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"Movie children were not always like real children," says Lament Johnson, who directed Mariel Hemingway in Lipstick and Diane Lane in Cattle Annie and Little Britches, a western film scheduled for release next spring. "Until about a decade ago, girls were dainty untouchables, unless they were little mutts. Hollywood had a Latin view of them, the whore or the madonna." If a script called for a very young girl to play a suggestive role, directors looked around for slightly built older actresses. When the film version of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita appeared in 1962, it was considered scandalous that Sue Lyon, a not particularly slight 14 when she was selected for the role, was so young. Actually she was old to play the part, because Nabokov's Humbert Humbert was fascinated by seductive little girls only until they reached puberty.
If Lolita were to be filmed now, the title role would be played by an eleven-or twelve-year-old, and the controversy, if any, would be about how well she acted.
"I look first to see if the eyes are wide open and if they express intelligence," says François Truffaut, whose films about children include the haunting The 400 Blows and Small Change. Truffaut also looks for "vivacity, above all vivacity." He usually does not prepare a detailed script for children. "I prefer giving them the essential ideas of the scene, and then letting them express the ideas with their own vocabulary. I think that's the biggest difference." Adolescent actors sometimes get the giggles, reports Truffaut, but they rarely have inhibitions, at least at the beginning. Says he: "They usually get scared on the third film."
Truffaut may be underestimating the coolness of the newest wave of young actresses. Brooke Shields smiles sweetly when told of his theory. "I don't think I've ever gotten nervous, and I have done six films," says she. (Four have not yet been released; the most recent to appear is Just You and Me, Kid, with George Burns, 83.)
Hill says that sometimes acting comes more easily to children "if you make it a game of make-believe or fooling people. That's what acting really is, anyway." Once kids think of moviemaking as a game, he says, "they will do all kinds of things to fool you." He took a somewhat different approach with the two young stars of A Little Romance, "since on a romantic level it's an adult movie." The initial problem seemed to be that Thelonious Bernard was very shy with Diane Lane. "It was mostly the language thing," says Hill (Thelo at first spoke almost no English, though he learned fast). To solve the chemistry problem, he says, "I made them hold hands and not break eye contact for ten minutes. Soon they started giggling, then arguing, and then breaking into gales of laughter." Thelo loosened up. And when Olivier was around, "it was almost like having three kids on the set. He'd joke with them, without patronizing them. He always tried to break them up."