Hey boys and girls, LMD was so thrilled to be on the receiving end of the world’s most famous squint.  Attending the press day for Hereafter, we were overjoyed to meet actor/director/ writer/musician/cinema icon Clint Eastwood.  The Dirty Unforgiven Misty Man with No Name, along with star Matt Damon chatted with us question about George and Frankie McLaren, the two young newcomers who run away with Eastwood’s latest film.

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Hereafter

Clint Eastwood, Matt Damon, Cecile De France, Bryce Dallas Howard and Peter Morgan

The Lady Miz Diva:  Hello Mr. Eastwood and Mr. Damon.  Can you please talk about George and Frankie McLaren, the two young brothers who are the real heart of Hereafter?  How were they chosen and how did you get such wonderful naturalistic performances out of them while dealing with such dark subject matter?  And for Mr. Damon, what was it like to work with them?

Clint Eastwood: {Looks at Matt Damon} Go ahead.

Matt Damon:  {Laughs} Well, he cast them and I remember talking to him during that process, he said he found these {boys}.  I mean, I think we were pretty resigned to the reality that we’d have probably non-actors in those roles since it’s obviously 11- and 12-year old kids you’re looking for, so you’re not going to find a Juilliard graduate.  Clint just loved their faces and I remember talking to him he said, “I think the faces of these boys are really just terrific and they seem to be from the same neighbourhood that these kids are actually from and they’re not actors.”  They went and shot the first two stories without me and so I would get reports about how the boys were doing.  But obviously, the movie comes down to that scene in the hotel room and we knew that was a big {moment}.  You know, there’s a lot made of how few takes Clint does, but he does the number of takes that are required, and that day -- we both went into that day going, ‘We’re really going to have to get this from these guys.’  And one of the really smart things that Clint did was he interchanged the twins.  Even if he was only going to use one of them, he let them both do the scenes, so I think that took a lot of pressure off both the boys.  And then also for that scene, to play them off one another I would take one of them aside and get all this information, like, did his brother have a girlfriend?  Or little things like whose farts were the stinkiest?  Things that they would think were funny and then while the camera was on them, Clint and I would start revealing these things so that we got really real reactions from them.  Little tricks like that just to help them because moves sets can get tense and people can get nervous pretty easily.  Never on his sets, but that’s all by design and so it was all about he created an environment for those kids.  They wouldn’t know that they really shot a movie, I think, they had a really good time and they’ll probably be surprised when they see the movie.

Clint Eastwood:  The interesting thing with child actors is they…  Kids are natural actors.  They’re wonderful actors and most kids are acting all the time: They’re out in the yard playing and they’re imagining things happening and they can get very vivid. Unfortunately, once they’ve been organised into acting and then you’ve got a stage mother sitting there saying, “No, do it this way.”  And I’ve watched many times over the years in other films, where a director tried to undo a lot of bad habits that had been instilled.  And so when I looked at people for this picture -- young kids -- I picked the two who were the least experienced.  In fact, they had no experience; they’d never been in film before.  They said they’d been in some grammar school plays, but I doubted that. {All laugh}  But they had the faces and I’m one of those guys that believes if you cast a film correctly -- that’s with professionals or with amateurs -- you’re probably 80 percent there.  If you cast the film incorrectly, you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle.  But these kids, I just figured I could pull things out of them without them knowing it better than trying to get somebody organised.  We auditioned about 3 or 4 sets of identical twins.  They looked great, a couple of them, but there was a lot of acting going on.  So I said, these guys, they look great, they have the right faces, and as Matt said they were from the right neighbourhood.  They had certain elements that these kids had needed to have built into their systems, so we didn’t have to do anything. They didn’t have to get in there and act like something else that they weren’t.

~ The Lady Miz Diva

Oct. 10^th, 2010

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