Son of Washington Post and New York Times foreign correspondent Bernard Nossiter, he was born in the United States in 1961. He was raised in France, England, Italy, Greece and India. He studied painting at the Beaux Arts in Paris and at the San Francisco Art Institute, as well as Ancient Greek at Dartmouth College (Phi Beta Kappa, Senior Fellow.) After work as an assistant director in the theatre in England (The Newcastle Playhouse, King's Head), he went to New York where he landed a job moving office furniture for the film Fatal Attraction, which led to a position as assistant to the director Adrian Lyne for the length of the shoot.