Hotshots: Amma Asante

Are you filming today?

Not for a couple of hours. I'm in the production office in Cardiff at the moment. For the last three weeks we've been shooting near the docks in Swansea and Barry and also in Cardiff. I found this street in Swansea where there's a mountain at one end of the street and the docks at the other. This is the street where my teenage mum, called Leigh-Anne lives, although I'm keen not to say she's from a specific place. I wanted to contrast the tragedy of the story with the beauty of the surroundings. We're doing the exteriors over the next few weeks.

What is the story about?

The story starts off with the racist murder of a Turkish Cypriot man by a gang of teenagers - including Leigh-Anne. Then it cuts back to the six weeks before the murder takes place and to the circumstances that led to the events coming to pass. As the film unfolds you realise that, although racist language was used, there were other more complicated issues involved, namely Leigh-Anne's struggle to keep her baby from being taken away by social services, which challenge your assumptions about her.

How did you find your cast?

Oliver Hayden is from London and he plays the Turkish neighbour. Brenda Blethyn has what I'd call a large cameo. The teenagers, Stephanie James, Gary Sheppeard, Dean Wong and Sara Gregory, are all newcomers. I went the normal route, seeing agents and so on, but I realised quite quickly that we weren't seeing the rawness we were looking for. I had a great casting director, Gary Howe, who had lots of kids on his books from Human Traffic and he took me to lots of evening classes and workshops where the tutors would pair off their kids and get them to improvise. We would walk down the rows of kids improvising the scenes we had given and shortlist the ones who stood out. We saw about 700 kids.