A session with John Turturro will cost you. Twenty minutes clocks in at about $250, plus tip – at least going by his new film. Fading Gigolo, which he also wrote and directed, sees Turturro as a sex worker rented out by novice pimp Woody Allen to clients including Sharon Stone's screwy dermatologist and Vanessa Paradis as a widowed Hassidic mother of six, for whom he falls.

Off screen, there's no charge. Though, it has to be said, you do get a substantially reduced level of service, for all Turturro's friendly entreaties to share his tea.

Fading Gigolo, which premiered this week at the Toronto film festival, is a love story, at its most persuasive when the central pair are he and Allen. "I had this instinct," he says, a little Woody-ish in his delivery, more strapping in the flesh, "that he and I would make an interesting couple." Turturro and Allen already knew each other – he had a bit part in Hannah and Her Sisters – but Allen learned of Turturro's idea for the film though their mutual barber. (For the record: whoever this man is, he's good, not just as a fixer, but with the snippers. Turturro's tight curls are peaky and prodigious; Allen's white mop has great bounce for a 77-year-old.)

Turturro told him the pitch; Allen offered to give feedback on a script and advised reading Isaac Singer stories as research for the Hassidic aspects. "He said: 'Do you want to make a silly movie or one with some levels to it?'" They bonded over the process, reports Turturro, proud as offspring.

Both men agreed the plot needed an obstacle: "My options were either she's a Muslim or a nun or Hassidic." He opted for the last one, but really, Paradis's character is semi-Sister, too, frumpy clothes her habit, nylon bob her wimple. "Religion has a lot to do with sex," Turturro says. "These things interest me. I really liked Black Narcissus. All these people were overheated and it's very erotic." He sips his tea. "I like films about nuns a lot."

Turturro was born in Brooklyn and raised a Catholic by Italian immigrant parents. His first (non-speaking) screen role was in Scorsese's Raging Bull and he featured in 1986's The Color of Money, but it is with film-makers of other, distinct ethic origin he has become best-known on screen. First Spike Lee, with whom he's worked nine times, initially on Do the Right Thing (1989). And second with the Coens: in 1991, Barton Fink won him the best actor prize at Cannes and the brothers the Palme d'Or.

Turturro as the eponymous Barton Fink. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Working Title

He is consistently interesting as an actor; Gigolo is his fifth effort behind camera, and look set to be a yet bigger hit than Romance and Cigarettes, his charming musical romance with Kate Winslet and James Gandolfini. There is a similarly saucer-eyed approach to love in Gigolo. It was, says Turturro, 56, an attempt to give airtime to the sex lives of the middle-aged. Specifically, the literate yet unminted middle-aged who live alone and lonely in New York. He has friends like that, he says (Turturro himself has been married near 30 years, with two sons). "You can sleep with someone but there's a cost to that afterwards. And I also thought it would be interesting to see people put into positions they were in when they were 17, before they had baggage."

The must curious thing about Gigolo is its take on female desire. Turturro's character in the film remains a bit of a blank: hot stuff in the sack, but quite a cold fish otherwise. Stone's character says that his remoteness is what makes him so attractive. Is that really what he thinks women want?

"A good listener, that's a big thing." He quotes Abraham Lincoln, that notorious agony uncle, who said there's nothing stronger than gentleness. "I'm very attracted to that as I get older." His character is also notably good with his hands: accomplished at plumbing and electrics, brilliant with a kosher fish dish. "There's something very attractive and revealing about watching somebody cook or make a flower arrangement. I have a lot of close women friends; I'm very comfortable with women and I like women, too – they interest me. And I liked the idea of a guy's guy like me – not too pretty – who'd be sensitive."

The film also draws parallels between the oldest occupation and that of the actor. Off screen, he broadens the comparison. "People perform in life all the time. You go for a job interview; you go to a restaurant and the waiter comes over." Acting, he says, is a "service business … we're acting out people's wishes or fantasies.

"People aren't even aware if it. Yet there's a transaction that goes on constantly, even if you're married. You're like: 'OK, I gotta give up this and you give up that.' You start out being able to do these things, and then you live with someone and then she can do four things and you can do two things." He laughs and drinks his tea.

Our time is done, the transaction complete. I'd recommend him to a friend.

• First look review: Fading Gigolo