Robert D. Siegel’s career path has been unconventional, to say the least. After several years at the satirical news site The Onion, where he ended up editor-in-chief and co-wrote ill-fated feature film The Onion Movie, Siegel gave up his post to become a full-time screenwriter.

His first produced script, The Wrestler, dominated the film-festival circuit in fall 2008 and led to Oscar nominations for stars Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei. Just as those nominations were being announced, Siegel’s directorial debut, Big Fan [link to review here], was making its Sundance premiere.

Over the phone from New York, Siegel was more than willing to discuss his fondness for working-class heroes, the benefits of casting against type and his childhood dread of Manhattan.

What’s your take on diehard sports fans?

They’re harmless. They’re venting their anger at people they idolize. Their passion has no place to go but toward anger.

Both The Wrestler and Big Fan have a really intimate understanding of East Coast working-class sports fandom. You’ve clearly grown up around these people.

My parents are teachers, and I had a pretty standard suburban middle-class upbringing. I grew up on Long Island, and for some reason the outer boroughs of New York were very exotic and strange and alluring to me as a kid. I wasn’t one of these kids who snuck off to Manhattan and went to clubs. My wife was that type; she grew up in Jersey and longed to be in Manhattan, and I was just terrified of it – I stuck to my suburban milieu, went to the mall, went to movies.

You never went into the city?

Places like Brooklyn and Queens and Staten Island, I didn’t go there very much, even though they were right next door to me. The closest I actually came to them was listening to the radio, specifically sports radio. I listened to a lot of sports radio as a kid, and I heard all these working-class-type guys, blue-collar guys calling in, ranting about the Mets or the Jets or whatever. It was exotic and strange and exciting, listening to these people and wondering what their lives were like. So that definitely made an impression on me. I’ve written two movies set in that world.

And both of those movies refuse to mock their characters for working in delis and shopping at dollar stores – stuff that other films and TV shows use as easy punchlines.

In terms of presenting working-class people, they’re (often) either treated with a kid-gloves nobility or condescension. I guess I’m trying to occupy that space between the two, or make sure not to do either. I must like the tightrope – drama and comedy, and that line between respecting your characters while still being able to laugh with them. Something attracts me to things that are tonally tricky, or at least tonally challenging.

Patton Oswalt gives a powerful performance as Paul, but he’s about the last person I’d have expected to see in a dark, serious project like this. What led you to cast a comedian?

If he wasn’t right for the role, I wouldn’t have cast him just because he was a comedian. But I think comedians can definitely bring an extra layer to things. I love when people cast kind of unusually. Did you see Precious? It’s a very different movie, but it’s got this really interesting cast that really works – Mo’nique is playing this real dark character, and Lenny Kravitz and Mariah Carey pop up, and they’re all just really excellent in it, you know? I kind of relate to it in that way. It’s got a comedian in one role and a singer in another, and the lead is this girl who’s never acted before and she’s phenomenal. There’s kind of a magic in it that you don’t get when you just plug in Hope Davis, Sam Rockwell, Laura Linney and Greg Kinnear – the standard indie cast. There’s a freshness to the performers, and there’s just a freshness to the experience of watching it, and I definitely wanted a little bit of that.

Paul spends all his time working on his rants for sports radio, where he gets to unleash all the emotions and energy he bottles up during the day. But he’s not actually saying anything of substance.

The stuff he’s saying is utterly banal and uninspired, just parroting what he hears on the radio. But for him, that’s when he’s a star, when he shines. People have compared it to Taxi Driver and some other movies of the 70s loner genre. I think of it more as Saturday Night Fever, where by day he’s a nobody, but he just lights it up at night. What I love about Saturday Night Fever is that the disco’s not in Manhattan – he’s still a big fish in a small pond, when he’s doing his thing.

Paul really doesn’t have any larger sense of the world – he doesn’t even use the Internet unless he absolutely has to.

Yeah, he’s kind of an analog fan in a digital world – he doesn’t play fantasy football. Even if he were online, I don’t think he would play fantasy football. I think he would think it too crass. As a purist, that’s not what it’s about. A lot of those guys are all about sports radio, who don’t do the blogs and stuff. The blogs have really taken it to another level – because you’ve removed the human voice from the equation, it frees the person to have even more of an alter ego, and inevitably that alter ego tends to go in the direction of anger, hostility, aggression.

The movie doesn’t see Paul as a bad person – just a damaged one. And he does try, in his bizarre way, to do the right thing.

To me, he’s pretty honourable. I don’t want to condescend toward the characters, and I don’t want this to be one of those movies where you can feel the director’s hatred for his characters, and he’s just using them as a punching bag. I have a tremendous respect for Paul. I do think he’s happy; he’s a guy who knows what’s important to him and has a code that he lives by – a perverse one, but a code nonetheless.