Child actors and gruesome films.

[Itsmychristmasdress]

I'm watching gangs of new York. And it just got me thinking how child actors are exposed to horrific violence on set of movies...I wonder how is that allowed. I am sure they are protected in some ways but I'm not sure they can be fully protected?
Anyone know a bit about it?

I'm peripherally involved in the film industry, and in my experience everything is so disjointed that things generally don't seem at all scary on a film set. It's amazing that actors can create a coherent performance when things are shot over and over again and don't follow the order of events from the script.

I worked on a film that needed a crying baby, and they waited for the baby to cry naturally. It was being minded by it's mother, and the two of them had a fairly normal day off-camera. Sometimes you have to work with what you can get and then chop things up to appear convincing.

Linda Blair from the Exorcist was injured from the stunts, as was Ellen Burstyn who played her mother. Such disregard for actors' safety would be unacceptable now. Linda Blair had a hard time with the media coverage, but she said she wasn't traumatised by the subject matter, as it didn't make a lot of sense to her at the time.

Sometimes a "crying baby" is clearly dubbed on sound of crying and shots of the back of the baby's head etc

I believe swear words have to be dubbed in/aren't spoken directly to/in front of under 18s.

"Scary" actors will often take the time to spend with kid actors between shoots, showing them its not real etc

There's a story that the little girl who runs up to Angelina Jolie's Maleficent is her daughter because she was the only one not scared of the make up.

i work in tv and child protection is paramount. It didn’t always used to be like this though.

https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/12/sarah-polley-terry-gilliam-run-towards-danger-baron-munchausen-interview

'Full House' with the Olsen twins is a really good example of the cutting an editing and the baby/ies being out if the picture. It's really obvious and that's why I hate it.
Call the Midwife and also Friends do it if you look carefully.

I love films and always watch directors commentary on dvds etc..
From this you learn alot about how they direct children. For younger kids or kids who aren't professional actors they often don't ask the kid to act at all. Nor does the kid actually know the story or the theme of the film. They often do things to provoke the facial expression they want from the child but in a more age appropriate way than whatever scenario is going on in the film. For example they might have someone on set reading a fairytale book to the child. The child's face will be filmed for the reaction shots then they will be used in the film, cut to look like the child is reacting to what the adults are saying. The adult dialogue or drama, if it's deemed to be potentially harmful to the child, will be shot separately.
There are some exceptions to this with older professional child actors.
A famous one is jodie foster in taxi driver. Her older sister was used as a body double in any scene where there was a sexual element, but jodie herself was aware of the nature and themes of the film and had read the whole script.
Another interesting one is Kirstin Dunst in Interview With the Vampire. I watched all the commentary on that and she was used as she was a professional actress so more able to deal with the adult themes. However she was still often shot separately. She was only allowed to work a certain amount of hour per day due to child labour laws. So alot of her dialogue was shot completely separately. She also wasn't required to work in the same way as an adult actor would ie imagining the scenario the script required.. instead they'd use tricks to get the facial expressions, like I mentioned previously, such as reading her stories.. or in one instance she talks about how the director asked her to imagine a fight with her brother or an event at school. So she had a general idea of the themes of the film but she didn't have to engage with the adult script in the same way as the adult actors did.

Just watched 'Good Boys' it was so funny but the teenagers were the main actors. But also saw an interview with the lads that they were too young to watch the film. They were some cracking young actors though not many can pull off that comedy!

I think Richard Osman's just Entertainment did a segment on this and there has definitely been threads about it before.

If the children are present for bloody scenes they get to help spread the 'blood' around and decorate the place. Spend time with the actors in and out of costume.

Things are alot better than even 10 years ago with so many stars having spoken up about poor treatment. There's a clip of a Judy Garland (or possibly Shirley Temple I can't quite remember) interview where her mother told her to cry for a scene and to imagine her dog had died, and if she didn't cry her mum would kill the dog anyway.

Children aren't always in the gruesome scene and are filmed separately, or everything is shown to the children first like prosthetics and dummies of dead bodies. My ds acts and was once in a movie scene that is quite sinister. He had no idea, he just went in and did what he was asked to do, he didn't see anything scary.

My ds acts and was invited to audition for a horror film a little while ago. There were pages of information about how the children in the film were kept safe.
Daily sessions with counsellors and so on.
He didn't sign up with an agency until we were sure he was old enough to understand that it was only acting and wasn't real. I do always wonder about babies and toddlers in highly charged emotional shouting scenes and whether they get scared.

Also when I asked my ds afterwards how the day went on set he told he made a new friend, the horses pooed and he played I spy on the way to set. He clearly didn't register anything about the actual scene!

Really interesting thanks!!

I saw an interesting clip on YouTube of the Outnumbered children (who are now all adults) watching clips of old episodes and discussing them - the actor who played Karen said she had no idea what some of the storylines were when she was actually in the show - she just did her bit and then carried on playing or whatever!

