Haley
Talks about Playing a Robot in 'A.I.'
By Mike Szymanski
Rarely does Oscar® buzz occur before a movie is even released, and it's even more rare
when the buzz surrounds an actor who hasn't even reacehd puberty, but that's what's going
on around Haley Joel Osment's performance in A.I. Artificial Intelligence opening Friday
(June 29).
It's Pinocchio in a sad Don Quixote style going through Dante's Inferno as Osment stars
as a robot who is programmed to love — and desperately wants to become a real boy
— who stumbles through a hellish world in his futile quest. The tale takes a dark
turn thanks to the mix of the late Stanley Kubrick's guidance in forming the story and
director Steven Spielberg taking over the reigns of the Warner Bros. sci-fi project.
Kubrick's bleak look at the future, as portrayed in his past works such as A Clockwork
Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey melds hauntingly with the boyishness of Spielberg,
responsible for Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
Their collaboration puts Osment's character, a robot named David, into precarious,
dangerous and horrifying situations as he befriends a sex-surrogate robot played by Jude
Law.
Osment, who turned 13 on April 10, produces an unblinkingly stark and deep performance
— unblinking, in part, because for the first third of the movie, he doesn't blink his
eyes at all — an idea his father, actor Eugene Osment (who's appeared in Pay it
Forward, Baby Geniuses and Bogus) came up with while they were on the set.
By all accounts, everyone on the set was astonished by young Osment's professionalism
and adult manners, yet when sitting down with Zap2it.com (with his father hanging around
quietly in the back of the room) he tries to insist that he's just like any other kid.
Sitting upright in a chair wearing a gray sweater over a T-shirt, with his
characteristic tousled sandy hair and bright blue eyes, Osment insists he ignores the
hoopla about the Oscar buzz, a lot like he did when he became the eighth youngest Academy
Award® nominee for his Best Supporting Actor nomination in 2000 for The Sixth Sense in
which he saw dead people. He enjoys it, like he enjoyed going to the Oscars, but he says
normal life is pretty easy.
"It's easier than you'd expect, because going home and going to school, everything
there is very normal," Osment says. "I get grades at school and do my chores at
home, so everything's just like a normal kid. So it's almost like two different worlds,
even the best of both worlds, because when I'm working my mind's on the normal part of
life and going to school and being at home and everything, and it's good to have that to
go back to after a film is over."
While working on the film, he became the master of Dreamcast's football and basketball
video games which were set up in the craft services trailer "Those grips are
good," Osment laughs. "We sort of had our own little championship thing
going."
Even the seasoned veteran actors who play his parents were in awe of Osment. "And
yet, he's also a kid, he was kicking my butt on Dreamcast basketball all the time,"
says Sam Robards, 39, who was in American Beauty. "I'm still really irritated."
The son of Jason Robards and Lauren Bacall, Robards says his actor parents didn't want
him to become a child actor, but Osment is different from any he's ever met. He and
London-based actress France O'Connor, 31, (who played Osment's mother and has appeared in
Bedazzled and Mansfield Park), watched the boy in amazement.
"Frances and I had conversations where we'd be in a scene with him and just
sitting and looking at him, and the cameras were rolling, and we're going, 'God, that's
just amazing!' He always came so focused, so prepared, and from that base he was able to
take these leaps, courageous ones, acting leaps, but to me they never felt canned, they
never felt pushed, they never felt rehearsed," Robards tells Zap2it.
O'Connor tells Zap2it, "What makes him so good is he's really specific with every
scene. He has this really interesting instinct for what to go for in a scene, and when you
put that all together, you have this amazing character."
And ultimately, she says, he's a kid. "He's about to grow up," O'Connor
notes. "But between the takes, he'd be off playing with the other kids."
Unlike other kids, he's developed a connection with Spielberg similar to E.T. child
stars Drew Barrymore and Henry Thomas, says A.I. producer Bonnie Curtis.
"He's Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant reincarnated," Curtis insists. "Steven
met him and they hit it off like Henry Thomas did with him in E.T., they got along
great."
And this script was even more secretive that E.T., allowing Osment to read the full
script only after their second meeting, and he was aware that every page of his script was
numbered.
"It had your name printed on each page of the script, so that if it was copied,
everybody would know," Osment says, laughing about the suggestion to sell his script
on Ebay.
He knows people think of him as a little adult, and he shrugs his shoulders saying,
"I just try to do my best on the set as an actor, and as a person. I guess I've had
lots of experience at stuff like that, so it helps."
Continuing with his insistence that he's an average boy, he's excited about The Lord of
the Rings movie more than any other film this year and he's more skeptical about how the
Harry Potter books will translate to screen. Rings is his favorite series of books and he
enjoys Killer Angels, a war book, and The Endless Game Prophecies
"I'm interested in the Harry Potter books, I think it's going to be hard to make
them into a good movie," Osment sighs. "I'm not really anticipating seeing that
because it going to just take away every time you read the books, take away from that
magic feeling when you first read it."
It's his boyish imagination where he pulled out the stoic, curious robotic boy that he
plays in the movie — something from his love of Pinocchio as a kid.
"Most of it was just from my own imagination, drawing on things that were in the
script to create the character," Osment says. "But before we shot, I had to
develop the physicality and mentality and his reaction to how he perceived the world
around him, and how he'd react."
He kept from blinking just by not thinking about it. "It was pretty hard the first
week, but after the first week and the first scene with my eyes not blinking, I got it.
It's just an involuntary reaction that you do, and you just have to not think about
constantly forcing yourself to keep your eyes open."
Even after the director yelled "cut" it was a challenge for the boy to see
how long he could keep from not blinking.
Although he's too young to see most Kubrick films, Osment says he was aware of the late
director's style.
"There was always a little bit of Stanley on the set. His style was always there.
I just saw the film recently, and in a lot of the shots you can just see Stanley's
style," says Osment, who is waiting to see 2001: A Space Odyssey on the big screen
this year when it's re-released. "A lot of this was his, the blocking in the film was
his creation. You can see him there. You can see him there in the story and the shots, and
even on the set people would say from time to time, 'Oh, this is a shot that Stanley would
have done.' We were so aware of Stanley."
Although there were robots built to look like him, Osment says the coolest robot built
for the film was Teddy, who follows him all through the movie. "A lot of them were
pretty cool, but Teddy probably was top dog," Osment says. "Teddy on the set was
amazing, almost like acting across from a real actor because of how good he was at being
Teddy. The finished result, seeing the film, is amazing. It looked exactly like you'd
imagine it to be."
Sometimes the director was frustrated about the mechanical and puppet-led bear, just as
he would be about an actor. "Steven would yell, 'The bear is not on his mark!' in the
megaphone, and Teddy would miss his mark just like a real actor," Osment says.
"He would get notes like a real actor, too."
For Osment, the toughest scene is the heart-wrenching scene when his mother leaves him
in the woods. "That was tough, we already had shot all the scenes at home with
Frances, and developing feelings between the two characters, so it was good to draw on
that," Osment says, looking sad.
With all the serious roles, young Osment is looking for something more fun. He sees his
future as a screenwriter and as a director. He and some friends are shooting a comedy
among themselves over the summer.
And, next summer, he has a film called The Bears which he says is a parody of the music
industry.
"I like to do not only these more serious films, but spread a span over all the
genres," Osment smiles.
With his voice for Disney's Jungle Book II and a flood of scripts to consider, he
expects to get many more chances to do just that. |
