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'Goodbye Solo': NC director makes movie about town

MARTHA WAGGONER

Associated Press Writer

Published: May 13, 2009

RALEIGH, N.C. - Nursing homes in Winston-Salem gave writer and director Ramin Bahrani inspiration for his latest movie, but even though he stayed in his home town he needed a cab driver to find the right locations to film.

"Goodbye Solo," the latest offering from the award-winning Bahrani, tells the story of a Senegalese cab driver who picks up an elderly passenger who wants a ride, in 10 days, to a rocky outcrop overlooking a gorge in western North Carolina.

William, played by veteran actor Red West, offers cabbie Solo (newcomer Souleymane Sy Savane) $1,000 for the impending trip to Blowing Rock, and it becomes clear he intends to jump to his death from the landmark. Solo, with an infinite sense of optimism, decides he can't allow this and insinuates himself into William's life with a friendship that is reluctantly accepted.

"Goodbye Solo" opened in March in New York City and Roadside Attractions plans to distribute it nationally. It follows Bahrani's two well-received films: "Man Push Cart" in 2005 and "Chop Shop" in 2008.

The 2008 Independent Spirits Award named Bahrani "someone to watch" for the earlier films and he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship on April 8. "Goodbye Solo" earned the prestigious FIPRESCI International Critics Prize at last year's Venice Film Festival.

Bahrani, the 34-year-old son of Iranian immigrants, attended a private high school in Winston-Salem. Like many cities, it's striated along socio-economic lines, and parts were foreign to him. Bahrani had been unaware of the Double J food mart, the Great American Food Store and the Peanut House, which is a hot dog stand with an adjacent "Tickled Pink Car Wash."

"I didn't know of these places," he said of the businesses that make up the movie's landscape. "A lot of those are in slightly lower-income neighborhoods that I wasn't familiar with. Making the film was a wonderful introduction to a whole part of town I didn't know much about."

To find the locations, Bahrani turned to a taxi driver he'd met at a pickup soccer game where Bahrani's brother was playing. The cabbie intrigued him, especially after he learned the man he knew only as "O'' didn't own a car and either walked or hired a taxi to get around.

"I thought it was strange that a taxi driver would hire a taxi to get around," Bahrani said. "He became in my mind someone I wanted to spend time with and try to create a story around."

The idea of a lonely man wanting to kill himself came from Bahrani's experience driving past two nursing homes in Winston-Salem, where elderly people would sit in wheelchairs or stand in walkers by the side of the road. One man waved at him each day, and Bahrani was sad for him.

"It's contrary to my heritage," he said, referring to his Iranian background. "We have no real nursing homes per se. The families just stay together and the elderly live with the kids. I started thinking what would happen if I put him in a taxi with someone like O, someone whose culture also wouldn't have a nursing home in it."

"Goodbye Solo" features different ethnicities — Solo is black, his wife and her daughter are Mexican-American and William is white. Bahrani says he enjoyed growing up in North Carolina, that his family "was always treated with love and respect," and that opening windows on specific cultures was not his goal.

"I'm not trying to impart any after-school messages to get along despite our differences," Bahrani said.

The movie "is not about minority characters but about people in the South and the whole country," he said. "This is something that has to be accepted."