When Italian film director, painter, and inventor Alessio Della Valle (who was born and raised in Florence, Italy, and studied film in Los Angeles) had the idea of a thriller set in the world of art, he probably didn’t think that stars like Jeremy Piven, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Emile Hirsh and Paz Vega, and an Oscar-winning editor like Zach Staenberg (The Matrix) would immediately come on board. But they did because of the strength and originality of the script, and they are now supporting the US limited release of the film, American Night, a neo-noir action thriller set in the New York City contemporary art world.

In the story, when a highly coveted Andy Warhol painting suddenly surfaces, it triggers a chain reaction of danger-filled events for a colorful group of characters including a forger turned art dealer (Rhys Meyers); a mobster, and painter (Hirsch) with a penchant for scorpions; a seductive museum conservator (Vega); and Vincent, a stuntman and wannabe ninja, played by Piven.

American Night is a “Tarantino-esque” thriller with many eccentric characters and several acts interwoven in a narrative that flashes back and forth. How did Della Valle come up with this idea? We talked with the director and Piven after a screening of the film in Hollywood. 

“It is a genre-bending hybrid,” said Della Valle. “I didn’t want to go just for one genre. It is many things, but at its core, it’s a reflection on accepting who we are. The journey that I created for these characters is a journey which, at the end, they don’t really change. What they do is they accept who they are.”

American Night was shot in Bulgaria, for financial and practical reasons. “The story takes place in New York, but we built the biggest exterior sets of New York in Europe,” Della Valle explained. “Bulgaria offered great affordable deals and fees and very skilled workers.”

Piven’s character Vincent, indeed, has an arc and changes through the story, and also brings a touch of humor. Best known for his role as Ari Gold in the hit HBO series Entourage,  for which he won a Golden Globe, Piven explains what attracted him to Vincent. “I read the script, and what you see is what’s in his script,” he said. “Alessio is an artist and has a background in painting, and my character takes everything from his input. My character did have vertigo, and he was taught how to kind of be more present, to overcome his fears, and he ultimately does that. And no, that was not me jumping from a fire escape,” he added, laughing. “That was a 26-year-old, fit Bulgarian stuntman. I actually am afraid of heights, so that was not acting in any way, shape, or form. But I thought the script was great. Alessio allowed me to improvise.”

Why was Andy Warhol at the center of this piece, we asked. “It’s because I was thinking on what is iconic, what is a myth, and what creates an icon,” answered Della Valle. “And I really liked the iconic role that the artwork from Andy Warhol plays in our culture. In particular, the central piece of the film is an artwork that is created out of another iconic figure, Marilyn Monroe. So, Warhol created a double icon. It’s an icon based off an icon. Warhol forces you to ask: what is pop culture? What is an icon? What is iconic? There’s much more than this, but this is why.”

Della Valle, as a filmmaker, draws his inspiration from many different sources. “I did consciously look at a couple of specific films and directors, mainly A Clockwork Orange, and another couple of movies,” he said. “A lot of scenes and ideas for American Night really came just from the world of pure imagination. I started with the characters from the noir genre: the anti-hero, the antagonist, the good wife, the femme-fatale, and the innocent, who ends up sacrificing sometimes his life for the anti-hero, which are the five typical noir characters. But I literally would just close my eyes and I would see them talking to each other. They sort of became alive at a certain point. Everything came from my imagination.”