"I'd just recently seen My Name Is Joe, and that was an eye-opener for me, just because I'd never seen those types of characters on the big screen, people I could personally relate to, and so I thought it would be something interesting to go for and jumped on a train, up to the big city in Glasgow and met this tiny wee man with glasses behind the desk."

  - Martin Compston

When Ken Loach cast Martin Compston in the central role of Liam in Sweet Sixteen, Compston had no professional acting experience and was signed to his local professional football team Greenock Morton. But Ken is well-known for his preference for using non-professional actors whose backgrounds and personal experiences can feed into and inform the characters they play.