A Sense of Place: An Interview With Ramin Bahrani
by Richard Porton
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg once dismissed Willets Point, a chaotic aggregation of junk heaps, garages, and vacant lots in Queens adjacent to Shea Stadium, as "another euphemism for urban blight." For Ramin Bahrani, an Iranian-American filmmaker born in the United States and educated at Columbia University, Willets Point (sometimes referred to as the "Iron Triangle") is more than a mere eyesore on the city's landscape. Inspired by the dizzying contradictions of a New York backdrop that must seem alien indeed to viewers weaned on the upscale locations favored by Woody Allen and his cinematic brethren, Bahrani's second feature, Chop Shop (warmly received at the 2007 edition of Cannes' Directors' Fortnight), views this area as much more than a simple breeding ground for despair. Recognizing that Willets Point cannot be reduced to a facile synonym for urban desolation, Chop Shop depicts a little-known New York neighborhood as a place where endemically American hopes and dreams coexist with crippling impoverishment.
The phrase "endemically American" is employed with at least a smidgen of irony since both Chop Shop and Bahrani's first feature, Man Push Cart (2005), are often compared to seminal works of what was once designated as Third World cinema—particularly Abbas Kiarostami's idiosyncratic take on realism and, in the case of Chop Shop, films such as Hector Babenco's Pixote that feature resilient street kids. Yet Bahrani's films are valuable for refusing to exoticize poverty—and for reminding us that, in the age of globalization, so-called "Third World"' conditions are often a submerged element of daily life in these United States.
Alejandro (Alejandro Polanco), the twelve-year-old protagonist of Chop Shop, fleshes out abstractions of being "on the margins" of American society. An enormously resourceful kid, Alejandro (often referred to by his nickname, Ale) and his sixteen-year-old sister, Isamar (Isamar Gonzales), although essentially homeless and apparently parentless, find refuge in the eponymous chop shop owned by Rob (Rob Sowulski) a gruff, but surprisingly empathetic, entrepreneur. An inveterate survivor, the pragmatic Ale forages for—and frequently steals—auto parts while reporting to another chop shop owner, Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi, the star ofMan Push Cart), for payment. Smitten with fantasies of upward mobility, Ale encourages Isamar to find work in a cooking van while nurturing dream of buying his own van, which go disconcertingly awry.
As Nathan Lee observed in The Village Voice, Chop Shop successfully avoids the twin pitfalls of "romanticism" and "miserabilism." Although certain viewers appear perturbed by the film's avoidance of both overt social commentary and melodramatic pyrotechnics, Michael Simmonds's incisive hand-held cinematography and the nonprofessional cast's naturalistic, but carefully shaped performances, allow audiences to make their own conclusions about the significance of Ale and Isamar's plight.
Cineaste interviewed Bahrani in March 2008 at a Manhattan café near Hunter College, where he is currently teaching screenwriting to undergraduates. He spoke with extreme candor about his casting process, his collaboration with Bahareh Azimi on Chop Shop's script, and the affinities of his work with Italian Neorealism and Iranian cinema.—Richard Porton
Cineaste: In his review of Chop Shop in Cinema Scope, Jason Anderson observed that, although New York City is not thought of as a center of "regional" filmmaking, your fondness for capturing a sense of place resembles the work of so-called regional filmmakers such as David Gordon Green, Ira Sachs, and Kelly Reichardt. So many recent contemporary American films seem to be set in some sort of anonymous nowhere-land.
Ramin Bahrani: I usually have the locations before I start writing or while I've started writing. I write while I'm coming back and forth between locations. So the locations become truly integral to how the story is told and how it's being envisioned from the script stage.
Cineaste: I had the impression that the decision to focus on Willets Point was probably the initial catalyst forChop Shop.
Bahrani: After seeing the place, you can begin to spend a lot of time there and I began to pick and choose what interested me the most. Michael Simmonds, my cinematographer, was the first person to tell me about Willets Point. I was very impressed; visually, it's overwhelming. I knew I had to make a film there. And the more time I spent there the more I was struck by the pace of life. People are literally fighting over cars and two minutes later a baseball game erupts in the street. I was interested in the contrast between the fistfights on the street and the joy that comes and goes and is evident in the film. I finally concluded that the kids interested me the most.
Cineaste: So Chop Shop couldn't have been about a fifty-year-old man?
Bahrani: No, Alejandro is straddling that world. It's not by accident that he's twelve and not nine or fifteen.
Cineaste: The fact that he's on the verge of adolescence is significant.
Bahrani: Yeah, I'm still waiting for Alejandro to understand the complexity of the scene where he's sleeping in the bed with his sister. He might watch it when he's sixteen and go, "Whoa!"
