor, 35, spent a long time researching the kind of sociopathic behavior and self-delusions that inform Abel’s actions, particularly looking at some disgraced figures in the business community. He also delved into the world of heating oil, a sundry business that’s nonetheless rife (particularly three decades ago) with colorful characters and rivalries.

It’s a world that is fiercely competitive, Isaac learned, not least because those who finance it are captive consumers; people can go without many things, but they can’t go without heat when the temperature drops.

For the actor — a Juilliard graduate who has had character parts in movies such as “Robin Hood,” “Drive” and “The Bourne Legacy” — “Year” marks his second lead role (Juilliard pal Chastain helped persuade Chandor to look at the actor). The first, of course, came courtesy of last year’s Coen brothers folk-music drama, “Inside Llewyn Davis,” in which he played a struggling musician.

Though the characters are different in type and temperament — a gregarious busker and a smooth businessman, to start with — there are parallels.

“They’re both trying to find success on their own terms,” said Isaac, a features-altering cap and mustache accompanying his jeans and a leather jacket. “But I don’t think they’d like each other very much,” he laughed. “One is the Man and the other really doesn’t like the Man.”

The actor grew up as an outsider himself — his father, a native Cuban, moved the family from Guatemala to Miami when Isaac was a baby. Isaac (original surname: Hernandez) is fluent in Spanish and English, yet he noted that “Year” marks the first time he speaks Spanish in a film.

Fans will note the actor’s protean nature: Over the last decade he’s played a Russian American security guard (“W.E.”), a Middle Eastern operative (“Body of Lies”), an American mongrel musician (“Davis”), a Mexican streetwise operator (“Drive”), a British monarch (“Robin Hood”) and a Polish American politician (the upcoming David Simon miniseries “Show Me a Hero”).

“This was a very conscious effort, a kind of goal early on to play a wide variety of humanity,” he said, adding, “I really just like characters who you don’t know where they stand for a long while. It’s like people. You hang out with them for 10 years, and then all of a sudden they do something and you say, ‘Who are you?’ That’s more interesting. In life and on-screen.”

steve.zeitchik@latimes.com