A firsthand look at `Secondhand'
By Chris Garcia

AMERICAN-STATESMAN FILM WRITER

Friday, December 6, 2002

Michael Caine cocks a shotgun as Robert Duvall clenches the throat of a young punk, growls in his face, then hurls him to the dusty wood floor. A few feet away, Haley Joel Osment looks on with dismay, perhaps afraid that if things keep up he will see dead people.

The punk tumbles onto a pile of blankets out of camera range, Duvall takes a thick breath and director Tim McCanlies, perched in the next room before a pair of video monitors, shouts, "Cut!"

"That really worked well," McCanlies says to director of photography Jack Green, sitting next to him. "Bobby did a great job with that speech. He really got revved up."

"I loved it," says Green, who's shot several Clint Eastwood films.

Delivered inches from the punk's nose, Duvall's speech is one of the climactic notes in "Secondhand Lions," the Texas-set coming-of-age dramedy written and directed by Bastrop resident McCanlies that has been filming around Austin since mid-September. The key scene was supposed to be shot outdoors, but it is chilly and rainy on this Thanksgiving-week day.

The large crew of Austinites and Los Angelenos mills and murmurs about the detailed grocery store set in Pflugerville, adjusting lights, moving cameras and generally fussing. Most wear puffy jackets, knit gloves and hats, lending the cold but very Southern setting a bustling ski lodge vibe.

This is the set of a major motion picture, which isn't half as glamorous as many people like to believe. It's the place where stars and crews are notoriously told to "hurry up and wait" and which some wag described as the most interesting place to be on your first day, the most boring on your second.

Between shots, tedium sets like fog. Osment's female stand-in yawns, dropping her head onto her arms for a nap. People sit where they can and get lost in crossword puzzles. Idle chatter: very popular.

Osment stays alert by juggling. He snatches lemons from a basket in the store, next to tidy pyramids of vintage Campbell's and Planter's cans, and places them in a tumbling arc, a blur of yellow. A crew member cheers him on.

Behind him is a deli freezer and an old meat scale. On the walls hang rusty farm tools and a commotion of deer heads and antlers that bespeaks the movie's rural Texas complexion.

"Secondhand Lions," McCanlies assures, is deeply Texan, much like his 1998 directorial debut, "Dancer, Texas Pop. 81," which he also wrote. So Texan that Caine cloaks his Cockney accent in a credible regional twang. So Texan that this scene features not only a shotgun and deer heads, but gooey plates of down-home barbecue (provided by Iron Works).

The cameras are rolling. Caine, Osment and Duvall are sitting at a counter eating ribs. A passel of young toughs struts into the store seeking beer and flinging sneers. One with slicked-back hair and rolled-up Levi's approaches Duvall with a taunting, "Gimme some of your barbecue, old man."

Duvall bolts upright and grabs the trembling punk by the neck. He delivers his volcanic speech, molten pride and outrage, and flubs a line. There's another take. And another.

"He's got another good one in him," Green tells McCanlies.

Another take, another flub.

"It's gonna be a long day," Duvall groans.

He nails it.

"That's lunch!" bellows a crewman.

The lions roar

Duvall looks pleased as he walks to his trailer.

"It's a nice speech," he says. "I had to get it right, get a little rhythm, you know. They'll cut it up. They'll never get it all in one take with two cameras rolling. So it's cut, cut, cut. That's the way they make movies these days. But it worked OK, because I was able to turn my frustration into a positive thing."

At 71, Duvall moves a little slower than he used to in movies like "Apocalypse Now" and "Tender Mercies," but he's as rugged as a retired general. (He claims bloodlines to Robert E. Lee.) His crinkly elfin smile hints at the grain of his personality: Southern silkenness with crunchy edges. There are pebbles in his voice.

Duvall plays Hub McCaan in "Secondhand Lions," brother to Caine's Garth, storied adventurers who've returned to Texas in the early 1960s to retire. They have lived an epic, glorious past as soldiers in the French Foreign Legion during World War I. Their exploits took them through North Africa and beyond, a kaleidoscopic welter of war, women and possibly fortune.

And now Texas, where enforced rest does not suit these Gunga Din-like actioneers, the metaphorical lions of the title.

"I thought we'd call it 'Grumpy Old Texans'," Caine laughs. "We're really grumpy, I'll tell you. We're funny. We're ticked off at life. It's the end of our time, and we don't have anyone but each other and our shared experiences. We lead a very boring life, sitting on the porch looking at the sunset."

To stanch their boredom, they shoot catfish point-blank and call salesmen to their home so they can scare them off with gun blasts. The idle mischief is punctured when their 14-year-old great nephew Walter (Osment) is left in their care by his flighty, floozy mother (Kyra Sedgwick). Walter, described in McCanlies' script as "pale, quiet, one of life's wallflowers," isn't quite prepared for the gruff duo, and they aren't prepared for him. Epiphanies all around.

"They have a lot to teach Walter about what being a man is," McCanlies says between takes. "He hasn't been around men much. And of course men in Texas have guns and eat a lot of meat."

