No experience wanted

Martin Compston, an athletic 17-year-old student from a small town near Glasgow, Scotland, was looking forward to a career in soccer when on a lark he attended an open audition for British director Ken Loach.

Within two days of receiving his final exam results, Compston was offered both a professional soccer contract from a local team and the lead role in Loach’s gritty drama “Sweet Sixteen.”

The film was scheduled to shoot during a two-month break in his soccer season, so Compston took the role. “If I’d never had that free time, I don’t think I would have made the film,” he says.

Since then, Compston, now 18, has received a standing ovation at Cannes for “Sweet Sixteen,” garnered strong notices for his heartfelt performance and landed a Creative Artists Agency agent. He also quit professional soccer after eight months to pursue acting full time.

Making that decision was gut-wrenching, he says, but “a lot of people in Scotland would kill for the chance I have.”

“To turn it up just wouldn’t seem right,” he added.

Compston is just one of several young discoveries with either no training or limited experience who have made impressive debuts in several recently acclaimed independent films:

* Victor Rasuk, 19, who in “Raising Victor Vargas” plays the cocksure yet vulnerable title character, a Lower East Side teenager who awkwardly romances neighborhood beauty “Juicy” Judy, played by another newcomer, Judy Marte, 20.

* Keisha Castle-Hughes, 14, who plays a preternatural Maori girl who challenges the patriarchal traditions of her tribe in the New Zealand drama “Whale Rider,” which opened Friday.

* The ensemble cast of “Camp,” writer-director Todd Graff’s musical look at a group of theater-loving adolescents struggling with self-esteem, romance and sexuality while staging shows at a performing-arts summer camp. It opens July 25.

All were found in extensive casting searches and none had previous film or television credits. For the few newcomers who catch such a break, it can be a springboard to a Hollywood career; think of the low-budget films that introduced then-unknowns Rosario Dawson and Chloe Sevigny (“Kids”), Jamie Bell (“Billy Elliot”), Kerry Washington (“Our Song”) and Anna Paquin (“The Piano,” for which she won an Oscar).

Natural actors are rare

There are several reasons a director may turn to a young amateur, from budgetary concerns to avoiding the oversized acting style of youngsters who have worked in commercials or on Broadway, says talent agent Nancy Carson, whose roster of child and teenage clients included Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Britney Spears early in their careers.

“Often, a director will decide that they want somebody brand-new or a fresh and not that familiar face,” Carson says. Or, if casting for a specific look or ethnicity, it may be necessary to go beyond the agency route. Although there are a lot of child actors out there, “there are not always a lot of great, natural child actors,” Carson says.

Such recent films as “City of God” and “Rabbit-Proof Fence” have also found critical success using young nonprofessional casts. Chinese director Chen Kaige’s new film, “Together,” features non-actor Tang Yun, a violin prodigy, in the lead role. Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant,” inspired by the Columbine shootings, was cast mostly with students from the Portland, Ore., area and recently won the top prize at Cannes. Nikki Reed, 15, not only makes her debut in August’s “Thirteen,” but also co-wrote the script.

“I think that we really are seeing more ‘real’ kids than we used to,” Carson says.

Loach, known for his docudrama style, has cast nonprofessional actors before, in his films “Kes” and “Bread and Roses.” He wanted to cast a local to play the lead role in “Sweet Sixteen,” the tale of a downtrodden teenager in Greenock, Scotland, who turns to drug dealing to buy a better future for himself and his mother, who is to be released from prison the day before his 16th birthday.

For “Sweet Sixteen,” Compston first auditioned with his soccer teammates as a favor to his coach, who had arranged for tryouts at the school but couldn’t get anyone to sign up. “An actor is seen as being a posh person or a wimp,” Compston says. But his father encouraged him to stay in the running when he wanted to back out during the five callbacks. Compston was shocked when he got the part. He thought it was a joke, but a month later filming began.

Director Peter Sollett was also going for a naturalistic style in “Raising Victor Vargas.” Five years ago, when he and fellow New York University film student Eva Vives began working on “Five Feet High and Rising,” the short film whose characters would inspire “Victor Vargas,” they tried going through casting agencies. “The kids we were meeting, they were really just mimicking what they were seeing on television,” says Sollett, 27. They began scouting junior high and high school talent shows and posting fliers, one of which Rasuk, then 14, spotted. Rasuk remembers walking into the audition -- his first -- and being intimidated by the head shots spread out on a table in front of Sollett and Vives. He didn’t have one.

“Right away, I was so discouraged,” Rasuk says. “I didn’t really know the etiquette of how this all worked.” But Rasuk, who had been acting as a hobby in the short projects of a group of NYU students filming in his Lower East Side neighborhood, impressed the filmmakers with the sincerity and unpredictability of his improvisations. Marte, who was 14 at the time and had been studying drama and acting since she was 8, was selected to audition by a teacher in her junior high performing arts program. After “Five Feet,” Rasuk and Marte began attending Professional Performing Arts School in Manhattan. (Alicia Keys and Claire Danes are alumnae.)

