November 5, 2009
During our recent Cinereach advising workshop with Writer/Director Tze Chun (Children of Invention), there were some very useful takeaways related to casting and working with children.
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Tze talked a lot about how, when casting a role, it’s critical to keep in mind the specific demands of the part. A very natural young actor who doesn’t have a great deal of acting ability can work well for a role that doesn’t contain many highly emotional scenes. If the character needs to display a great deal of strong emotion, however, more acting ability is necessary even if this means sacrificing naturalness to some degree.
Director Tze Chun discusses working with child actors
When I entered the casting process and had to begin making decisions, I took Tze’s advice and looked for the right balance of acting ability versus naturalness. We auditioned 20 actors for the two open roles and had four, two actors per character, come in for callbacks.
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At callbacks, I was careful to go over the most emotionally subtle parts of the script several times to see what each actor could bring to the moments. In this script there are no highly emotional scenes that call for crying, or throwing a tantrum, so I decided I could err on the side of naturalness over acting experience, while making sure that the actors were skilled enough to understated and convey the emotions of the scenes.
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Also critical to me, was looking at the chemistry between each pair of actors. My two actors will be playing brothers and the story hinges on the subtle interactions that make up their relationship.
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Now that my film is cast, I am looking ahead at how I will work with my actors in rehearsal and on set. In my discussions with my mentor, Laurie Collyer (Sherrybaby), Laurie has really emphasized using improvisation as a lead-in to scripted scenes in order to get a more natural performance from child actors. Tze also advised that I give my young actors a set of actions to execute whenever possible, rather than a single action, in order to keep them from over-emphasizing each one. I’ll definitely be employing these tactics.