Acting Their Age

By RICHARD CORLISS

Damian, a shy 7-year-old still grieving over the death of his mother, has been taken by a friend of his dad's to the Manchester, England, department store where his mum used to work. Left alone for a moment, he feels mournful, bereft--and then panicky, when he thinks he has been deserted again. In an ordinary movie, the situation might call for a freshet of tears to guarantee an audience's instant pity. But in this film, Millions, with this young actor, Alex Etel, subtlety is the key. His eyes mist up, just enough to cue the attentive viewer to the desperation of the sweetest child in the English Midlands.

Directors of movies with kid actors have to be parent and disciplinarian, coach and coaxer to their young stars. But there are limits to how much children can be helped. And as movies with kid protagonists become more popular, and our understanding of children's psyches becomes more sophisticated, child actors are asked to carry a lot more of the emotional freight of a story. How then to find and direct kids?

Ask Danny Boyle, the English director of Millions, a nimble, touching parable about the mystical visions of a boy on whom a sack of stolen money has literally fallen. (He thinks it came from heaven.) "You can't put tears in their eyes for a weepy scene," says Boyle, making his first kids' film (after the R-rated trio Trainspotting, The Beach and 28 Days Later). "You have to actually find out if they can do it. And if they can't, then you do the scene without the tears." In the department-store scene it was better, more delicate and potent, without.

Millions, which opens next week, is one of the best reasons to go to the movies this year and a reminder of how affecting a film can be when a magical child takes hold of it. Film people are not immune to sentiment, but they make pictures with kids because, well, they hope a sack of money will fall on them. A big project (like the Harry Potter series) can earn zillions, and even the smaller ones do O.K. Because of Winn-Dixie, about a motherless girl (AnnaSophia Robb) and her pet dog, was made for an estimated $15 million and pulled in $13 million in its Presidents' Day weekend debut--and it's not even very good. Dear Frankie, a Scottish drama about a fatherless deaf boy (Jack McElhone), has been charming festival audiences and opens this week.

If producers have hopes of cash coming in, they also know there will be less going out. Some Hollywood stars make $20 million a picture. First-time kid stars typically get union scale: about $20,000. Some child actors might inch into the six-figure range. It's only the very rare tot, like Dakota Fanning (see box), who makes more than $1 million.

Child actors have been stealing scenes and hearts at least since Jackie Coogan teamed with Charlie Chaplin in the 1921 weepy The Kid. For three years in the '30s, Shirley Temple was Hollywood's biggest box-office star; she was just 6 when the Motion Picture Academy voted her a special Oscar. Since then, the Academy has honored 16 actors under 14 with nominations or Oscars. Keisha Castle-Hughes, 14, the Maori charmer of Whale Rider, was cited last year. Tatum O'Neal (Paper Moon) and Anna Paquin (The Piano) won supporting-actress Oscars on their first acting jobs. Standards change, and what was cute in the '30s can seem forced today. "I watched a Shirley Temple film the other night," says Trevor Albert, one of the producers of Winn-Dixie, "and I thought, 'God, was she an over-actor.'"

Different media have different demands too. The kid market is big business on TV, with full-time factories like Nickelodeon, ABC Family and the Disney Channel churning out moppet entertainment. Nickelodeon has 14 scouts traveling the country trying to find the next young stars. But the show-biz sass that works on sitcoms may look grotesque on the big screen. Those reflexes anticipate what a director wants, when maybe what he wants is to be surprised. "You don't want some actor child who does everything perfectly and doesn't have a childlike aura," says Campbell Scott, who directed the then 13-year-old Valentina de Angelis in Off the Map, opening next week. "They have to be professional enough to not want to go home after three hours but unprofessional enough so they can be completely wild--so they'll go for it."

Is this technique sandbox or Stanislavsky? "Children are natural Method actors," says Emily Mortimer, who is McElhone's mother in Frankie. "It's because there are no tricks at their disposal. The only thing they can do is what they do in life: to play and use their imaginations." The boy plays Frankie into a fully realized character, preternaturally alert to the emotions swirling around him.

