Master Class Is in Session

The pairing of Sean Connery and newcomer Rob Brown as mentor and pupil in “Finding Forrester” is a study in contrasts, both on and off the screen. Although they’re both more than 6 feet tall, Connery is broad-shouldered and robust while Brown is lithe and boyish. The two are at opposite ends of their professional lives. At 70, Connery is in the autumn of an astonishing career dating to the early 1950s. Brown, who was born in 1984, is making his motion picture debut.

The older man is loquacious and expansive in his answers, an engaging and spirited raconteur. He sits erect on the sofa in his suite at the Four Seasons Hotel, legs apart, feet firmly planted. Brown, who is at the other end of the couch, is drawn in, slouched over, his face partially concealed under a baseball cap. His answers are measured and to the point. His deep, velvety voice betrays not a hint of his New York upbringing (he lives in Queens and is in his junior year at Brooklyn Polytech high school with plans to major in engineering in college) while Connery’s gravel tones are thick with Scottish inflection.

Based on the prize-winning Nicholl competition script by newcomer Mike Rich and co-produced by Connery, “Finding Forrester” follows a familiar trajectory in the relationship between teacher and student. It’s the interaction between Connery and Brown that gives the movie spark and tension. As Jamal Wallace, a gifted student and athlete who befriends the reclusive author William Forrester (imagine J.D. Salinger crossed with William S. Burroughs in a Bronx tenement), the 16-year-old holds his own against the formidable Connery, an impressive feat considering he’s never acted before. He found out about the role through a flier distributed at his high school.

Question: What was the most challenging aspect of appearing in your first film?

Rob Brown: The first day of shooting. I was a little intimidated because everyone was there. We had already rehearsed for two weeks, but you know, we didn’t have a whole crew and lights and cameras.

Q: Of all the actors who auditioned for Jamal how did you decide on Rob Brown, who’d never acted before?

Sean Connery: Through a process of elimination. I watched all the selections on video and then came to New York to read with two boys, Rob and [James Williams III], the boy who plays his friend Fly. [Director] Gus Van Sant had one of those hand-held Sony digital cameras and we talked about a scene, kicked it around a bit and shot it. Both of them gave interesting and different readings. Afterwards Gus and I had a conversation and I thought, without question, that Rob had that feeling, that center which was what we wanted for the piece. He had a very capable stillness. Actors have a tendency to act to get that, but he had it from the start. Gus agreed. Now we just had to tell Columbia we wanted someone who’s never acted before to play the lead in the movie.

Q: And was that difficult?

Connery: I must say John Calley [chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment] and them were great. They said, if you think he’s right, go with it. I’ve known John for a long time and he obviously has a degree of faith in me. The same was true with Mike [Rich, who wrote the “Forrester” screenplay], the first-time screenwriter, who incidentally stayed with us throughout the movie.

Q: How did you prepare Rob for this undertaking?

Connery: Since the spine of the movie is the relationship between Jamal and Forrester, I insisted we shoot in Toronto so I could take the principals up there to rehearse for two weeks with Gus and the writer. We were on the actual set and we dressed it as we moved along. This way we were able to find it and walk through it. The real hard work came the first day of shooting because it’s another thing to be doing it with the cameras, the lights. But I have to say Rob was marvelous and calm. He has formidable instincts in terms of response. There were no problems in any way. Just as soon as we were able we brought the first rushes up from L.A. and we were very happy.

Q: What did you think when you saw the rushes--the first time you saw yourself on screen?

Brown: I was relieved, man, because I still haven’t seen that tape when I first read with Sean and everybody was coming up to me saying how great it was. And I was saying, that’s nice but when do I get to see it? But the first time I saw the dailies, I was like, wow. I was so happy to see myself.

Connery: There are a lot of actors who avoid the dailies. To me it’s the stupidest thing because if you’re trying to do something, you don’t know if you’re accomplishing it. When I get the rushes, I look at everything. I look to see what I did wrong and what I did right, so if need be I can say I have to do it again. We never had to do that. I think there was only one retake, a scene in which I smashed a glass.

Q: As a first-timer what did you learn from rehearsing?

Brown: A lot, like how to block [choreograph the scene] and everything. I didn’t even know the terminology. So when day one [of shooting] came I was more natural, I was familiar with the set. I was real prepared.

Connery: You couldn’t have done the preparation for the film right in the studio. We would never have had the control we had up in Toronto. In the studio, there’s always noise and distractions. You don’t get to do that kind of exploration. That would have made it harder for Rob. But up there nobody came near us. It was just the dance of two people.

Brown: Yeah, things that we would have had to figure out on the day of shooting, we knew already, where to go, where to stand.

Connery: We made a lot of sense out of it. It all came out of the blocking. You find the dance that goes with the dialogue. If it doesn’t work, you find a different way to play it. The points raise themselves. It became organic. We found out where the drama was, who does what to whom and that all the scenes had a certain progression. Our relationship was all worked out before we shot the movie, through working with Mike and Gus.

Q: Even experienced actors might be afraid to star opposite Sean Connery, afraid they’ll get blown off the screen. Did you have any of those fears?

Brown: [Shakes his head.] Hey, they cast me, so they must have had faith that I could do it. I didn’t have any pressure like that. I just thought, I must be doing something right. So I just went ahead and did it.

