Ramin Bahrani and Alejandro Polanco on the set of Chop Shop Courtesy of Koch Lorber Films

So, for this film why did you decide to focus on an orphaned Latino kid and that particular environment?
I came to see that particular location when I was editing Man Push Cart. My cameraman had to get his car fixed so he took me there. I saw that location and I was immediately really interested in it. I started spending more and more time there and I started noticing young kids that lived and worked there. I thought this would be the best angle to go into that story. With my co-writer we created this story of a love between this young twelve-year-old boy and his sixteen-year-old sister in that environment.

And the chop shop itself? You could have picked any shop or location. Man Push Cart centered on a coffee vendor in New York…
Again because I feel it is fresh. [These are] locations and characters that we really haven't seen. I think this is how the majority of people are living... and I wanted to put an eye on how much we have and at what expense and then specifically to the story, I wanted to put an eye on what people are prepared to do for love. At the end of the film, the kid is selling his sister for money. And he's twelve. And he's doing it because he loves her. How does that happen? What is this story that makes this twelve year-old boy say, "Go and sell yourself for money" and he is saying it out of love. I may tell you that and you may say, "What an awful kid." But when you watch the film, it seems like it is the only thing he could say. I think it is this kind of relationship about love that is how people are. And it [shows] a strange kind of possession and obsession that people have where they say they love you but they want you to do what they want as opposed to letting you be free to do what you want — which would be more "love." As opposed to Romeo and Juliet and Wuthering Heights — these things have destroyed our brains.

Did you hesitate to make a film with an untested twelve-year-old boy?
No. I think anyone who wants to hesitate should go and look at things like Burden of Dreams: Making Fitzcarraldo or they should look at the making of Apocalypse Now and realize and accept that filmmaking is hard. But it is easy compared to that. The kid is really good. We made him work in that garage for four or five months prior to shooting the film so everyone in the location thought we were making a documentary. My cameraman and I shot the entire film on a Handycam in advance of making the film on location with all the actions.

We're hearing more and more of filmmakers shooting sequences on Handycam as opposed to storyboarding…
When you go in and shoot the film, you change it anyhow. I am never set to what we have done in advance. But what it does is it gives me and my cameraman a foundation. It makes the actors aware of the camera because these guys are not professionally trained and we need to get used to the camera. And it gets the location used to us. So by the time we made the film they thought we were just workers. Most people there thought we were making a documentary about this boy. People who watch the film think it has "a documentary feel" but actually it is almost entirely "Take #30" with quite complicated blocking.