Capote vs. Brando: Kids Are Alright

The most famous rule in all of filmmaking: Never work with kids or animals. But hell, I’m a maverick. And I can see Russia from my house.

The best thing about working with kids is that they don’t know the meaning of the word “pressure” -- it hasn’t come up in their vocabulary lessons yet. And let’s face it -- re-creating Truman Capote’s iconic interview of Marlon Brando is a lot of pressure. Adult actors, limited by what they’ve seen and what they know, would have broken out their best Brando impressions or tried their damnedest to rip off a Philip Seymour Hoffman performance. And nine out of ten of them would have collapsed under the weight of it all.

So for this installment of Icon Redux, we went younger. Much younger. Makes sense, if you think about it; there’s something indisputably childlike about Brando’s ramblings. We made some phone calls, sifted through some résumés, and dug up two kids well on their way to stardom who, thankfully, had no clue who Marlon Brando and Truman Capote were. They had seen nothing, knew nothing, had nothing in their own minds to live up to. Their innocence was refreshing. And their credentials were amazing.

At six years old, Tyler Christopher Backer showed up at the NYCastings office fresh off a glowing review in the New York Times for his role in New York City Opera’s Madama Butterfly. And Spencer Harrison Hall had been Don Draper’s son on the Emmy-winning Mad Men before the series moved to Los Angeles. Spencer stayed east: “I don’t move for productions,” he said. “Productions move for me.” Okay, he didn’t say that.

Plus, they’re adorable. You just want to pinch their cute little cheeks, shake them violently, and yell, “Run! Run, as fast and as far as you can before the Hollywood machine sinks its talons into you and you end up staring at the ceiling during your third stint in rehab wondering what the hell it was you started doing when you were six!”

Sorry. Let me just brush that chip off my shoulder there ...

Okay, let’s bring the class back into this joint: Ahhh, Columbus Circle. There may not have been a more Brando-like place in all of New York to recreate this interview, which originally took place in a hotel in Kyoto, Japan during the filming of Sayonara in 1957. 6 Columbus is the Circle’s newest, hippest hotel, and like Brando at the height of his physical prowess, the hotel is an incredible site to behold, with a 1960s mod aesthetic tinged by a certain Zen minimalism (Brando had pretty firmly thrown himself onto the “Path to Enlightenment” by the time of the interview). The altitude, insulated windows, dark wood, and soft sunlight of the penthouse where we were shooting cast a hypnotic peace over those damn cars driving the endless loop of Columbus Circle 12 stories below, ignoring lane lines and traffic lights, blaring their horns and bullying the park-bound carriages as the horses drawing them pause to whinny and shit. Taken as a whole, Columbus Circle is a warring dichotomy, a gorgeous fuzzy blanket covering an omnipresent, pulsating chaos.

It’s Brando’s Zen incubating his ever-growing madness.

Of course, madness is a relative term. Some say two kids in a hotel penthouse surrounded by art and furniture more expensive than the entire production budget is madness.

But I call it maverick-ism. And where’s Russia? There it is!

Photos: Philip Buiser. Eyewear provided by Morgenthal-Frederic, NYC. Casting space provided by NYCastings.com.