Saturday, November 7, 2009 East Central Illinois

11th Annual Roger Ebert's Film Festival 2009

'Chop Shop' director took pigeons under his wing

By: Melissa Merli
Friday, April 24, 2009
Story Photo

Photo by: John Dixon

'Chop Shop' director Ramin Bahrani talks about his film during a panel discussion with Kim Voynar of Movie City News, left, and Lisa Rosman of Flavorpill online magazine at the Virginia Theatre in Champaign on Thursday.

 

CHAMPAIGN – Director Ramin Bahrani not only meticulously trained amateur actors for his neo-realist film, "Chop Shop," but also spent three weeks training pigeons for the final scene.

"I had a pigeon wrangler, and unfortunately it was me," he joked Thursday afternoon after his sophomore film was screened at Roger Ebert's Film Festival at the Virginia Theatre.

Bahrani, who recently received a Guggenheim Fellowship and whose new movie, "Goodbye Solo," is receiving rave reviews, trained a flock already being fed by a man named Carlos, who works in the Iron Triangle.

The 75-acre district in Queens, a borough of New York City, is a "third-world clone jammed with auto and body part shops and the population that lives off of them," Ebert wrote in his review.

Carlos fed the birds outside a garage about eight doors down from the garage where the character Ale, a 12-year-old street orphan portrayed by Alejandro Polanco, lived and worked.

Bahrani asked permission from Carlos to persuade the pigeons, via feeding, to move down to Ale's garage, in real life owned by Rob Sowulski, who plays himself in the movie.

So, for over three weeks, Bahrani would arrive in the Triangle before the pigeons, eventually moving them to the Sowulski garage.

In the final scene, Ale and Isamar Gonzales, who plays Ale's older sister, feed the pigeons, which then swoop into the air.

It took Bahrani 54 takes over two mornings to get the shot.

Adding further authenticity to "Chop Shop," Alejandro Polanco actually worked at Sowulski's shop when the movie was not being filmed. Sowulski would pay the boy $5 for each car he brought in.

Bahrani said he did 30 to 40 takes of about 90 percent of the scenes; nothing was improvised.

And though he and Bahareh Azimi wrote a detailed script, cast members did not receive copies. Instead, the director fed the untrained actors their lines over six months of rehearsal, letting them add their own personality to the dialogue.

The people who appear in the background of the Iron Triangle scenes actually thought Bahrani was shooting a documentary: Before the actual filming began, Bahrani, three interns and cinematographer/camera operator Michael Simmonds spent five weeks at the location, filming with a Handycam, a small digital-video camera. When shooting began in earnest, they returned with a 15-person crew and a larger camera.

"We would shoot 30 takes in a row, and everyone still thought we were making a documentary," Bahrani said.

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