Through a Child’s Eyes

For all their state-of-the-millennium technology, high-priced stars and million-dollar scripts, movies sometimes depend, as much as anything, on kids--child actors playing leading roles, as dictated by the story. And this has never been true more than in 1999, when children were asked to help carry any number of adult pictures, big and small, from “The Sixth Sense” to “Tumbleweeds.”

It’s one thing to be cute, like Macauley Culkin in “Home Alone” or Jonathan Lipnicki in “Jerry Maguire,” but this year kids had to put on some pretty serious faces in pictures like “The Cider House Rules,” “Angela’s Ashes,” “Magnolia” and “The End of the Affair.”

Children of all ages figured prominently in a slew of films, from the spate of teen movies earlier in the year (“She’s All That,” “Varsity Blues,” “American Pie”) to “Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace’s” diminutive Anakin Skywalker, to child-parent-themed films such as “The Deep End of the Ocean.” The kids and what happens to them form the axis on which their stories spins.

Certainly in “Sixth Sense,” the movie wouldn’t work unless we believe not only that young Haley Joel Osment’s character sees dead people . . . everywhere, but that he has also been psychologically damaged by the experience. Osment’s depressed mien and breathless voice grounded the film in an unexpected kind of realism.

“So many casting directors I know are looking for kids who can do drama, who can be mentally challenged,” says Cassandra Kulukundis, casting director of “Magnolia,” whose star-studded ensemble made room for an 11-year-old actor named Jeremy Blackman playing an anguished child prodigy. “There’s a trend now in movies to see things through a kid’s eyes.”

When we see a child give a great performance, we tend to wonder, how did he or she do it? Were they really acting, or just being kids? If a child seems perfect in a role, we are glad for him or her and the film, but we might also wonder how the experience of going Hollywood so young is going to affect the rest of their lives? After all, it’s hard enough on grown-ups.

“Before ‘The Sixth Sense’ I didn’t believe in such a thing as a ‘child actor,’ that it’s not a correct phrase,” says M. Night Shyamalan, the 29-year-old director of the blockbuster hit ($275 million and counting). “What I mean is, I thought, they’re not really acting, you catch them at a certain time in their lives and they’re just themselves.”

But when Osment came to audition for the part of the troubled boy who talks to ghosts, Shyamalan realized he had been wrong. Osment cried real tears while reading a pivotal scene, as required of his character, the young boy named Cole.

“It’s one of the most difficult children’s roles. I don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote it,” Shyamalan says. “I was prepared to change it, and then Haley came for his audition.

“He didn’t look like who I had in my head. I was looking for a truly mysterious kid, maybe with black hair and black eyes, a kid who would be that kid in the story. But then I saw that Haley could become that boy. He’s very gifted to understand emotions.”

“The audition is everything. I had to get that character down,” said Osment, now 11.

Young people in films this year had to deal with issues of death, loss and longing, even the threat of decapitation (“Sleepy Hollow”)--besides the usual teenage obsession with sex. Not exactly child’s play.

“Kids used to be older,” says Alan Parker, director of “Angela’s Ashes,” the adaptation of Frank McCourt’s best-selling memoir about growing up painfully poor in Ireland in the 1930s.

“We don’t tend to cheat as they used to, because in films now we’re trying to make things more real. Audiences won’t accept it now if you have a 16-year-old playing 10.”

Parker cast three boys to play Frank, one about 7, the next about 11 and the third as an older adolescent. “There’s a difference between the young Frank and the middle Frank,” the director says, referring to the level of self-consciousness of “Little Joe” Breen, 8, as the young Frank (the face in the ads for the movie), and Ciaran Owens, 12, in the slightly older role. “Young Joe is playing himself; Ciaran, on the other hand, is acting.”

“No director can direct a child below a certain age,” Parker says, “but you can create an environment where they can be themselves. For a young actor, that’s the most important thing. And to do that, as a director, you have to be a strict schoolteacher at times and at other times a benign uncle. I chose Joe because he was totally unspoiled and natural.”

“Little kids play themselves because they don’t know what else to do,” says Kimberly J. Brown, the 15-year-old co-star, with Janet McTeer, of the independent film “Tumbleweeds,” a story about a mature daughter and a flaky mother, written and directed by Gavin O’Connor. (A similar scenario was played out in “Anywhere but Here,” but the mother-daughter team in this bigger-budget version was played by bigger stars: Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman.)

But by the time you get to be 13, as Brown was when they shot “Tumbleweeds,” some technique is often necessary. Brown began her career at 5, in a cereal commercial, shouting “Trix are for kids!” and at 7 was onstage at Lincoln Center playing the daughterof Stockard Channing and James Naughton in John Guare’s “Four Baboons Adoring the Sun.”

In “Tumbleweeds,” playing Ava, the anguished daughter of a restless mom who keeps setting up house with guys in relationships that don’t last, she was asked to improvise, for example, and become a girl not at all like herself. “Once the cameras started rolling, Ava was who I was,” Brown says.

