Video:Orphan - Susan Downey and Jaume Collet-Serra Interviews

Transcript:Orphan - Susan Downey and Jaume Collet-Serra Interviews

Rebecca Murray from About.com Hollywood Movies at the premiere of Orphan.

Orphan Producer Susan Downey

As a producer, how are you feeling about Twitter and the fact that people are giving away secrets of movies and voicing their opinions as soon as they get out of the film. How do you think that affects box office and how does it affect films in general?

Susan Downey: "Well I think it, obviously, we've been seeing that it can affect it both positively and negatively. Things can really skyrocket over the weekend if everyone is saying great things, and they can underperform if people are killing it. But, what can you do? It's there, and you just try and make the best movies you can and hope that people don't kill it."

And that they don't give away the ending, right?

Susan Downey: "Yeah. I mean in this one I certainly hope people don't give it away because it just ruins the experience for other people. And there's a lot of movies that have successfully held onto to their kind of secret endings and stuff. But I do think it's a well-crafted enough movie that even if people do go in knowing, I think it will be fun watching with that knowledge, so you can kind of have the best of both worlds. So if you're fortunate enough that someone didn't ruin it for you, you can enjoy it. And if they did, just kind of look back with those things in mind."

As busy as you guys are, how do you pick your projects at this point?

Susan Downey: "We just go with what affects us, what we feel is fresh, what we feel we haven't seen before, and what we think we can execute well."

Director Jaume Collet-Serra

How difficult was it to find the kids in this?

Jaume Collet-Serra: "How difficult? It's always challenging because you're looking for fresh faces. You can not just get the kid that did the last movie, because by the time of your movie, that kid is older. So you always have to find the new kid, but luckily there's a big pool of talent. There's a lot of kids who have interests in acting. I think kids nowadays are very smart and they can deal with taking on a role like this. But obviously the role of Esther is very demanding. The whole movie is on her shoulders. And finding her was a blessing, really. So you know, it was an easy decision at the end when we saw her. We knew that she was the one."

But you also had to direct a hearing-impaired actor. Is that difficult? Did you have to adjust anything?

Jaume Collet-Serra: "We had to adjust a couple of things. The script called for that and I wanted the real thing. I didn't want to have a kid pretending. I wanted to get that for real, so Aryana [Engineer] is not completely deaf and mute. You know, she had some issues. Mostly the issue was that she was six years old and had never been in front of the camera before. So if you throw on top of that some of the other challenges... But at the end of the day, we captured something that was really magic. We captured her innocence onscreen and that's really basically what this family's fighting for is to keep that innocence. It really worked out great. I couldn't have asked for anything better."

Screenwriter David Leslie Johnson

You're a big fan of The Bad Seed, right? How did that inspire you when you're working on this one?

David Leslie Johnson: "One of the things that I was looking to The Bad Seed for was The Bad Seed is the template for all evil kid movies. You can't get away from it, you know? And what I wanted to do was sort of pretend like we're going along with it, and you sort of use sort of the expectations of the genre that's set up by other evil kid movies, and make you think you're seeing something you've seen before - make you think that the audience is maybe 10 minutes ahead of you, and then take a sharp right turn. And then once that turn happens, you realize you have no idea where you are. Because the idea was you thought you knew where it was and it turned out to be something completely different."

This was a script that you were brought in to work on?

David Leslie Johnson: "There was a treatment and they gave me three pages of the story. It was a 10 page story and they gave me the first three pages that sort of set up the premise. It set up all the family dynamics and the idea of Esther being adopted, and it ended with her coming home. And so from there I came up with the ending and worked my way backwards to their beginning, and then they gave me the rest of the treatment and they hired me to write the rest of the story."

How tough was it to come up with - without giving anything away - that ending, because it does take it off somewhere very different that you don't expect?

David Leslie Johnson: "Right. It was the first thing I came up with. My wife is also a screenwriter and she's my sounding board. I came up with the idea and thought, 'Can I do this? Am I out of my mind?' And I bounced it off her, and we just sort of sat with it for a while. I kept coming back to it and thought, 'I'm still bothered by this. And the fact that I'm still bothered by it means we should try it.'"

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Orphan Poster, Credits, Trailer and Video Clips