On Movies: Film's star explains mystery of the two espressos

What's the deal with the two espressos, you ask?

In Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control, the indie filmmaker's star, Isaach De Bankolé, is a sharp-suited mystery man who makes clandestine assignations in Spanish cafes with a cast of characters played by Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, and Gael García Bernal.

At each cafe, De Bankolé, credited as the Lone Man, requests two single espressos from the waiter - not a double, but two singles, in matching cups.

Jarmusch worked the detail into his script after watching De Bankolé do the same thing at restaurants over the years. It becomes the mark by which the Lone Man is recognized by his contacts in the film, a loping, deadpan thriller that is more about process than plot.

"When I was in drama school in Paris, I worked in the evenings as a waiter," says De Bankolé, 51, a native of the Ivory Coast who lived for a long time in Paris before relocating to New York a decade ago. "And I'm a coffee lover, I love coffee. The Ivory Coast used to be one of the world's biggest producers.

"And as a waiter, I noticed, as I was making espresso for the clients, that the first part of the water coming out of the machine gives you more caffeine than the second part of the water, which is weaker. So when people ask for a double, it doesn't equal two singles. . . . Whereas in two singles, you have two halves stronger, stronger than a double espresso.

"So when Jim and I would go to a restaurant, at the end of the meal, I would order always two espressos. And the waiter would say, 'You want a double?' And I say, 'No, I don't want a double. I want two singles.'

"They would look at me like I was a zombie. And so I explained it to Jim. . . . And then I read his screenplay, and there are the two espressos! I had to laugh."

De Bankolé, familiar to fans of this season's 24 as the exiled African prime minister Matobo, has worked with Jarmusch thrice before - as the Paris taxi driver in Night on Earth, and in smaller roles in Ghost Dog and Coffee and Cigarettes.

The two have become good friends.

"Among the people I work with, he always comes with a surprising idea," says De Bankolé. "He has this ability to see you and put you in different roles, different identities. It's a big contrast compared to a director who sees you in something, and then just wants to replicate it and pigeonhole you."

As for the origins of The Limits of Control, De Bankolé says that Jarmusch contacted him one day and explained that he had had an idea and wanted to work with him on it. There was a sketchy 25-page treatment.

"He told me that a long time ago he went to visit a friend in Spain," says the actor, on the phone from New York. "And she was living in this building, this weird building with curved forms, which is, of course, one of the places where the Lone Man stays in the film. . . . And Jim said to me, 'So I have the building and I have you - that's all I have. So maybe we should just go over with a small crew and do it, day by day.

"I said, 'I'm your man, that sounds interesting to me.' Why not?"

More of "Goodbye Solo." The films that Ramin Bahrani has directed to date - Man Push Cart and Chop Shop, both set in New York, and now Goodbye Solo, shot in Winston-Salem, N.C. - have the loose-limbed, naturalistic feel of nonfiction, full of real people moving through real places, inhabiting real cityscapes.

So it may come as a surprise to learn that the Iranian American filmmaker, who grew up in Winston-Salem, is an obsessive rehearser, a director not averse to putting his cast through 10, 20, 30 takes of a given scene.

"They may have an improvisational feel, but in reality it's quite the opposite," Bahrani says of his films. "With Chop Shop, where people thought it was a documentary, we would be looking at take 30 of the same thing. And not like take 30 of finding the scene, it's take 30 to get it perfect. Nonactors in a two-minute shot in a live location with 50 marks to hit . . . it's not easy!"

For Goodbye Solo, playing now at the Ritz at the Bourse, Bahrani's script was detailed and location-specific. The film deals with the relationship that develops between a resilient Senegalese cabbie (Souléymane Sy Savané) and an older, hard-bitten man (Red West, once a bodyguard and confidant to Elvis Presley) determined to end his life.

"I remember when Red West showed up, he said, are we going to do a table reading now? and I said, what's a table reading? I really didn't know," Bahrani recalls. He told me and I said, 'No, with all due respect to you and your process, do you mind if we get to the locations?' And then we drove to the locations and worked out the scenes."

Bahrani is not exactly a household name, nor are his films likely to become box-office behemoths. Nonetheless, his small, observational portraits of immigrants struggling to find their place in America, and of the bonds that develop between strangers, have received wide praise and a widening, appreciative audience.

"I was surprised by the response, especially by the response to Man Push Cart," he acknowledges. "The first film's always really hard to make. And I'm that fool who tells the truth. So I'm saying to my investors, 'Guys, I want to make a movie about a Pakistani guy who's going to sell coffee and doughnuts in a cart. That's it. OK? OK?'

"I honestly thought the film would go in my mom's closet and I'd have to go to grad school and become something else."

Luckily for Bahrani - and for us - that didn't happen.