Taking a new gamble: Richard Kwietniowski returns after a long absence with Owning Mahowny, his obsession-drenched follow-up to Love and Death on Long Island. (film).

Richard Kwietniowski had us worried there. His wryly subversive 1997 feature-film bow, Love and Death on Long Island, featuring John Hurt as a fuddy-duddy magnificently obsessed with B-flick hottie Jason Priestley, had critics and audiences marking him as a major new filmmaker. Then he went MIA for five years, an absence felt especially keenly by those of us who had previously loved his essential-viewing queer shorts such as 1988's The Ballad of Reading Gaol (featuring Quentin Crisp) and 1989's Brief Encounter-meets-Douglas Sirk Flames of Passion. Now, happily, the openly gay Londoner, who studied filmmaking at the University of California, Berkeley, returns with Owning Mahowny, another study in obsession, featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman as a real-life Canadian bank manager who swindles millions to feed his gambling compulsion, along with Minnie Driver as his enabler girlfriend and Hurt as a venal casino honcho.

Kwietniowski, flesh from a Berlin festival showing of his latest, chatted by phone from London about where he has been and where he's headed. Asked whether Love and Death on Long Island hadn't prompted scads of juicy offers, he says, laughing, "Nobody said, 'Why don't you look at this great script to which we have Meryl Streep attached?'" Bored by the fluffy comedy and unthrilling thriller scripts sent him, he developed several cherished projects that failed on liftoff. Then along came Mahowny. "I'm just now having to admit to the fact that I am extremely interested in obsession," he says with a chuckle. "As a filmgoer I like stories that take me where I wouldn't normally go in real life. I like the psychological aspect that film can naturalize almost anything--like in Hitchcock's Vertigo, where it's Jimmy Stewart playing the necrophiliac, so nobody rears up and yells, 'Sicko!'" Owning Mahowny's Jimmy Stewart is Philip Seymour Hoffman, the 35-year-old character actor who crackled in such movies as The Talented Mr. Ripley and Magnolia and in the Broadway revival of True West. Kwietniowski says, "He's used to playing pervy kinds of characters, yet you love and are absolutely with him. I needed an extraordinary actor whom I'd be asking to play a con artist, bully, thief, and manipulative asshole, and who treats his girlfriend and everyone else appallingly--who am I talking about here, Caligula? I'd revered and admired [Hoffman] so long, I thought he was the only one to play it."

Did he and his first-choice star cut a groove? He says, "Very much in the Method acting tradition, he played Mahowny with an ever-present audible breathing he sustained between takes. He had an almost instinctive understanding of how to play a guy about whom one keeps asking, 'What actually makes him tick?' That's one reason why I have a lot of unusual close-ups of him, like moving the camera in so that you're looking in the eyes behind those enormous glasses he wears. We were going in so close, it's a wonder his breathing didn't fog the camera lens." And while the director may have wondered at first whether his own judgment was fogged in taking on a project he calls "almost a compendium of things I hate--casinos, banks, hotels, airports," he's anxiously awaiting audience reaction. Sort of. He says, "In the back of my mind I wonder, Are the big moments big enough? Does it matter enough? With Love and Death on Long Island, some British critics--a number of whom, as a friend reminded me, are not unlike the central character--said, 'It's a souffle beyond John Hurt's very good performance.' The worst thing is to be damned with faint praise. With this, some said Philip Seymour Hoffman doesn't play leading roles for good reason, that he's too good, intense, supersaturated to be a leading man. I think that's a slightly peculiar phenomenon. Why shouldn't he be a lead?"

However audiences take to Hoffman and the movie, Kwietniowski is chomping at the bit to tackle his next, most likely an "erotic caper movie" based on Daniel Chavarria's novel Adios Muchachos, about a gorgeous Cuban prostitute and a larcenous, libidinous middle-aged man who resembles Mel Gibson. "It's bizarre, funny, quite radical," he says. What, not obsessive? "Maybe a little," he admits.

Rebello also writes for Playboy, Spin, and Hollywood Life. He is at work on his seventh book.