By David D'Arcy

Chop Shop [1] takes us into the streets of Willett's Point, a section of Queens behind Shea Stadium that you might not know unless you steal cars or have tried to get one fixed cheaply. Ramin Bahrani [2]'s second feature (after his much-praised Man Push Cart [2], 2005) looks at life on these streets through the character of Alejandro (Alejandro Polanco [3]), a kid of 12 who scavenges a living off the neighborhood of garages and struggles to make a life for his older sister, 16, Isamar (Isamar Gonzalez [4]).

These streets look as mean as anything in Scorsese [4] - the primitive conditions make you think of Gangs of New York [4] rather than anything as clean as Mean Streets [4] or Taxi Driver [4] - yet the film reveals a community of all sorts of businesses that find a harmony in near-anarchy. This could be a place where roads are unpaved and the police don't venture much. An orphan, Alejandro is a relatively lucky kid, enterprising enough to find a job and a place to live, and to stay a step a head of the predators who prey on these street kids.

Chop Shop is not a documentary, but thanks to intrepid camerawork weaving through the site by Michael Simmonds [5], it has a tactile grasp of what everyday business is like in Willett's Point, as the cars pile in and out on unpaved roads. Crucial here is the gritty sound of the place, where the noise from the cars, the subway, and the LaGuardia-bound airplanes overhead grinds and rumbles on endlessly.

The atmosphere is on target in Bahrani's film. I know Willett's Point from spending time there 20 years ago, researching a story about merchants for National Public Radio when the place was threatened with demolition after Donald Trump and Mario Cuomo concocted a plan to put a new stadium there. Like so much of what displaces real people, this amounted to a trophy project for a few zillionaires and their politician friends.

The place is still endangered by schemes for new projects there - most recently, Mike Bloomberg targeted the site for an Olympic venue. More immediately, its people and their subsistence are endangered. In Alejandro, Bahrani and the plucky Alejandro Polanco have found a balance between the indifferent practicality of street poverty and the young boy's dedication to his sister, without an ounce of sentimentality, bounced around by the cars. It's a cinematic image of the proverbial school of hard knocks, where freedom is often the freedom to wash another windshield. Yet there's something tricky here in assuming that this is universal, even if Willet's Point looks like comparable places in Mexico or Egypt, and the place is filled with immigrants. Alejandro is atypical. Kids are not this enterprising.

Both of Bahrani's features are stories of the streets. In Man Push Cart, a Pakistani immigrant (who defies every stereotype) pushes a cart like Sisyphus through the caverns of lower Manhattan, less violent than Los Olvidados [6] or Pixote [7], less cloying than Oliver Twist [7] and the Disney clones of it.

Don't expect a happy ending. Don't even expect an ending here, but the absence of an ending is the presumption of some hope for these characters.

I recently spoke with Ramin Bahrani in New York.

 

Did you approach this film any differently than you did Man Push Cart?

Along with the cinematographer, Michael Simmonds, we wanted to be less present as filmmakers. We wanted to erase ourselves and not be as visible as we felt we were in Man Push Cart. We really wanted the camera to be not noticeable. It is not a Dardenne [7] Brothers [7], violent shaky camera, and there's also an incredibly complicated mise en scene, with blocking that the actors were doing 30 times in a row. But you don't really feel the camera. You don't really notice that suddenly it's gone from a one-shot to a two-shot, to an over-the-shoulder, and then turned into another wide shot. It just kind of feels like some stuff happened.

After the screening in Cannes, Abbas Kiarostami [7] told me that he loved the mise en scene - he said he was impressed by it. He said it felt like an accident to him. And he said it felt "like a loose shirt dangling on my body."

For what audience did you make this film?

I'm hoping that kids are going to watch the film. The idea first came into my head in Cannes, when the screening ended and Atom Egoyan [7] was there, praising the film, and he said that he wanted his son to see the film, who was around Alejandro's age, and he told me, "If you have a smart distributor, he will make sure that kids can see this film." I think it might be great for kids who aren't living in the situation that Alejandro is, who actually have more at their disposal socially and economically, it may prove enlightening to them.

The problem is that kids don't see films.

The Film Forum has been reaching out, as has Koch Lorber, to New York schools. Some of them have agreed to do group ticket sales and bring their kids as part of the educational experience, and to talk about it. I'm sure they'll also sell it to a TV channel.

Were you always intending to shoot Chop Shop in New York?

Definitely. The idea first came from going to the location. When I was editing Man Push Cart, Michael Simmons, the cinematographer of Man Push Cart and Chop Shop, told me I should come with him to where he had to get his car fixed, because he thought I would be interested in the location. From the first time I saw Willett's Point, I told him, "We're going to make a film here. I don't know what it's about yet, but this is going to be the location of the next film."

These places are endangered areas in a city like New York, which is zoning them out of existence. Did you want these auto shops to be iconic instances of the spirit of New York, or a spirit of New York?

