The thing I loved about Super 8 was how genuine and natural the young leads in the film were. The whole movie is pretty much carried by Joel Courtney who plays Joe and as unbelievable as it sounds this was his first feature film. In comparison, Elle Fanning (arguably the more talented of the Fanning sisters) is an old hand at the acting biz but all of the kids in the film do a stellar job with varying degrees of experience, my favourite performance has to be that of Cary, the kid with an unhealthy obsession with blowing stuff up. It's a tight script and the young actors have so much more screen time than the adults in this film but add to that the fact that during the climax there is a lot of CGI and I can't but wonder how Abrams went about working with his young cast.
The Fall, Tarsem Singh's follow up feature to The Cell, is another film that relies on a strong central performance from a child actress but Cantinca Untaru didn't even speak English that fluently at the start of the film. I have to say before I start that The Fall is one of my all time favourite films so anything I could say in that respect is totally biased but there is no hyperbole involved when I say you will be blown away by this film and it's central performers. A lot of The Fall was improvised around Untaru and Singh would often give her the gist of a scene before letting her just go for it and often filmed her without her knowing. As such her performance style is completely different from the kids in Super 8. For one thing, she is much younger so that natural style was probably the only way she could be comfortable on set, especially considering the dark subject matter of the film. There is a child performer in The Cell but he plays a much smaller role compared to The Fall.
I find it so interesting to compare the two as I love the performances in both and the risk in building a whole film around child performances is risky by in these two films it paid off.
Sarah xo
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