On the other hand, there was a much more disturbing account from the actor who played one of the children on the estate in the first series of Line of Duty - he had some awful scenes, including threatening to cut someone’s fingers off with a bolt cutter, and it disturbed him for years afterwards.

My friend's 10 year old daughter played a sweary feral delinquent kid in a film about broken Britain. She loved it, absolutely knew she was only acting a part, is a lovely well balanced child irl. The film had a 15 rating, and when she arrived at the premier with her parents she was initially denied entry, until they explained she was one of the actors in it.

Apparently there were complaints that the child murders in House of Dragon weren't as graphic on screen as they are in the book. The producers said they couldnt get 2 x 4 year olds to act out their own death scenes so they just filmed them sleeping and the murders were offscreen. I haven't seen it yet ( although Ive read the book) but really, some fans are really stupid.

I have been an extra/background on TV shows and film sets and children are the best looked-after people on the set. Production employ chaperones who are there to look out for safeguarding but also to ensure that a child does not work one minute past their legal working hours and gets their proper breaks - I have seen a chaperone "pulling rank" on a famous director who wanted just one more take when the children had reached their limit, she marched the children off set.

So many scenes are filmed from multiple angles that it may look like children are present for every take but they aren't. Because of the limited working hours they will be taken away from set for close ups or other angles where they are not essential. Child actors are used to being on film sets and will be aware of make-up and that nothing is "real" like choreographed fights and fake blood, or green screen which lets them add scary bits later. Even if they are appearing in the film they might not be allowed to see it at the cinema - even at the premiere!

I thought the same when we were watching The Equaliser 3. Scene with a mum and little girl being threatened by intruders, I couldn't see how she could have been separated from the violence etc

I never like seeing the scenes of a baby crying (face on shot, not from the back of them), as you know it is a genuine distress. I’m not sure I could put my child through that, knowing they were so upset.

Oh I also would add that my ds did a take then decided he didn't like his costume and became upset. Chaperone removed him immediately off set and asked him what he wanted to do. He chose to watch. They really do look after the children and put them first. No question of trying to force him to do it and they didn't even mention it to us, he told us. So they clearly didn't see it as an issue and knew it's just how children can be.

Shirley Temple was threatened with being shut in a box if she didn't behave as required ... and she was appearing in lighthearted comedies. The actor has also written about the sexual innuendo she was subject to.

www.cinemasters.net/post/the-sinister-untold-history-of-shirley-temple

I agree with this, I have a 5 year old dd who is not sensitive or easily scared at all and has a good handle on real vs pretend, and I honestly think she could do a lot of these scenes without lasting trauma. I imagine nowadays they choose children who aren't prone to fearing monsters under the bed etc. Not sure about the past though.

Someone I know went to see the newest Saw film and they had a boy aged around 8 acting in it in a gruesome scene. Not needed imo

Poor Linda Blair got her back damaged by the scene where they strapped her on to a wooden board that flung her up and down in the bed in The Exorcist.

Aside from that though, you can watch the dailies online of The Exorcist and Linda Blair speaks the lines to whoever she is acting with (the demon voice was dubbed over later) and it all sounds and looks ridiculous, so even though she’s all made up like a demon, the whole thing is not remotely scary. It’s amazing what editing does for atmosphere in a film! I imagine it’s very similar in other scary scenes with children. What they act out on set actually looks nothing like and has zero atmosphere to what you see on screen.

I’m sure I read somewhere that people were scared of her and moved away from her if they saw her on the street. She also received death threats

Is your baby upset on an average day? Because that’s all that’s happening here — you wait till the baby cries about any of the fifty things babies cry about and then film, after which the baby goes back to his/her day. Hence the use of twin babies playing the same character quite often.

I was regularly at one of the locations of the first two Harry Potters, and as a pp said, what is striking is how little and how carefully child actors are allowed to work. With only very limited hours on set, and hours of compulsory education daily, the three leads were literally only out on set when required to do takes in their scenes. For set up, rehearsals for other aspects, camera repositioning, adult actors doing reaction shots in which the faces of the child actors aren’t visible, shots in general in which the faces of the lead child actors aren’t visible etc etc, they use child ‘doubles’ in costume who are off with the extras doing schoolwork when not needed. The vast majority of the shooting days I saw most of it wasn’t Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint on set, it was their doubles. They were there only when absolutely necessary, because otherwise it would have been a terrible waste of time.

I met the mother of a child who had played the Harry hand double at one point! He was used for shots of wand work or the like, though I can’t remember if this was just for convenience or because DR’s hands had started to look less little-boy…

I only know how it is in the UK. Children have to be licensed to take part in filming or theatre productions and the education welfare officers often vet the script/content. When distressing content is involved the production company must show how the child will be shielded from that content