“I wasn’t thinking about Kimberly. When we cut, it was like coming out of being somebody else. But that’s the fun of acting, creating somebody else.” As for improvising, she says, “Janet McTeer is a crazy person in real life, and we had a blast being silly together.”

Kim Zimmer, an actress on “The Guiding Light,’ a daytime drama she appeared in for three years, taught Brown an important lesson in acting: “You can’t be scared, you can’t be embarrassed, even for the people there on the set behind the camera. You have to concentrate and give it all you’ve got.”

Haley Joel Osment also started acting at 5, in a Pizza Hut commercial. The next year he played the part of the young Forrest Gump--the one with his legs in braces--and he was off and running.

He gives all credit to his father, stage actor Eugene Osment, who has been his primary acting teacher. “My dad has given me everything I know. I do script analysis with him, and he’s shown me how to get into a part. Sometimes we’ll go to a movie and see a character I could file away for reference.”

He and his father spent two weeks preparing for the “Sixth Sense” audition. “I’d never seen a role like that,” he says. “And I hadn’t had any experiences like that, but I tried to erase who I was and think like the character.” The crying, he says, “was not hard when you’re in the character. Acting is believing.”

Sometimes a young actor’s guilelessness can make a believer out of the man who wrote the script. Such a thing occurred in “The Cider House Rules,” John Irving’s adaptation of his 1985 novel, directed by Lasse Hallstrom. Set in a rural orphanage in Maine before World War II, the film’s main story is about a conflict between the doctor (Michael Caine) who runs the orphanage and the orphan who becomes his protege (Tobey Maguire), but the orphans themselves are in some ways the main characters, Irving says.

One in particular, a 6-year-old named Fuzzy Stone, comes to our attention because he has undeveloped lungs and lives in a humidified tent. Played by Erik Per Sullivan, Fuzzy has a death scene with Caine that Irving watched being filmed and describes in his just-published book about themaking of the movie, “My Movie Business”:

“The grips and the electricians were in tears,” Irving writes. “Yes, they were crying because Michael’s performance was that good, but they were also crying for Fuzzy. In every scene he was in, Erik was more Fuzzy than Fuzzy.

“He was a gift to the film. The day after we shot Fuzzy’s death scene, I saw Erik and his mother by the caterer’s truck at the old state hospital. ‘Mr. Irving!’ he called to me. ‘Did you see me die?’

“ ‘Yes! You died very well, Erik,’ I told him. He beamed. That was how he played Fuzzy, the dying boy beaming.”

In “Magnolia,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s follow-up to “Boogie Nights,” Blackman has one of the few sympathetic parts in a film about some desperately misguided souls in the San Fernando Valley, variously connected to the business of television game shows. Making his feature film debut, Blackman plays a precocious “quiz kid” who knows the plots of operas in three languages but does not know if his oppressive stage father loves him or just his moneymaking brain. (In real life, he’s an honor student who’s won an award from the White House for outstanding academic achievement.) It’s a tough part that includes a scene in which he wets his pants during a live game show broadcast.

Kulukundis recalls the auditions, in which she told each child she was going to yell at him harshly, pretending to be the father in the story. “A lot of parents were upset with me for even giving a child this part to read,” she says. “But maybe their children weren’t actors.”

Blackman was different. “I was yelling at him, and he immediately went to such a place and was feeling the pain of that little boy and showing it with his eyes and his body so much that I felt bad and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ He said, ‘OK, do it again.’

“He’s a very empathetic little boy, and he’s an actor, one in a million.”

“You become a kind of mentor for them,” says Parker, who mentions that several of the young actors who made their debuts in his 1991 film “The Commitments” still call on him for advice. “After all, you’ve changed them, the direction of their lives. It’s a big responsibility. Little Joe was milking cows before his audition, and now he’s doing ‘Letterman.’ ”

“The fame thing changes everything,” says Shyamalan, who might be talking also about himself after the success of “Sixth Sense.”

“Haley, to me, appeared very comfortable with his role in life. But I don’t think 99% of kids can handle it. When you’re a child and you have your own trailer, how are you not aware of that?”

Osment apparently deals with fame like the show-biz pro he is. “It was just a trailer and I didn’t spend much time there at all.”

Anyway, he says, “Acting is my favorite thing to do. There are no disadvantages right now.” This spring he will begin work in his next feature, playing the son of Kevin Spacey in “Pay It Forward.”

“My mom says if there’s ever a point where I don’t like it, that’s it,” Brown says. “But I love it. I love being in front of a camera and creating characters. It’s important to me and my family that I have a separate life from the business. I have friends in the business, but I also have friends in my church choir. I play basketball. I love sports.”

She also has her own Web site (https://www.kimberlyjbrown.com) with links to photos, fan club information and articles about her.

Blackman, whose mother and father are actors, is not doing any interviews yet or otherwise actively publicizing his career. “You do worry about them,” says Kulukundis. “They’re young, impressionable minds, and you’re asking them to go to places emotionally that are difficult. I feel very close to Jeremy and I will always be checking in on him to see how he’s doing.”