Agents and directors look for unaffected kids with the gift of not minding being looked at. "I only respond to natural, and then what I do is enhance," says agent Meredith Fine, who represents Haley Joel Osment (an Oscar nominee for The Sixth Sense) and the Breslin siblings Spencer (The Cat in the Hat) and Abigail (Signs). "They have to have some innate ability. It's like, if you're going to take ice-skating lessons, you have to have good balance or you're going to be on the ice a lot."

Des Hamilton, the casting director who found McElhone in a school search for a boy to play Tilda Swinton's son in Young Adam and then recommended him for Dear Frankie, also prefers nonprofessionals. "When you're casting a kid, you want a kid to be a kid. It's nice for them to come onto the set wide-eyed and wondering what's going to happen next. You know they won't try to be anything other than what they are."

Etel had never acted before. Yet when a casting search of schools around Manchester turned him up, and he walked in to audition, Boyle looked at the boy's seraphic face and said, "I bet that's him." Etel didn't give as good a reading of the lines in Frank Cottrell Boyce's script as some of the other boys, but that didn't trouble the director. "I didn't really want an actor," Boyle says. "I was looking for an innocence, a simplicity and a beauty that make you feel like you're not watching a manipulated piece of commercial art, which is what films are." Boyle has to feel lucky that Etel wasn't home sick that day; Millions might lack a spark without this boy's artless charisma. But the screen appeal of an untrained actor like Etel has to be weighed against the risk of his blowing lines often or being petrified by the awareness that a gigantic enterprise depends on him.

So the first trick with child actors is to make filming serious enough so that they know they must apply themselves yet fun enough so that it's play. "If you make them self- conscious," says Boyle, "it's gone." The second trick is to retain their spontaneity and keep them from being and looking bored on the fourth or fifth take. Boyle's strategy: "I act very stupid. I'm an encourager, so I'll say, 'Very good, everyone! Let's do it again!'" Of course, that doesn't fool them. "They say, 'Why? You just said it was really good.' And they can't understand. So I have to make fun of it." And kids want to do a good job. "You do get bored after a while," says Lewis McGibbon, who plays Etel's older, suspicious brother, "but if you're really enjoying the whole thing, you just keep it going, don't you? You think of being in the film, that it's an amazing experience."

Parents are a crucial part of the equation, whether for instruction--Boyle would often tell Etel's mom what he needed the next day, and she would prep him--or for comfort. "I don't go home with them at night if they didn't get a job," says agent Fine. "Parents have to be dedicated to taking their kids through that, or it doesn't work."

Finally, since a first film is a crash-course acting school, save the hardest bits till last. That's what director Wayne Wang did in Winn-Dixie: he let Robb ease in to the heavy lifting with early lighthearted scenes. "I was nervous until the day she did a scene of consequence," says producer Albert. "But in those scenes she was surrounded by very strong actors. So by the end of the movie she was a better actor than she was at the start." Wang would also hold Robb's hand, a technique that seemed to focus her attention.

Plucking children from obscurity and making them stars, even for one movie, can be perilous, as the kid actors from almost any '80s TV show can attest. And even Fernando Ramos da Silva, the illiterate Brazilian boy who starred at 12 in Hector Babenco's Pixote, returned to the streets and, when he was 19, was killed by police. There are milder dangers: Boyle is worried that Etel, having carried his first film, might be disappointed if he doesn't get another big role. "The business can be very loving and also very hurtful, almost simultaneously," Boyle says. "And for a stable upbringing, you don't want exposure to those extremes."

But Etel, now 10, and McGibbon, now 13, seem to have a pretty mature view of their work while still being kids. They both want to keep acting. Etel, who will reprise his role in a production of Millions at his school, "would like to do comedies and action films," he says. "I would like to work with Alex again," McGibbon volunteers, "'cause he's so cool." "Yeah," adds Etel, "you'd best say that."

He may be a dewy unspoiled calf onscreen, but Alex Etel has quickly learned that a star can always use a little attitude. --Reported by Desa Philadelphia/Los Angeles

With reporting by Desa Philadelphia/Los Angeles