When Toronto-born filmmaker Adam Irving first read about New Yorker Darius McCollum – a man with Asperger’s syndrome who has spent 23 years behind bars off and on for stealing subway trains and buses by impersonating transit workers – he was intrigued. So he decided to make a documentary about him.

“I love stories about impostors because I’m an honest, unfiltered person,” Irving says. “It’s really hard for me to lie, even if it’s a white lie. So I kind of admire people if they can live their whole life as a lie, especially if it’s harmless.”

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He was also attracted to this true crime story and wanted to explore the mental health issues that underscored McCollum’s life. While McCollum stole transit vehicles, he wasn’t simply taking them on joyrides. Instead, he followed their prescribed routes, picking up passengers along the way.

Irving’s film Off the Rails had its international premiere on May 4 at Toronto’s Hot Docs Film Festival, although it was previously screened at some festivals in the United States, including the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in North Carolina.

However, it wasn’t easy for Irving to get his doc off the ground. When he started his project in 2012, McCollum was serving time on Rikers Island. Irving, who’s based in Los Angeles, exchanged letters with him for six months before finally visiting him in jail in March 2013.

“There was all this pressure because if Darius didn’t like me, then my dream of making this documentary about him would be over,” Irving recalls.

Luckily, the two got along. In fact, Irving notes how McCollum loves attention, an element that he weaves into the film. “He wants the world to know about his story,” says Irving.

Irving began working on the project in earnest about three years ago. While he was able to shoot some footage of McCollum in prison, he filmed most of the documentary in New York City.

Instead of simply having McCollum talk about his crimes, Irving decided to re-enact them with actors.

“I wanted the audience to see what it would look like if a kid was driving a train,” he says, describing the time McCollum first operated a subway at age 15. “It’s almost like you don’t believe it – like how could a child drive a train?”

Since it was too expensive to rent a subway station in New York, Irving ventured home to shoot these scenes in the abandoned Lower Bay Station.

“I’m not a train buff, but I love subways. I’ve been on subways in 51 cities around the world, so to be able to film in my home city’s subway system was really exciting,” says Irving, who grew up in Toronto.

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He went to Bialik Hebrew Day School and the Anne and Max Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto before leaving to complete his undergraduate degree at Brandeis University near Boston. Then he did his master’s at New York University and started working for his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. Before he finished, however, he moved to Los Angeles to be in the epicentre of the film industry.

Off the Rails is his first feature-length film. Unlike much of the news coverage that already surrounded McCollum, Irving wanted to create a nuanced film that went behind the tabloid-esque headlines calling him a “transit bandit” or “transit kook.”

And, indeed, the film does just that by presenting a complicated subject who can’t stop stealing trains.