One of the reasons I pushed myself to make the film so quickly was that I was working under the fear that by this [time next] year the location wouldn't exist, that it would have been re-zoned and razed. I wanted it to exist in my film, and for people to know that it did exist. The references to this place go back in literature to The Great Gatsby [8]. F. Scott Fitzgerald [8] mentions it. He talks about it as the Valley of the Ashes. As Gatsby is driving into the city, he drives past it. He talks about it then as more of a dumping ground, and he sees mounds of ash and smoke billowing up.

How did the script take shape?

The more I spent time there, the more I focused on the young boys who were working there. There was a sign across the street from Shea Stadium that said, "Make dreams happen," and I began to wonder, "What sort of dreams would a young boy have here?" I had an idea about a boy and his mom, and when I met my co-writer in Europe, she had the idea of changing it from a mom to a sister, and changed the whole focus of the film.

Little by little, she and I worked on drafts of the script, and I began spending more and more time at the location, and [gathering] more and more details and things that could be introduced into the story that could be real, things that could keep the story moving dramatically that wouldn't feel like they had come from an outside source. Then I cast Alejandro and Izzy and made shifts in their dialogue, based on the way the kids actually spoke.

 

 

One of the things that I did with Michael Simmonds, the cameraman, was that he and I went with the kids, and maybe one or two of the assistants, and we shot the entire film on a handi-cam, for about five weeks before the film was ever made, and we were holding the camera inches away from the actors' faces, so they would just forget about it. We were also filming people around that areas whom we knew we would be filming a month later.

That helped for many reasons. It helped me refine the script, to see what was needed and what wasn't needed, but it also got the kids completely comfortable with the camera, acting in a real-live location with people following them, and also it got the people who lived there used to us arriving. And after a while, I would bring three or four people, along with my cameraman, just so they got used to us. Even if they had nothing to do with what we were doing, I would bring them, so that the people in Willett's Point would get used to there being a crowd of people. So when the film was actually being made with a high-definition camera - now we had a 14-person crew, instead of a 5-person crew - nobody really seemed to care. It was the same thing, basically, but now there was a boom guy chasing someone.

There was so much movement; it was hard to tell how you were able to get a consistent level of sound.

We spent a huge amount of time building sound effects, most of them that I had recorded live on location. So if we had a banging sound, we thought about what kind of banging sound it should be, what rhythm it should have. When a kid is going to the truck stop at the end of the film, and you're hearing cars going by in the distance, some of them are playing at 50 percent slow motion, and with light drizzle on the ground - that has a different kind of feeling.

In Chop Shop and in Man Push Cart, you are looking at characters in streets, with a fundamental and tactile relationship to what's moving along on those streets. I the case of Man Push Cart, the main character operating the push cart is like Sisyphus, pushing this burden into lower Manhattan and pushing out at night, repeating this movement every day.

I like to focus on characters and images and stories that are right there. The push cart guy is right outside your apartment right now, but nobody really takes notice of him. So I get compliments - when people tell me, "I live in Queens and you just showed me something in my own home that I didn't know, and you made me look at my neighborhood and my surrounding in a different way." This, to me, is one of the most important things you can do with a film. I really like to focus on something that might appear to completely ordinary, like the objects or characters who are just right there. In combination with the events in the film, they can create a more deep or intense meaning.

If Alejandro and Isamar can have such an unconditional love in the film, with no judgment, and they have such hope in the film, within the context of such a harsh location, then I feel that as a viewer or filmmaker or audience member watching it, I could have that amount of hope. I could be so non-judgmental, I could be so loving to someone, as opposed to a glossy Hollywood film, or a glossy independent film - because now the word "independent" doesn't mean that something is made with an independent vision. Now that kind of film might present you with a "hopeful" ending, but it is existing in a world which doesn't correlate with the world that I'm living in. That hope isn't something that I can reach towards. To me, it's like a candy bar that tastes good for three seconds and then gives me a stomach ache. In my film, the hope and the struggle of these characters is real, and it's in a world that seems to make sense to the one I'm living in. So I wonder, why can't I be more like them?

Getting back to why I want kids to see this - because when I was the 13 year old, I wasn't like this. I was wondering why I didn't have another video game, why we couldn't have McDonalds for dinner again. Why can't I watch one more hour of cartoons?

You mentioned that Abbas Kiarostami saw Chop Shop. In the course of showing your films at festivals, have you gotten to know any other Iranian directors?

Kiarostami, I knew vaguely from Iran, and we got to spend a week together in Marrakesh, where Man Push Cart was playing. And his translator hadn't shown up, so I was his translator for his master class there, which was great, because I was speaking his words, which helped me learn something. In Cannes, he just happened to be there. I turned around and he was sitting behind me during the screening, which was kind of terrifying. The film ended and, thankfully, he was extremely positive about it, much more so than the first film. I've been fortunate. I came to met Scorsese at one of the festivals. Mike Leigh [8] came to see Man Push Cart in London and was very complimentary. I'd love to shake Ken Loach [8]'s hand, but I missed him in Toronto by five seconds.