Cineaste: Perhaps he'll cringe a bit at that point.
Bahrani: I don't know. I think he might have a future and could pursue an acting career. I hope he does.
Cineaste: I noticed you didn't have a casting director.
Bahrani: I had a few very dedicated people who helped me. We saw thousands of kids, probably about two thousand. We went to a hundred schools, twenty-five youth centers, neighborhoods, and parks. We put 625 kids on tape. The person who was helping me, Myrna Moncayo, was very good; when I finished the film, I asked her—and she had spreadsheets to record this sort of thing since I knew people would eventually ask about it.
My first audition is essentially a Q&A. I talk to the kids and try to find out what they like, who their parents are, and so forth. I try to get them comfortable talking so you can get on to the more pointed questions. Like, if they had a sister, would they steal for her? "No, really you wouldn't?" If you ask them rather weird questions that twelve year olds are not used to answering, and make them realize you're not judging them, you might get an honest answer. You assess if they're telling the truth or not and think, "Would this person fit into the film, or would I have to change the character and would I accept that?" Or perhaps the actor is really close to the character and I won't have to change anything. Ale seemed to match the character very well. The first thing you're struck by is his face. His face suggested so much: child-adult, childlike and vengeful, suspicious, compassionate. He has so many expressions.
Cineaste: So you immediately knew you had your actor when you found Ale?
Bahrani: There was only one other kid I thought could do it. And it came down to the two of them. But Ale was better for the film.
Cineaste: How did the script evolve since you were dealing with a cowriter, Bahareh Azimi, based in France?
Bahrani: She came to New York three or four times for very intense sessions of about fifteen hours a day, for two weeks at a time. We also met once or twice in France. When I was at a festival in conjunction withMan Push Cart, I would arrange a stop in France. She only came to the location in Queens once with me along with Michael, my cameraman. Then she said she never wanted to go there again. She thought it would be better if I'd be intimately familiar with all of the details while she would have more of a distance from them. I thought that was very interesting. For example, when Rob approached me and I wanted to shoot in his garage, I showed her the pictures. We were all amazed by the little room, which seemed so much like a kid's tree house. As an architect, she was fascinated by the fact that it had a window that looks into an interior space. That window became a constant, recurring space the kid could go to.
In addition, she had other experiences she could bring to the script. Her parents were Iranian architects who moved to France after the revolution. But they couldn't practice architecture there; they wouldn't accept those degrees. The first years were quite difficult and they were more or less forced into menial jobs. So she spent her early years coming and going on the street, particularly with gypsy kids. Since she had something of "the street" in her past, one thing she brought to the project was what she termed Alejandro's "slipperiness"—whatever came at him would slip off him and he would come back with some sort of sarcastic joke. His positive and very pragmatic energy would keep him going; otherwise, how could he continue? She was very intent on this being his character. I thought it was great, particularly in the culmination of the film and what he does at the end.
Cineaste: As some of the reviews observe, there's a precarious balance to maintain. You obviously wanted to avoid a sappy ending but left room for at least a tentatively hopeful future for Alejandro.
Bahrani: A.O. Scott put his finger on it in that he pointed out that there's something about the ending that's crucial although he didn't pursue it to the end. Of course, there's something important about the ending. In what the kids do, how they act and react and look at one another, and of course in that the camera goes in a direction it hadn't before.
Cineaste: Endings are tricky. Even with a film like the Dardenne Brothers' L'Enfant, the ending injects a note of phony redemption, a steal from Bresson's Pickpocket.
Bahrani: Yes, I agree with you. The Dardennes are great filmmakers. But the ending of L'Enfant is unacceptable. When I compare the ending of my film with the Dardennes,' it seems to me that they're very "moral" filmmakers while I'm not. In other words, I don't put a knife in your stomach at the end with the heavy weight of morality. All their films seem to have this, with the possible exception of La Promesse. I love their films, and even many of the endings of films such as Rosetta and Le fils. But moral endings aren't true to life since life has no intrinsic morality. If you look at Persian poetry, it has an acceptance of life as it is. That's disturbing to most American viewers and you don't find it much in American movies. I find the opposite disturbing. Some viewers found the ending of Man Push Cart despairing. But I didn't.
Cineaste: Of course, that film has a romantic subplot, even though it was admittedly a failed romance, to leaven the gloom. In Chop Shop, Alejandro's dreams are, perhaps inevitably, at least temporarily frustrated.
Bahrani: To me, Chop Shop is so hopeful at the end. I assume the audience thinks so as well.
Cineaste: You've already mentioned Persian poetry and Kiarostami, who has more than a passing interest in that subject, is often cited as an influence on you. Chop Shop recalls some of his films by having the actors' names double as that of their characters.
