Children or Animals

Never work with children or animals, the old actors say. Well, fortunately in The Warren real live animals have been kept to a minimum. There's not too many real dead ones either. But children? The cast practically consists of children. Which can be very cute I grant you, and in this case justifies the ridiculousness of the plot, but they can be . . . special to work with. It's not their fault. Mostly. They can't be expected to act like adults (who are moderately predictable) or even teenagers (who tend to be predictable in the extreme). Kids will do things that would never even crawl across our consciousness. One thing you can always count on though: give a few boys some plastic guns (as we did today) and they immediately transform into mini-Rambos - yelling, shooting each other (complete with improvised sound effects), and not paying attention to anything that's going on around them. You have to be prepared to repeat instructions at least three times and then allow four takes before one of them says "Oh, you meant you wanted us to do that?"

It's not all bad. Sometimes an inexperienced child gives you gems that a mature actor (with all their preparation and polish) could only sit back and envy. When they can forget that they're supposed to be acting, truth shines out of them in a raw and beautiful form. A few months back I was writing some lines for a particularly important scene. It was important that the words were spoken with conviction and truthfullness, and yet when I set them down I doubted that we'd get anything better than a bit of sentiment washed over the top. It was, in my opinion, a difficult piece. The girl who was acting it however, wasn't aware of this. And so she breezed through the scene - instantly conjuring up the vital thoughts and emotions. First take. We did two more takes after that (oh we of little faith), but they were superfluous and the initial one turned out the best.

Having said all that - if I ever work with an all-child cast again anyone reading this has my personal permission to take a plastic spray-painted machine gun and smack me over the head with it. Hard.