Do you know any Albanian now?
(laughs) Yeah, I do now. I started learning Albanian before I made my first trip there. Learning languages is something that’s interesting for me and Albanian is by far the most difficult language I’ve tried to learn. It’s not related to any other language that’s currently spoken on the planet. But by the time I wrapped production I was able to have a basic conversation and speak to my actors in Albanian, and to talk about normal subjects.

How did you find the child actors, and how did you direct them?
We spent about six months going from school to school all over northern Albania, and saw something like 3,000 kids. Then we would select a group for callbacks, and the callbacks would start as a group conversation about being a teenager in Albania today. And of course these kids have lots of opinions about what was difficult or annoying about being a teenager. Those conversations would turn into debates, and those debates would immediately turn into little improvisations. When I found the kids who were in the movie, it was pretty immediate. Both of them had this just tremendous creativity and imagination and memory, and when they were together they really hit it off as brother and sister. And that was what we did when we started rehearsing: I worked first with just the two of them and we improvised all these moments of their relationship as brother and sister. Then when I cast the rest of the family bit by bit, I folded them in until we had the core family.