- The execution of any film is a miracle.

I'll say that.

Let me just start by, to get a film done is, it just feels like such an enormous and like it's a mountain that you can't climb.

And when you're at the foot of the mountain, you're just like, "We can't do this."

There's not enough time, there's not enough money.

That's the way they all start.

And needless to say that's how our film started or felt that way to me.

I'd say that the biggest challenge, which turned out to be the biggest reward of the process, was working with five kids, young actors who had a tremendous amount of fun on set.

We weren't expecting them to be such fast friends, and they really were.

And they had a blast through through the production, as we were rushing, we were against, we shot in late October, right?

And so the sun was setting quite early.

There was never enough sunlight.

We were a daylight contingent type production.

Of course, we're working with young people on set.

There's a lot of rules about how long they can be with us.

So tremendous time constraints.

And then to organize everybody into the right mood and mode and get everybody in the right position.

And oh my gosh, the costumes aren't right.

So just this incredible scramble that would continue to the point that the camera started to roll.

And then, if I'm being honest, I mean, they just took over, and there was just a lot of magic that they brought.

Their talent was, I mean, just their ability to hit their beats and be reactive in the moment and be organic was actually really incredible.

It was a challenge to get to that moment, but I think the result we can see in the quality of the performances, which was amazing.

- And I think we were very choiceful about every single person that we added to the team because I think you, you've gotta love your collaborators, and everybody brought something special to the table.

And I think we really spent a lot of time on the casting because they brought so much, they brought so much that wasn't on the script, in the script.

They brought so much that, that I was feeling.

But I think what they, but they brought a lot of their experiences to the story, which I think was incredible.

A lot of the little kids had not experienced a lot of what was happening in the story.

Because I think I wanna believe that we've made a lot of racial progress in sort of the 30 years hence.

And so I think they hadn't heard some of the racial taunts.

They hadn't had that direct experience, but I think many, many of the kids understood what it's like to be bullied and to have experience, just kind of that outsider feeling.

The kid who plays Eric, his name is MG Barnes, an amazing actor.

He plays this kind of bully kid.

And he brought such an interesting story too, because his father was raised in rural Kentucky.

His father, I believe is half Japanese, half Korean, sorry, quarter Japanese, quarter Korean, and half white.

And a lot of what was happening on the screen was something that his father had experienced.

So it's something that MG could relate to in that way.

So, everybody brought something very interesting and unique to the experience in the story.