Cue a dodgy Sixties samba-jazz soundtrack as he walks purposefully down a corridor lit with pools of light and jags of shadow. Here, there can only be right or wrong, action or inaction; greyness and gradual inertia affect only those who are not strangers with pallid, vinylesque skin.Toran’s shadowy creation enters his special boudoir. In it are a chair and a table whose top is covered with a moulded plastic tray The indents in this are purposeful. They contain a revolver, sunglasses, a pack of Gitanes, a photograph of Belmondo and a video joystick. Strangest of all are the toytown steering wheel and the hinged, stylised head of a woman, which stares up from its wide slot in the tray.Then, without warning, we’re watching a clip from A Bout de Souffle: Belmondo, reading a newspaper,mutters: “After all, I’m an arsehole.” The stranger watches the film on a flip-up screen attached to the table, meshing his words and actions with Belmondo’s.

He turns the steering wheel, pre-empts the dialogue, fires his gun. Belmondo and Seberg in bed? No problem: his copycat doll-cranium rises up; he plants a kiss on it, and then drapes his shirt over himself and the ersatz paramour; rumpling ensues. The final gunshot, the final kiss.Film(s) over.These, the bare bones of Toran’s work, can only rattle. But flesh there is – and it has a history that began when he was seven years old, being dragged to three or four films each week in San Francisco by his father, who was an assistant director. It was there that he absorbed Hitchcock and film noir – “and Gun Crazy, The Maltese Falcon and the whole Howard Hawks series. Plus the French New Wave”.After college in California, Toran pursued fine art and product design “I’m interested in our relationship with objects,” he says “Film comes from fantasy and influences our fantasies It genericises our fantasy In many ways, film dictates what our fantasies are.

We do want to kiss the girl; we do want to fire the gun.”In the film, the whole set-up was that the character was preparing for his night out, which was no more absurd than our normal nights out. He stays in, and goes out in a different way.”Toran’s graduate show ancillaries were a series of ironic bloke-aids: a gizmo that exhales warm breath on pillows; a cylinder that rumples sheets as a body would; a chest-hair curler; a rapid-fire plate thrower “for those Greek argument moments”; an alarm clock that wakes you by flailing long hairs across your face.No wonder he’s besotted with David Cronenberg, “a director of ideas rather than a director of stories. That use of objects as characters, and the relationship between characters and objects I think this is very peculiar. It’s this trying to find triangular universes – fantasy objects and people.

In our sex lives we give ourselves to fantasy women, like children.”Then there’s so much good Catholic and Jewish guilt in other aspects of our lives that we completely repress that So there’s a lot of comedy to be found. It makes me curious.”It is a curiosity which, in due course, will produce “a series of vignettes to be put together in a film about people and their relationship with objects”. And it may bear the kind of fruit absurd strangers like to bite into while planning a fatal night in.. Steve Buscemi once danced with a friend of mine.

“He did this hip-swinging, Latin thing,” she tells me, “very tight, no arms flailing No, really, he was very cool Honestly.”It’s a funny thing about Buscemi. He’s one of the most enviable actors around, a man who’s worked with the best in the indie business (Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, Altman, Scorsese), who can also brighten the dimmest blockbuster (Con Air, Armageddon, Big Daddy). And on top of that, he can direct (as those who’ve seen his debut, the beautifully grubby bar-fly drama Trees Lounge, will know).
And yet, there’s still something a little too real about this morgue-pale, floppy-thin Irish-Italian for him to count as a bona fide star. Like those other mainstream outsiders, Steven Soderbergh and Philip Seymour Hoffman, Buscemi’s charisma comes at a slant Seen head on, he cuts a rather vulnerable figure. So you wind up feeling that, for all the adulation and big bucks, he may just need all the help he can get.Maybe that’s why the news that Buscemi was attacked in a bar-room brawl in April (he was stabbed in the throat, face and arm) didn’t come as that much of a surprise. People like Brad Pitt don’t get stabbed in bars; Buscemi does.Then there’s the fact that the 43-year-old’s second film, the intense prison drama, Animal Factory, hasn’t even had a proper release because its financiers are currently rowing with its distributors. Again, bad luck that no Hollywood sprinkle-dust can make disappear.He’s in town for an interview at London’s National Film Theatre – this month, they’re running a Steve Buscemi season, as well as using Animal Factory to open Crime Scene, the annual festival of crime fiction and film.