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Etel had never acted before. Yet when a casting search of schools around Manchester turned him up, and he walked in to audition, Boyle looked at the boy's seraphic face and said, "I bet that's him." Etel didn't give as good a reading of the lines in Frank Cottrell Boyce's script as some of the other boys, but that didn't trouble the director. "I didn't really want an actor," Boyle says. "I was looking for an innocence, a simplicity and a beauty that make you feel like you're not watching a manipulated piece of commercial art, which is what films are." Boyle has to feel lucky that Etel wasn't home sick that day; Millions might lack a spark without this boy's artless charisma. But the screen appeal of an untrained actor like Etel has to be weighed against the risk of his blowing lines often or being petrified by the awareness that a gigantic enterprise depends on him.
So the first trick with child actors is to make filming serious enough so that they know they must apply themselves yet fun enough so that it's play. "If you make them self- conscious," says Boyle, "it's gone." The second trick is to retain their spontaneity and keep them from being and looking bored on the fourth or fifth take. Boyle's strategy: "I act very stupid. I'm an encourager, so I'll say, 'Very good, everyone! Let's do it again!'" Of course, that doesn't fool them. "They say, 'Why? You just said it was really good.' And they can't understand. So I have to make fun of it." And kids want to do a good job. "You do get bored after a while," says Lewis McGibbon, who plays Etel's older, suspicious brother, "but if you're really enjoying the whole thing, you just keep it going, don't you? You think of being in the film, that it's an amazing experience."
Parents are a crucial part of the equation, whether for instruction--Boyle would often tell Etel's mom what he needed the next day, and she would prep him--or for comfort. "I don't go home with them at night if they didn't get a job," says agent Fine. "Parents have to be dedicated to taking their kids through that, or it doesn't work."
Finally, since a first film is a crash-course acting school, save the hardest bits till last. That's what director Wayne Wang did in Winn-Dixie: he let Robb ease in to the heavy lifting with early lighthearted scenes. "I was nervous until the day she did a scene of consequence," says producer Albert. "But in those scenes she was surrounded by very strong actors. So by the end of the movie she was a better actor than she was at the start." Wang would also hold Robb's hand, a technique that seemed to focus her attention.
Plucking children from obscurity and making them stars, even for one movie, can be perilous, as the kid actors from almost any '80s TV show can attest. And even Fernando Ramos da Silva, the illiterate Brazilian boy who starred at 12 in Hector Babenco's Pixote, returned to the streets and, when he was 19, was killed by police. There are milder dangers: Boyle is worried that Etel, having carried his first film, might be disappointed if he doesn't get another big role. "The business can be very loving and also very hurtful, almost simultaneously," Boyle says. "And for a stable upbringing, you don't want exposure to those extremes."