Alejandro Polanco in Chop Shop Courtesy of Koch Lorber Films

Where did you find the kid?
In a school in the East Village [in New York City].

Was he taking a drama class?
No, he was in a cafeteria. I went to about a hundred schools and twenty five youth centers and places like that. We see almost thousands of kids. We put 650 on tape to pick this boy and his sister. I was just immediately drawn to him. He was charismatic. He came to the rehearsals where he was very good at improvisation. We worked for months before I gave him the part and then I took him to that garage for months in preparation. The kid is an actor. The difference between a non-professional actor and an actor is one has done it before. When I read about the non-professional actors in my films, I am thinking: "He was before he made the film. Now he is an actor. And I challenge someone to do what he did." It is not easy what he did. And why he is non-professional also depends on the film. Ken Loach is correct: you can't make a film about these kinds of characters and bring a movie star in it. It is disruptive. He uses a mix of professionals and non-professionals, and even the professional actors tend to be not the most famous ones so that they can blend in there.

Is this a strategy that you will continue to use as you move forward with your filmmaking?
I am shooting a new movie. This one is again almost entirely non-professional actors except for the two people who are the leads. One is a new talent. He has not really done anything but he's studied acting. And the other one is a seventy-year-old man who is a veteran and a very interesting character but he has never really had a leading role. I am shooting in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It is about a Senegalese taxi driver and a seventy-year-old Caucasian man who hires a taxi driver to drive him to a mountain in twelve days time where he wants to jump to kill himself. And the driver decides that he is going to become his friend and convince him not to. And he has twelve days to do it. This is different because it also has quite a lot of humor in it.