 

Were you born in Iran?

I was actually born in North Carolina. I grew up speaking Persian, and after I graduated college, I lived in Iran for three years, where I made a medium-length film called Strangers [9]. It was a 70-minute film. Iran was my grad school. You either do grad school, or you do this.

Has Iranian film found its way into your style, or into the way you make films?

It's certainly true that Kiarostami or Amir Naderi [10], they were influences, but kind of in the same way that Flaherty [10] or Bresson [10], they were influences, or Rossellini [10] could be an influence. I'm watching Roma [10] again, by Fellini [10], and I think Fellini could be an influence, even though I've had nothing to do with him.

How did you raise the money for this film?

Chop Shop was financed by Big Beach Films [11]. They had done Little Miss Sunshine [11]. Someone from their office named Emily McMaster contacted me. She had seen Man Push Cart at Sundance, and really liked it. They believed in me and believed in the script. They were supportive and had good critical comments, and just let me do my thing. It just really worked out.

Is there anything that you've seen in cinema that treats the same kind of setting or story? Obvious things come to mind, like Los Olvidados - not that the subject matter is the same - but there is a sense of kids fending for themselves on the street. After World War II, there were a lot photographers who went to places like Harlem, and made still photographs of kids in situations like this - everybody from Helen Leavitt [12] to Roy DeCarava [13], later Diane Arbus [14]. Let's not forget that Kiarostami is a still photographer, too. Did you look at that work?

For Chop Shop, certainly, I'm aware of some of the great kid movies, like Los Olvidados or Pixote, Kes [15], Ken Loach's film, any number of Kiarostami's films, or Amir's film, The Runner [16].

In Chop Shop, Michael Simmonds and my co-writer and I, we really didn't talk about those things anymore. We just wanted to tell the story in the most simple way that we could. I don't want that to sound as if it was simple to make. The filmmaking is quite rigid; it's very demanding filmmaking. But it just appears to be very simple. I don't know of any simpler way to have shot those scenes than the way that we did them.

In terms of the attitude of the kid, my co-writer, Bahareh Azimi [17], she is French-Iranian, and her parents moved to France after the revolution. They were architects, very educated, but they were not allowed to do that job, and had to do menial labor when they first got to the country. My co-writer grew up on the streets with gypsies, getting into trouble, so she brought something to the script which was really important. Alejandro could never get down or depressed - he has to be pragmatic, and whenever something bothers him, he should come back with a joke, and remain light on his feet and keep moving forward. Otherwise he couldn't survive. He's not a brooding metaphysical guy like Ahmed in Man Push Cart. He's a practical guy who needs to keep moving forward.

 

You've got a paradox, visually, in this film. You have Willett's Point, in all its amazing specificity, which people who've been there will recognize, and you've got a universality, so sometimes it looks like it could be Brazil or Mexico, or Morocco, as long as you're not paying too much attention to the cars.

I tried to do in it Push Cart as well. There are all the details which make it this city, which a real New Yorker would know, including sound, by the way. Don't you get angry when you hear movies that are made in New York, but they don't sound like New York?

What you're hearing is post-production in Toronto.

They don't sound like New York. If we meet in New York, we're going to have to talk loud. Either you talk loud, and you walk on a street that doesn't smell, or you talk a little bit less loud and walk on a street that smells like urine. That's New York. And if you can't hear and feel and smell those things in a movie, well, just go and make it somewhere else.

Is the film that you're finishing now, Goodbye Solo [18], also made in New York?

No, Goodbye Solo is in my home town of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Speaking of sound - during rush hour in Winston-Salem, you could drop a piece of paper on the street, and you'd hear it.

This is my least noisy movie.

It's so quiet there, you can hear them breathing out their cigarette smoke. After all, this is the capital of the tobacco industry, and smoking seems to have the status of protected speech. It's perfect for a work of minimalism. You brought up the Dardennes before. What did you mean when you said that you were not making a film in their style, and how do you differentiate what you've done from the films that they have made?

In terms of the camera, it certainly is not. But more importantly, I'm really not a moral filmmaker. I read a review of my film, and the person wrote that the film forces you to suspend moral judgment - and the review also talked about the absence of the "father upstairs," or God. I love Dostoyevsky [18]; he's one of my favorites; I love Bresson, he's one of my favorites - and of course, the Dardenne Brothers don't exist without these people. And I think all these three artists are on the top, but I don't want to end my film with a moral knife in your stomach. That doesn't interest me. That's a major distinction between the philosophy of my films, which can really be found in the end of any work of cinema. I don't want to stab a knife in your stomach, the way a Dardenne Brothers film does. It can prove troublesome to people that there is no moral right or wrong in the film. People have told me, after seeing the film, and I was happy to hear this - one told me this personally and two emailed me - "If I see a kid steal something and run, I'm not going to stop him."