Bahrani: If the actors' names weren't good and appropriate, I would have changed them. If Isamar's name wasn't good, I would have changed it. But is it really such a great name.
Cineaste: Have you encountered people who thought the film was a documentary?
Bahrani: Of course. There are some people who think it's a documentary and others who love the performances but claim the actors are "playing themselves." Man of Aran should have ended all of these discussions about fiction and documentary. There's just good storytelling. People are still arguing that Flaherty wasn't telling the truth, if you turn the camera a little to the left you'd see a town that he didn't want to show. In Chop Shop, Alejandro actually trained for six months. I had him work there so it would seem as if he belonged. The people in the locations thought I was making a documentary about Alejandro, a kid working in the shop. Even though I came with a crew and took thirty takes of the same scene, they still thought I was making a documentary.
Or, for example, in the scene where he bursts open that car door to interrupt his sister and gets into a fight with that man, I think there were eighteen or nineteen takes. One or two were good. I walked Ale back to the truck, which was quite some distance away, and I told him, "Ale, never stop, keep going." I walked back to the car and gave the man a fake gun and told him to put it to Izzy's head and told her to be terrified. I knew Ale had witnessed a murder at the age of nine and it had disturbed him. I don't want to be mean about it, but I knew mentioning this would create a reaction. It did and he was very aggressive about grabbing this guy, while at the end he was giggling.
Cineaste: I guess it's not as extreme as Samuel Fuller shooting off a gun to provoke the actors at the beginning of a take.
Bahrani: Yes, so the question becomes: is Ale's reaction acting or is it a documentary reaction to an event? It doesn't matter. There's only one question that matters: does it work and is it a good story?
Cineaste: The honesty of what's reproduced on film is what's important.
Bahrani: Exactly. Whether Nanook of the North really fished like that doesn't matter. What matters is how much the film teaches us about life. Kiaraostami is using these tricks all of the time with his actors. As we know, in The Taste of Cherry no one ever met anyone else. God knows what he was really saying to them to get the reactions he wanted. So is it documentary or fiction? It doesn't matter. What matters is the basic truthfulness of the premise.
Cineaste: How do you inspire truthfulness in your actors?
Bahrani: It differs with each person. Sometimes it's just excessive, intensive, and repetitive rehearsal to the point where they know the material like the back of their hands. And then occasionally on the day of shooting it might involve just changing something a little bit. Or, during the last second, whispering something in their ear that will give them a little charge.
Cineaste: Rehearsal is itself something of a luxury on a film, isn't it?
Bahrani: I just rehearse alone with two or three interns. Since I do a lot of the jobs alone or with interns, that cuts down on the budget. We shot the actors with a Handicam for six months of rehearsals and then for five weeks before we even made the film. We shot it with the same Handicam on location with the actors. The first rehearsals involved Alejandro and his friend Carlos playing games. Or they were playing basketball or going to McDonald's; it just involved making sure Carlos did whatever Alejandro did. Through games and activities, one followed the other and it became a natural process. A subtle way of manipulation to get the characters where they needed to be for the film without them knowing it.
Cineaste: Of course, since Rob is a garage owner who plays a garage owner, he is, in some respects, playing himself in a way that Alejandro isn't.
Bahrani: Yes, many of the details came from him. Some scenes were harder for him than others. The workers never counted their money in front of Rob when they were paid. He'd pay them and leave and they'd count their money. I noticed this and thought it would be a valuable lesson for Ale to learn—not to count his money in front of Rob. It would be disrespectful. That became a little story in itself.
Cineaste: He treats Ale quite unsentimentally—almost if he's dealing with an adult instead of a child.
Bahrani: He's also nice to him and his sister in that he gives them a place to stay. He's not really concerned that they're kids who aren't going to school. He has other things going on and is neither good nor bad. He's just doing his thing. The same with Ahmad. Is he cheating Ale? In the end, even I don't really know. He's a smart kid, though. His first question was, "How much are you going to pay me?"
Cineaste: It would be unrealistic of course to expect a corrupt society to produce "nice" people. That also seems to be the lesson of Buñuel's Los Olvidados.
Bahrani: Yeah, you'd have to be Dostoyevsky's "Idiot" to be nice under these circumstances. You couldn't survive and you'd be destroyed.
Cineaste: I assume there probably is a fair amount of prostitution in the Willets Point area. Did you decide to integrate that aspect of reality into the script?
Bahrani: Yeah, I had it as a storyline before I knew about it. Then a filmmaker friend questioned the validity of my script, which really bothered me. When I began to investigate the situation and get into the nitty-gritty, it turned out that the reality was worse than what I showed in the film.
Cineaste: To get back to Kiarostami—how much contact have you had with him? I knew you were in touch with him at Cannes after the screening of Chop Shop at the Directors' Fortnight.
