'Station Agent' stars worked on script for years

"We'd often joke on the way to set, 'So Peter, what are you saying today? Like 'no' three times and that's it?' " Dinklage recalls with a chuckle.

The actor didn't mind. Dinklage and co-stars Patricia Clarkson and Bobby Cannavale had been rehearsing and refining the script of "The Station Agent" with director Tom McCarthy for about three years before they finally got financing for the low-budget production. The film, now in select cities, won the Audience Award for best dramatic film along with an acting prize for Clarkson and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for McCarthy at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival.

"This movie was in the back of our hearts and minds for a while," said Dinklage, who knew McCarthy, Cannavale and Clarkson through their work in New York theater. "Tom wrote it for the three of us. We started doing readings of it when we were in the same city at the same time, New York or L.A.

"It was a part of our lives that we kept returning to, and we were definitely determined to shoot it, but it's hard to find the funding for a small film like this ... . We were turned down a lot when we pitched it to investors. People were wary."

Granted, "The Station Agent" does not subscribe to a Hollywood formula. It's about a train enthusiast, Fin (Dinklage), who inherits a defunct train station in rural New Jersey. Fin, who's a dwarf, moves into the dilapidated building in hopes of escaping from the world, but new neighbors Joe (Cannavale) and Olivia (Clarkson) draw him into friendship.

McCarthy, also an actor (he starred on "Boston Public" in its first season), shot the film, his first as a director, last year in New Jersey in 20 days.

Dinklage, 34, made his big-screen debut in Tom DiCillo's "Living in Oblivion" and has been in 10 films since. He appears opposite Will Ferrell in "Elf," playing an arrogant children's author who attacks when Ferrell's character insists on calling him an elf.

His previous work in movies has always been as a character actor.

"I've never been in every scene of a film before, and that is a challenge to be the through line," he said. "Tom McCarthy was instrumental in helping me out in that regard. He knew what I could do as an actor -- what he's seen and what he's worked with me on before -- and he really just wanted to challenge that."

Apart from them both being 4-foot-6, Dinklage doesn't think he has much in common with Fin.

"I'm definitely a social person," he said. "But obviously, because I am a dwarf and that's a part of who this character is, some moments that come out of that obviously I do have in common. Tom actually put some of that into the movie.

"I've done movies that they're mostly written for people of my size, but the smarter ones, they don't bang the audience over the head with it. It takes a back seat and just becomes another aspect of the character. Everybody has something going on, but people are much more complex than their exterior, which is what I love about Tom's movie."

Dinklage earned his bachelor's in drama from Bennington College in Vermont and attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London and the Welsh School of Music and Drama in Cardiff, but he shares Jersey roots with McCarthy and Cannavale. He said that sensibility helped. For example, they all know who's Boss -- Bruce Springsteen.

"When he was about 16, his first band, their manager lived right next door to us," recalls the Bayhead, N.J., native. "So Bruce Springsteen was always in the back yard next door and in our back yard just hanging out, drinking beer, playing guitar.

"My mom went to a wedding, and the reception was in a surfboard factory, and Bruce Springsteen's first band was the wedding band. The only thing my mom said was, 'Well, I won a surfboard in the raffle, but the music was too loud. My ears rang.' "