Director Ramin Bahrani Courtesy of Matt Carr

On a fifth floor balcony of the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto, Rahim Bahrani gestures to the building across the street where a couple of painters have paused work to take a couple of drags on a cigarette and chat. This ordinary vignette has caught his eye: "Look at those guys across the way…this is no different from my film: those three guys squatting there, taking a smoke break before they go and paint the rest of that apartment. That is the majority of the world." Bahrani, a North Carolina-born New York director-screenwriter, left America for his parent's homeland of Iran in 1998 in order to make his first feature film, Strangers. But it was his Man Push Cart, the story of a New York coffee vendor, which attracted the attention of the filmmaking community and garnered a host of accolades (picking up three Independent Spirit Awards in 2007). In Chop Shop Bahrani returns to the streets of New York, again using unknown actors, to tell the story of Alejandro, a twelve year-old orphan who works at an auto body repair shop in the wasteland of the "Iron Triangle" of Willets Point, Queens. Bahrani speaks exclusively to Premiere.com about his filmmaking process, working with non-professional actors, his next project Goodbye Solo and... Woody Allen.

This film follows on the success of Man Push Cart. But it is not a huge diversion from that in the sense that you are still focusing on marginalized people.
I have been thinking a lot about that. What does that mean exactly: marginalized people? Because I think that the people in Woody Allen's films are more marginalized because there are a lot fewer of them in the world. Half the world's population lives the way that people in my films live. If you just go around the world and pick up the people who live in that situation, it is like three billion people. And if you look at the majority of films [they represent about] two percent of the population. So I have been thinking a lot about reading critiques of my films and how people describe them and I am starting to think that they are not marginalized. This is the reality.

So, directors like Woody Allen are more peripheral…
Believe me, I think Woody Allen is a genius and I love him as a filmmaker and I don't mean just Woody Allen but the majority of films that deal with privileged, affluent Caucasians which is — in terms of American cinema — not the majority of the world. So I am starting to think that it is the opposite.