Haley Joel Osment plays introverted 14 year-old Walter in Tim McCanlies' new Secondhand Lions who finds himself spending the summer with two great-uncles (Michael Caine and Robert Duvall). He says working with the two veteran actors was quite something."There's so much to learn from those guys. Everyday on the set was a learning experience, whether they were trying to teach me anything or not, because they were wise enough not to feel the need to tell you anything. It was pretty much they just did what they did on the set, you know, and you watched and learned from how professional they were."
The casting of Caine and Duvall wasn't the only thing that attracted Osment to the project. "The script was very appealing, I mean it just really came alive on the page. It had really strong deep characters on it. Even before we found out that Michael and Robert were attached, we just saw that the script just had so much depth to it. Tim had 10 years really to pull all his heart and all of the life into the script to where the characters, really, you could see everything to them. Then of course when these two guys signed on there's every reason to do it."
Part of the fun of Walter's dilemma is how much he is going to believe of the uncle's tale in the movie. "Oh yeah, I think everyone, initially, is going to want to buy into that. I like how these sequences themselves are really shown through Walter's eyes because it's really unlocking his imagination for the first time. Before this film starts, he has no convictions, he doesn't believe in anything and he really has this really incredible imagination and the first time it's unlocked is when he meets these two old men and they finally give him something that he's interested in and that he wants to believe in. That's why the sequences are so effective. When I first read the script I really did wanna believe in it, just like Walter does."
Haley also got to work with many animals while shooting, including a lion which his character wrestles with. "I did not get to wrestle with the lion, I really wanted to. They were a little bit hesitant about that, understandably, because it was a dangerous animal. But you know, just the way that the animal interacted with the trainers and everything, it had such an intense training program that when it was on the set, it was pretty much well rehearsed. It knew exactly what it had to do. So when the scene came up where we were supposed to wrestle with the lion, everybody was very scared about it. And I was ready to go jump in that cage with that lion. But I suppose they weren't too comfortable with that."
The dogs were a little less dangerous. "The dogs were great. They actually had photo doubles! So there was actually 10 or 12 dogs running around the set at all times. It was pretty entertaining to have this heard of animals that really added a lot of character to the film. We ended up putting them in a lot more scenes than they were originally allotted because they have such great character and they made such great humorous moments."
Haley's most memorable scene to perform was one with Robert Duvall down at the lake. "That was a really emotionally-charged scene. That's why it was so memorable I guess, because of the level of emotion that we had built up. Through the entire film, Hub [Duvall's character] is communicating with Walter pretty much in one word snippets. And now he's speaking to him in such detail and depth, I think the level of emotion we got in that scene was really genuine. It was exhausting because we had to put so much into that."
There's lots of humor in the film, though the actors didn't think they were being funny. "It's not about jokes that are planned, its about the humor in the characters themselves. It's about laughing at the ridiculousness just of who they are as people and the way they interact with each other, you know there are individual instances that are gags and stuff. But the funniest parts are just the characters of these old men. If this was real life they wouldn't be trying to make the audience laugh. There's no audience there. So it's even funnier when the character is just doing what he sees as normal and it's funny to us."
Watch Haley Joel Osment interact with the 'old men' this Friday in Secondhand Lions.
No comments:
Post a Comment