Making a leap of faith

Graff, 43, who based “Camp” on his experiences at the real-life summer camp Stagedoor Manor in the Catskills, admits that casting nonunion actors kept down the $2-million budget, but he also says he didn’t want professional theater kids who were overly trained. “I needed kids that were not conditioned to ‘this is how you sell a song.’ I needed kids who were kids first and performers second. And I needed them to be incredibly talented.”

Graff turned to Bernie Telsey, known for casting the original company of “Rent,” and his associate, Victoria Pettibone, who scoured their databases, held open calls, visited schools and even solicited on the radio and at municipal swimming pools. Graff could tell right away whether the youngsters could sing, but to find out whether they could handle the acting, he held “marathon” auditions that he videotaped, sometimes pausing “to give a little acting class,” he says.

“At the end of it, you just took the leap and thought, ‘They don’t really know what they’re in for to make a movie, but every [actor] has to make their first movie sometime, so this will be theirs.’ ”

“Whale Rider” director Niki Caro wasn’t looking for a professional actor to play the emotionally demanding role of Pai, a Maori girl who goes to heartbreaking lengths to prove herself worthy to the stern tribal chief, also her grandfather, who believes only males are suited to lead their people. Casting director Diana Rowan, who found Paquin for “The Piano,” looked at thousands of schoolchildren, one of whom was Castle-Hughes, then a 10-year-old sixth-grader in Auckland, New Zealand. Although Castle-Hughes had never acted, her talent shone through in auditions and workshops.

“I was a bit nervous because I didn’t really know anything about cameras,” Castle-Hughes says. “It was a bit difficult, but I didn’t find it that big a challenge. I just put my mind to it.”

Although Caro rehearsed Castle-Hughes for months, other directors have used more unorthodox methods to pull revelatory performances from their young actors. Loach shot “Sweet Sixteen” in sequence and gave the actors only the pages of script they were shooting that day, so Compston didn’t know how the film would end until the final day of shooting.

“It kept you on your toes,” he says. “I think it was a great way of working because it was as if you’re actually living the character.”

Sollett went a step further, withholding the script entirely. Rather than have the actors memorize lines, Sollett described the scenarios and encouraged them to improvise their characters’ reactions and offer their own ideas, “as opposed to just being the director up at the podium, like a conductor with a baton,” he says.

Marte enjoyed the process. “When you [improvise], it’s like water. It just comes out,” she says. “But if you have a script, you worry so much about the lines that you totally forget about the part and the character. We just improvised how we grew up, what we have seen and what we know.”

Graff also encouraged much improvisation during the monthlong rehearsal for “Camp” and continually rewrote the script on the set, inspired by observing the cast’s own adolescent struggles.

Since “Camp” first screened at Sundance, many in the young cast have signed with agents and managers. Sasha Allen, 20, who shines in “Camp’s” opening gospel number, “How Shall I See You Through My Tears,” recently signed a record deal with the label Divine Mills and Arista Records. The Harlem native is a graduate of LaGuardia High School -- “yeah, the ‘Fame’ school,” she says with a laugh, admitting that she applied after seeing the film in junior high.

Where are they now?

After Anna Kendrick’s performance in “Camp” of Stephen Sondheim’s “The Ladies Who Lunch,” the 17-year-old was cast by Sondheim to play opposite Jeremy Irons in “A Little Night Music” at the New York City Opera. Ohio-raised Daniel Letterle, 23, who learned guitar to play “Camp’s” earnest but troubled main character, landed a guest spot on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and was signed by the Endeavor talent agency.

Rasuk and Marte, of “Victor Vargas,” have graduated; Marte signed with William Morris while Rasuk recently shot a small role in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” a Charlie Kaufman script for director Michel Gondry that includes a scene opposite Jim Carrey.

Compston has been playing roles on British television and is working with a dialect coach to perfect English and American accents. (The Scottish brogue in “Sweet Sixteen” is so thick, the film is subtitled for American audiences.) He still plays soccer semiprofessionally, but he says he now loves acting as much.

Of course, not every young actor who lands a big role continues in the business. Carson has seen many choose not to pursue acting, often because of the brutal rejection of the auditioning process. “I think it’s just hard on them,” she says, “constantly having to look at themselves again and [ask], ‘What did I do wrong?’ ”

They sometimes go into another aspect of the business when they grow up, becoming attorneys or agents or a writer-director like Graff, once a young actor who was nominated for a Tony.

One of Carson’s clients, Alison Folland, was found at an open audition for Van Sant’s “To Die For.” Although she has worked in other films, including “All Over Me,” she is now in college and not focusing on acting.

It’s a decision that “Whale Rider’s” Castle-Hughes is carefully weighing as well. Now in ninth grade, she says she’s not sure whether she wants to continue acting, although she has read for a few parts. “It’d be a hard business, but it’s really enjoyable,” she says. “Maybe when I’m a bit older.”