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"Those were everything," Asomugha, 35, told me at the Sundance Film Festival. "Everybody keeps talking about the glasses, and it was important. And I think that's the way. It's such a small film, low-budget film, and you have to age 20 years and you don't always have the resources to do that, so the glasses for my character were important in showing the age and the time difference."

He also used Carl's Trinidadian accent.

"It wasn't that hard, but it was a lot of work," Asomugha said. "It was part of the job, and it was important for us to have accents in it. It's an immigrant story, it's an American story. Without that, we would've lost something. But we worked for about four or five weeks just trying to get it down."