“I had to ask Oscar a lot of questions to fill in the gaps. He called it free therapy. We had fights, screaming matches, because he had a lot of resistance. For him, it was a very intense journey.”
“did not include the recruitment of the children, and when we were filming, in the scene where the children are lying down on top of the roofs, I asked, 'Oscar, why are they on the roofs?' and he said, 'Because the army was coming to take them away,' and he hadn't included that in the script because for him it wasn't important, it was everyday life.”
“His was a very different audition. He had something special. This boy is pure; he's not contaminated and has an inner life that he brought to the character.”
“The night before we shot [the execution scene], I was doing the shot list in my room. I woke him up, and said, 'please tell me this didn't happen,' and I saw his eyes welling up with tears.”
