Man Push Cart, a film about a former Pakistani pop star selling coffee and doughnuts from a New York City pushcart, played to very receptive audiences at the Sundance Film Festival and sold before the end of the festival. Cinematical sat down at Sundance with cinematographer Michael Simmonds, star Ahmad Razvi, and director Ramin Bahrani (pictured above, from left to right), to talk about their film.

Cinematical: Ramin, I read an interview with New York Magazine where you talked about being inspired by Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus in making this film. Can you talk about that?

Ramin: Camus is one of my favorite writers, and in the myth of Sisyphus, the story is about this guy who is condemned to endlessly push this boulder up a mountain, only to have it roll back down. And I had this image of this pushcart guy, hauling this cart over and over again.

Cinematical: You really had Ahmad pulling this heavy cart through New York City traffic. Were you nervous about that?

Ahmad: I was, yeah. (laughs)

Michael: We all were.

Ramin: There was one scene where Ahmad drifted to the middle and these semis were driving by. That was a little scary then. And the time when he fell, too. But here’s the interesting thing – no one ever mentions that at the end there are two people pushing the cart instead of one – and that is a major change.

 

Cinematical: Those carts are so heavy and awkward. Ahmad, how did you ever manage to pull the cart by yourself?

Ahmad: It was hard, and exhausting.

Ramin: We filmed three nights of him pulling the cart. I wanted him to look exhausted, beat up. One night we made him pull the cart all night, then we rested an hour until the sun came up, and did it again to get him pulling the cart back to the warehouse. Ahmad didn't talk to me for three days after that.

Ahmad: I didn't know I was going to have to pull the cart so much - it weighed 1,000 pounds!

Ramin: He complained about it at one point, and I told him, “Look, the film is not called  Man Tow Cart, it’s called Man Push Cart. What did you think it was going to be? That's what it's about, that's what you have to do. It is not glamorous.

Cinematical: Let’s talk about the relationship between Ahmad and Mohammed, the wealthy Pakistani who hires Ahmad to perform odd jobs.

Ramin: I think Mohammed means well - he gives Ahmad work when he needs it, after all, and he does find him that job. Ahmad doesn’t talk much. Whenever Mohammed and his friends talk, they say a whole lot but don’t mean what they’re saying. When Ahmad has something to say, he means it. In the bar scene, Ahmad doesn’t say anything, but he acts more than people who have acted for years.

Cinematical: One of things I took from the film was how nobody every really saw Ahmad; they interacted with him, for the most part, on a very superficial level. Did you intend the film to make a social statement about the “invisible people” who service society? In the way he interacts with his customers – even the friendly regulars don’t know Ahmad as a person.

Ramin: Absolutely. Ahmad is right there every day, like all the pushcart vendors and others like them. We see them, but we don’t see them. We don’t see who they really are. There was this one guy who saw the film with his wife; she loved it and he didn't. Then a few days later he sent me this three page email about how much he loved the film - how it had made him see pushcart vendors and waiters and busboys in a completely different light. And how he realized how often he didn't really see those people.

Cinematical: Ahmad, can you talk about developing the character? You used to actually work in a pushcart, right?

Ahmad: Briefly, yes. After Ramin and I met, we shared the stories of our lives; he saw me and had faith in me. At first, I was overacting, and he told me not to be so “Bollywood”. I had to have faith in him.

Cinematical: Can you talk about some of the choices you made in filming?

Ramin: In the scene where he loses his pushcart, we were scouting this location and trying to figure out to shoot that scene from. We finally decided to shoot it from where the cart had been, and to just show Ahmad running frantically from place to place trying to find it. It was a deliberate choice not to hold the audience's hand and spell it out for them that Ahmad's cart had been stolen. And we had this one editor we hired - he only worked on the film one day and then quit, because he didn't agree with me on that shot. He thought we had to spell it out for the audience, and he actually accused me of not respecting my audience. Because I assumed they were intelligent enough to figure out what had happened. He even called me the next day to continue arguing with me about it, and I had to tell him, look - I'm in the middle of learning to use Final Cut Pro to edit my film, stop bothering me.

Cinematical: Any other interesting things happen during filming?

Ramin: Well, in the scene where the delivery guys come up as Ahmad is selling the porn to the guy down in the staircase, and they tell him they can get pirated porn in the Bronx for four bucks - that was totally unscripted, those guys had no idea they were being filmed. We had to grab them as they walked by us, they saw Mike with the camera and were like, "Oh, what's going on?" and we shoved the release form at them to sign. 

Cinematical: What message did you intend to convey with the film? It doesn’t end on a falsely uplifting note, and yet it’s still somewhat hopeful.

Ramin: I chose to end the film there because that is about life. It doesn’t matter what happened to the girl, or who stole the cart; it’s not about that -  it’s just about life and him moving on. At the end, he gives up on looking for that sticker (that his dead wife had put on his cart). He moves on from nostalgia, and he’s content. He pauses at the place where the sticker was, and he moves on and let’s go. And you think that maybe the next day, and the day after that, it will get a little easier for him.

I think people get trapped in thinking things are always going to get better, and they aren’t necessarily. But you should still keep trying, moving forward. And that's what Ahmad does.

Cinematical: Ahmad doesn’t go through huge changes in the film.

Ramin: I don’t see change as these big changes, these big character arcs. That feels phony to me.  I don’t know many people who have lives like that. But even if they have what appear to be small changes, to that person they might be big changes.

Cinematical: Your film doesn’t portray immigrant characters in stereotypical ways. Would you like to talk about that?

Ramin: This notion of immigrant film that is all about differences – it doesn’t have to be about that. It can just be about, here’s this guy who gets up, and goes to work, and lives his life. Film about immigrants doesn’t have to be about, “look, they dress differently, or they smell funny”.

Michael: In the 90s, multiculturalism was so prevalent, and now it’s becoming less relevant. Your passport doesn’t define who you are.

Ramin: I think that film critics and audiences and studios have to get past this notion that a French film has to be “French” or an Iranian film has to be “Iranian”, and just let filmmakers, wherever they’re from, just tell stories about people. People are people. My films are about trying to bring things together. I don’t want to make films about violence. I want to make films about people.