Bahrani: I knew him slightly from visits to Iran. Our big encounter really came in Marrakech during a screening of Man Push Cart. I was there for the film and he was there to do a master class. His translator didn't show up and I was asked if I wanted to translate for him that week. What else was I going do in Marrakech? I could just hang out and enjoy myself or I could translate the words of a master. That's when I got to know him well; I learned so much from that class. He saw Man Push Cart at that time. He liked it but had some criticisms. We talked about it for about a half hour. He spoke in abstract terms and I thought a lot about what he said.
When Chop Shop got into Cannes, I emailed him. He was happy and, hoping he would come, I told him when it would be screening. Although on the day of the screening I heard he had left and wouldn't be there, after I introduced the film with my crew I looked behind me and saw he was there. Sitting right behind me! So myself and my cameraman and cowriter, who all worship him, were in a state of panic. At the end, during a standing ovation, he had tears in his eyes and embraced and kissed the boy and me. This time, his complaints amounted to two transitions that added up to either, according to him, either two seconds and twelve frames or three seconds and twelve frames. He said many complimentary things. But one thing that made me very grateful was that he understood how complicated the mise-en-scène was. He realized that it was complicated although seemingly accidental. Then he paused and said in Persian, "The mise-en-scène is like a loose shirt hanging from my body." After the next day when I did the last round of interviews, I left Cannes and went to Nice. I decided not to go to any of the parties I was invited to since what could top this?
Cineaste: Many critics find affinities between your films and Italian neorealism. Do you find this a problematic discussion?
Bahrani: It's a very problematic discussion although it's true that critics adore the term. We were laughing since, with Chop Shop, every single critic used the word neorealism. What does neorealism even mean in America in 2008? After all, I don't live in wartime, or postwar, Italy. How many genuine neorealist films were there, anyway? Rossellini was dodging this term all of his life. How many Visconti films are truly neorealist? Maybe only La Terra trema. And what is neorealist Iranian cinema? Critics lump Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf together. But Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf are very different directors. And how does one make an Italian neorealist film in Iran or America?
I'm grateful that critics like the films, especially since there aren't any stars. It's helped the films tremendously and I find it humbling, and at the same time I do get concerned when they claim that they resemble neorealism—but if only they had X, Y, or Z like a neorealist film should— as opposed to just taking them for what they are. I remember The Village Voice review of Man Push Cart being very complimentary although the reviewer said that Bahrani gives us a guy with donuts in a pushcart whereas an Italian neorealist film would have given us the character's social context in a post-9/11 world. Of course, I have an affinity with elements in those films since they respect the actor—and respect what is in front of the frame and respect, and don't exploit, the audience. Ken Loach at his best also shares these qualities. You don't find that much in contemporary cinema. Take a film like Thank You For Smoking. After fifteen minutes I couldn't watch it because I wondered why the director despised his characters so much and why he hated me and the viewers so much.
Cineaste: You've released two features at a relatively young age, are in postproduction with a third, and seem to have circumvented many of the financial and logistical hurdles that confront so-called "American independent filmmakers."
Bahrani: Making a film is simple; it's as simple as picking up a camera. But it's hard to make a good one. I'm not sure I want to do these panels anymore with young filmmakers. They always ask the same annoying questions—"How did you find your money?" "What was your budget?" What is more important is how do you make a gesture believable—like picking up this coffee cup. [demonstrates] So Gus Van Sant got actors from MySpace for Paranoid Park. You think that I care? Whoopdeedo. I got actors from the street. And directors have been casting actors from the street for a hundred years.
Cineaste: In some respects, your films are neither rarefied festival fare nor commercial fodder of the type produced by Hollywood.
Bahrani: I'm interested in simple storytelling. So you're exiting the realm of, say, Kiarostami's Five. I was interested in that film and enjoyed watching it. But I don't want to make that kind of film. So the question is: how do you tell simple stories and assume the audience is intelligent? I'm not interested in exploitation of the viewer, emotionally or otherwise—like, for example, the last thirty minutes of many of Lars von Trier's films. (I tend to love and respect the rest of many of his films.) I don't like to be put in a headlock and forced to cry. I prefer Man of Aran. If you asked me what films I'd take to a desert island—Satryicon or I vitelloni— I'd say I vitelloni, even though I respect Satyricon.
I'm very lucky in that I've made three films and people and the industry continue to support me and my films. When I start each film I feel I have no idea what I am doing—and I also assume it will be the last one.
To buy Chop Shop click here
To buy Man Push Cart click here
Richard Porton is currently editing an anthology on film festivals for Wallflower Press.
Cineaste,Vol.XXXIII No.3 2008
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