Connery: There was never any thought of that, because it’s all there in the writing. I showed a cut of the movie to Mike Nichols and he said it wasn’t sentimental, which is the key to this film. I hate sentimental films. Mike said it reminded him of an old athlete teaching a younger man. I’m teaching him about writing, but in a funny way I was also teaching him about acting. And it’s all about interacting. I never try to blow someone away. That’s not difficult but I’ve never had a problem with any actor even in a minor role. I’ve heard and read about people who have people who are good cut out of the movie because they’re a threat. But if somebody’s that good, they’re that good. And the better they are, the better the film is. If I thought Rob was good and I said we’d better take some of his stuff out, well, who’s the loser? The picture. And me. The better he is, the better I’ll be. And vice versa.

Q: Several of your best moments in the film are silent close-ups of your face. How were you able to do that with no training?

Brown: I was just always thinking, “How would Jamal react? How would he stand, how would he move his hands?” Even when I was off-camera, I always thought like that. Then there’s a lot of stuff that just happens because of the writing. It comes out. I can’t relate my experiences that much to Jamal. I don’t act like him. That was difficult sometimes, figuring out how he would react. Sometimes I’d go to places I could relate to, but if I did that all the time I really wouldn’t be acting.

Q: Since both of you portray writers, did you ever try sitting down to write something?

Connery: No, I can’t even type. We had this typewriter that they fixed so that you could move your hands anywhere and it worked.

Q: Like a player piano?

Connery: Yes. Before that, every time I hit it the keys they would stick and I couldn’t get the scene at all. Having a typewriter that writes for you allows you to not think about it.

Q: Jamal is recruited by the elite private school mainly for basketball and not his academic abilities. What did you think of that?

Brown: I think that’s fundamentally wrong. And he resents the fact they wanted him for basketball. What they weren’t ready for was that he was as good a student as he was a basketball player.

Connery: Gus disagrees, but I think in that game when he misses throwing the hooker, he does it on purpose because it really [ticks] them off and frees him to write. It’s very much in his character to make that choice, though we leave it ambivalent in the film.

Q: Do you think the ability to play sports today is more valued than educational excellence?

Brown: In my experience any achievement is good, no matter what it is, whether you’re going to Yale or Michigan State to play football, which happened this year [to students] at my school. We’re just all happy. We don’t set people aside and make fun of them. We’re supportive and we show love. In Jamal’s case, it’s depicted accurately though. It’s like when I was in sixth grade. If you couldn’t play ball, you were ridiculed. If you were just a bookworm, you got abused.

Connery: There are soccer players today making 50,000 [British pounds], when at one time the most they made was 50 a week. How do you compete as an academic at that level? But America is the forerunner of all this. What do you have now, a $200-million baseball player? You could buy Scotland for that. Well, not actually, but close.

Q: You play golf and you like soccer. Forrester enjoys baseball and basketball. What do you think of them?

Connery: Baseball was Forrester’s great love when he came to America. I don’t care for it at all. What interested me was the stories about the days when Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds were both there and guys would walk from one to the other with their bats and their costumes ready to play. The whole idea of the Bronx then is entirely different. I always felt we should have had some reminiscence of that. It tells you so much about America and that era. Can you imagine a baseball player on the street with his bat and his costume today? That interested me. I’m not mad about basketball either.

Q: It was surprising to hear Sean Connery spouting street slang. Was that in the script?

Connery: Oh you mean, “You’re the man now, dog?” No, that was Rob.

Brown: That came about [during rehearsal] when I asked you to define palindrome and you said the word radar, which is spelled the same backwards and forwards and then I was trying to get you to loosen up and teach you hand shakes and slang.

Connery: But that’s the only one that made it into the movie. And it gets such a laugh every time.

Q: Everyone has an image of Sean Connery from the movies. Before you met him, what was your image of him?

Brown: As James Bond, of course. But when all my friends found out, they said, you gotta see him in “The Rock.” I still haven’t seen it yet. I don’t really see movies that much.

Connery: [With pride.] He’s a straight A student.

Brown shakes his head.

Connery: No? I thought you were. Then what? Bs, Cs?

Brown: Bs. No Cs.

Q: Do you think you could have played a character like Jamal when you were 16?

Connery: You mean what he did? No. I don’t think so.

Brown: I got spoiled. I never acted before. When I came in I said I hope they’re patient. I hear stories of other directors who are kind of like bastards and they shoot and shoot until they get what they’re trying to get at.

Q: Gus Van Sant wasn’t like that?

Brown: Gus just let me go and he just told me when he had a problem.

Q: So he doesn’t interfere much with the actor’s process?

Connery: Oh, Gus can handle himself, he’s passively aggressive. He’s very much his own kind of instrument. I had a very compatible relationship with him. Besides, we’d done 75% of the work on the script before we got to the rehearsals.

Q: Have either of you decided what you want to do next?

Brown: I definitely want to do it [act] again. But I have nothing lined up. I read a football movie, a part similar to Jamal. And a short part in a comedy. All types of stuff.

Connery: My situation is a little different. I don’t need to work. I choose to when I find something I like and want to do. I’ll do it if I can find another movie in a very controllable situation, though it doesn’t necessarily have to be in a studio. Right now I’m enjoying the response to this movie. It’s been extraordinary. The strange thing is that I’ve been doing this [interviews] for four days and never before have I been in a situation where people were so unanimous and for all the right reasons.