Mad Max: The Road Warrior's Feral Child Had To Be Tricked Into Acting Terrified
Acting is an incredibly strange profession. We talk about acting as though it's this spiritual calling where you inhabit another person's skin, but at the end of the day, it's an extremely technical profession. You need to be able to hit your mark, find your light, calibrate the size of the performance for what kind of shot has been framed, move in a certain way, and have seemingly spontaneous reactions to things that aren't spontaneous in the least. Yes, there is freedom to be had, but it is always within a controlled environment. For someone new to that way of working, it can be incredibly jarring. And incredibly funny.
This is especially true with child actors. Some people become actors because they want to tap into that childlike sense of play, but child actors innately have that. They understand the reality of playing pretend better than anyone, and because acting is far more precise than improvising a scenario on the playground with your friends, they can so easily be yanked out of the moment because the controlled nature of filmmaking immediately breaks the reality of play for them. Take a look at the behind-the-scenes documentaries about "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," and you'll see director Chris Columbus struggling to wrangle a bunch of children into not laughing and locking into the scene.
George Miller faced a similar issue on the set of "The Road Warrior" with the Feral Child played by Emil Minty. The apocalyptic hellscape of the "Mad Max" films isn't exactly conducive to a happy-go-lucky time, but Miller found it somewhat difficult to stop his child actor from outright laughing and having a good time on camera. So, he needed to devise a solution to truly unsettle the kid, and it was a (fake) bloody one.
'To him it was a game'
Many actors can "turn it on and off" when working. They can be palling around with their co-star, and then once "action" gets called, they can scream at them as if the other person murdered their family. It's much easier for adults to flip that switch than it is for children, but during "The Road Warrior," Emil Minty needed to do that for a big scene and couldn't. Speaking to the It Came From blog, actor Vernon Wells, who plays the red-mohawked Wez in the film, recalled how he and the child actor got along famously off-camera, which complicated their big confrontation scene:
"George [Miller] used to say to me, 'Don't become good friends.' And I couldn't help myself. Every time I'd get on set and see him I'd say, 'It's not a snack, it's EMIL!' And he hated it. ... When we came to the scene at the end of the film where I come over the bonnet and grab his hand, he's supposed to freak out. Well, the first time we did it, he just looked at me and laughed. He was 10 years old — to him it was a game, like hide and go seek. And George came up to me and said, 'I told you.'"
In order to get Minty to give the proper reaction, Miller and Wells went to the makeup department and soaked a small piece of foam in syrup that he concealed in his hand, so when he grabbed the kid's hand, it looked like blood went everywhere. You could probably use that trick on an adult and get a similar freaked reaction. Wells "felt so bad" about doing it, but sometimes you just need to harness the strange artificiality of moviemaking to get the result you need.