McCanlies enjoys a reputation in Hollywood as an ace scripter of action movies, many based on comic books. He wrote the acclaimed animated feature "The Iron Giant" and recently turned in scripts for the Jackie Chan vehicle "Around the World in 80 Days" and "Iron Man," based on the Marvel comic.

He wrote "Secondhand Lions" 10 years ago, wed to the idea of directing it, despite an outpouring of curiosity from major directors and studios. "There's always been a lot of interest in it," he says. "I still get a half-dozen phone calls a week from people who've heard about it or want to read it.

"I was tired of being action-film guy in L.A., writing films where a lot of stuff blows up but nothing else really happens," says McCanlies as bodies breeze by. "I looked back at movies that meant a lot to me growing up like 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' which had a young protagonist who learns really valuable life lessons. They were movies that were really about something. I don't want to sound hokey, but they had a certain moral lesson and had something to say. And a theme that I found interesting that people haven't talked much about is what men teach boys."

Due out next fall, McCanlies' rather wholesome PG movie will launch distributor New Line Cinema's new family film division. (The film's producer, Digital Domain, is partly owned by Cox Enterprises. Cox Newspapers Inc., owner of the American-Statesman, is a subsidiary of Cox Enterprises.)

"(New Line) wanted something sort of classy," he says. Classy means top-line actors -- all three male stars have won or been nominated for an Oscar -- whose involvement has edged the budget many times beyond the roughly $2 million spent on "Dancer, Texas."

The film brims with "humor and heart," the director says, part of why he wanted to keep the script until he could direct it.

"It's a peculiar sense of humor, wry and Texan, and it would be really easy to put Jim Carrey in this and make it a stupid comedy," McCanlies says. "It's not. It's really a drama with a lot of humor, but the humor springs from character. It's not about jokes. I just didn't want to let it get screwed up with gags."

Growing up on screen

Haley Joel Osment's voice is changing. It hovers somewhere in the octave netherworld between cute kid and pimply teenager. He is 14, no longer the button-eyed waif from "The Sixth Sense," but now a wispy, lanky teen-child who doesn't quite yet seem 14. He wears new denim overalls and sips root beer.

Osment's recent growth spurt suits McCanlies' vision nicely, especially as he's mostly shot the film in sequence.

"Haley makes a big transformation during the movie, from a shy, sort of scared little weenie kid to a good kid with a lot of poise," McCanlies says. "He grows about three inches over the summer, fills out, gets tan. His voice has changed in the course of the movie like it would anyway."

Osment seems self-conscious about growing up so publicly. "That's the tough part about acting at this age," he says. "You have to find the right roles so you can grow up in it. This film is very transitional for the character. This is one of the most drastic character changes I've done. 'Sixth Sense' was on television about a week ago, and I looked at it and went, 'Wow, my voice is high!' A movie is such a solidly captured part of you. It's going to be there forever."

Another voice is changing on the set, from British to somewhere around Buda. Caine has donned American accents before, but this is his first essay at the zesty boing that is Texan.

"It goes all right," Caine, 69, says. "I have a very good teacher on the set. The secret to those accents is for people not to look at me and say there's that British actor doing the best Texan accent we've ever heard a British actor do. I want it to be a Texan doing nothing."

It's part of the craft, Caine shrugs, just as his cowboy getup is. Caine's muddy cowboy boots lean against each other inside his luxe trailer near the set, where he's curled up on the sofa. "I like all that," he says, gesturing to the boots. "It's something entirely different from me. It's far, far away from my real character and nature."

Caine laughs when reminded that he vied for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar with Osment in 2000. He was up for "The Cider House Rules," Osment for "Sixth Sense." (Caine won. It was his second trophy in that category.) But he spots the same qualities in Osment the Academy and viewers noticed.

"He's the most self-possessed, straight child actor I've ever met," Caine says. "In fact, he's not like a child actor at all. He's very mature for his age. It's like acting with another actor, that's all. I call him 'partner,' because we have a lot of scenes together. I'm the one he bonds with first of the two men."

"I think at first too many people were whispering in his ear," Duvall adds. "But the kid's very talented. Just leave him alone and let him do his thing."

Nearing the end

After this cold day, the three stars have only one day of shooting left. McCanlies' work has just begun. He has several more shooting days and then months of post-production in Los Angeles.

There's a sense of completion among the actors, though it may take them some time to slough off the characters they've so resolutely embodied for three months.

"We're a very, very good threesome," says Caine, who believes they exceeded McCanlies' expectations.

"This is Tim's story coming to life," he says. "The first time he saw Bobby and Haley and me walk out, he practically burst into tears. There they were -- Hub, Walter and Garth. And we are them. There's nothing to say, because we're them."

Though New Line wouldn't provide a copy of the screenplay, there's been talk about the film's knockout surprise ending. When asked about it, the actors light up.

"It's the best ending I've ever seen in movies," Duvall says.

"The ending is wonderful," Caine agrees. "You can't see it coming, and then you go, `Wow'."

**Many thanks to OZ for this article.