Fugitive Pieces was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival. What was that experience like?

It was fantastic. Every film I’ve made has shown at the festival. This was a very big honour and all my family were there, my friends and everyone who worked on the movie. It was very exciting and moving for everybody, so that was great.

The cast received rave reviews at the festival. How important was casting to this film?

Casting is huge for me. If you don’t cast the right people, you don’t have a movie. Casting is everything. We did massive searches for every character in this movie. Aside from having to cast people who are beautiful and appropriate to the context of the film, in this case you have very specific requirements. For example, Jacob has to age about twenty-five years. He has to be believable as Jewish, Eastern European, intellectual, a writer and also a romantic lead. That’s a lot of things for an actor to pull off and there were not a lot of actors that really fit that role suitably.

Similarly, Athos has to speak Greek, has to age many years as well, and you have to believe that this character is capable of this incredible act of sacrifice to save this child whose language he doesn’t speak and raise him for his entire life. He’s an extraordinarily compassionate human being. Finding Rade [Sherbedgia] was like finding a needle in a haystack, a Greek-speaking actor who could believably be all those things. Dialect, language, aging, all those things are very difficult to achieve.

And Robbie [Kay], too — finding a young actor who believably had been through this kind of a trauma, who could be believable as Jewish, Eastern European and could speak little bits of other languages, including Greek and Yiddish, and age a few years believably as well — very tough. With Robbie and Rade, if we hadn’t found those two actors ... there was no second choice for either of those roles. We looked at thousands of kids all over the world. We looked over North America with no luck, we got casting people in Eastern Europe, in Budapest, in Prague and Poland, and there was no second choice. When I heard Robbie, it was like a lightning bolt. I knew if any of [our choices] didn’t work out for whatever reason, we were really in big trouble. But we found them all, amazingly enough.

One of the Toronto film fest reviews called the film “painterly.” Did your father being a painter influence your own appreciation or approach to art?

I think it did very much. My father’s father was also a painter and my brother is a painter. Certainly painting was probably the number one influence when I was growing up, seeing it around me and living with it. My father always had a studio and I went to the studio a lot and watched him paint. He painted me and my brother and sister all the time. I was very aware of the creative process and had a really good understanding of composition and colour and light and all these things. I was always interested in fine art.