The film Josephine opens with one of the most upsetting sequences in any movie this year. In it, the titular 8-year-old girl accidentally witnesses a woman being raped at a park near her home. In subsequent scenes, the filmmaker Beth de Araújo, who based the incident on an episode she experienced in childhood, carefully explores how the event affects Josephine and her family, and sheds light on larger questions: how parents can struggle to make sense of a child’s trauma, and how attempts to protect young people can yield more pain.
Josephine is anchored by Mason Reeves, the actor who plays Josephine, who was 8 at the time of filming. Her performance sensitively conveys her character’s mixture of confusion, frustration, fear, and curiosity. Reeves is now 10, and she’s been enthusiastic, de Araújo told me, about acting in another project soon. De Araújo would rather she didn’t. “I hope and I believe Mason had a great experience on this,” she told me in September, “and I hope she also puts it aside for a while.”
De Araújo is not the only director both working with children on films that have challenging themes and aiming to keep those young stars out of the spotlight. Cristian Mungiu, the writer-director of Fjord, has a similar wish for the adolescent actors who, in his film, give remarkably grounded performances as the children of a devout couple accused of child abuse. “I’m trying to encourage them to think twice before they consider acting as something they want to do for their lives,” Mungiu told me.
The filmmakers’ hesitation is understandable. Children who grow up on sets are vulnerable to being physically and emotionally exploited, as numerous documentaries and memoirs have made clear. And the emotional toll of subsequent fame can lead to troubled adulthoods, as the recent deaths of former child stars including Hayden Panettiere and RJ Mitte have helped demonstrate. But these concerns may be of particular importance when it comes to children appearing in movies with dark subject matter, such as Josephine and Fjord. Zuri Pryor-Graves, an intimacy coordinator and a former therapist for child actors, told me that young performers immersed in intense environments often fail to notice when they’re overworked. Tight production timelines and the scrutiny of an adult crew isolate them from normal childhood experiences, including coming of age as themselves, rather than as their characters. “They’re in development stages where they’re learning who they are,” Pryor-Graves said. “Being able to create that separation is not something that’s built into a production schedule.”
[Read: The uncomfortable truth about child abuse in Hollywood]
In an op-ed for The New York Times in August, the former child actor Alison Pill echoed that concern: “At a time when kids are supposed to be forging our own identities, child actors have ours chosen for us by agents, casting directors and the public.” Pill called to end such work altogether. “The greatest storytellers should find a way to capture the world we live in without child actors,” she wrote, “for all our sakes.”
Yet that idea seems impossible. Thoroughly adult stories that hinge on young performances are nothing new, and this year has seen a spate of such projects. Apart from de Araújo and Mungiu’s films, the drama Gentle Monster depicts a man who gets arrested for distributing child pornography; his 9-year-old son’s perspective becomes pivotal. This fall also brings the return of the Hunger Games franchise, and with it another round of youngsters fighting to the death, as well as the debut of Club Kid, a drama about a hard-partyer who discovers he has a 10-year-old son. And Primetime, a film dissecting the rise and fall of the reality-television series To Catch a Predator, features cameos from former child stars including Alex Winter and Jonathan Lipnicki. Their portrayals of some of the alleged pedophiles the TV show targeted flip the script, underlining how unprotected they themselves were as children.
The directors I spoke with about this topic all agreed that young performers need extra care and attention. But the trouble with working with children is that no single method exists to ensure their healthy adulthoods. The question facing Hollywood, then, is whether the industry can ever truly place their youngest actors’ needs first—perhaps to the point of scrapping a film no matter the budgets, schedules, and egos involved. Projects involving child actors should move forward, de Araújo said, only if directors are genuinely confident those actors are capable of handling the pressure of being on a set. “If you don’t find them, you don’t find them,” she said. “You have to go back to the drawing board and start from scratch.”
Let’s say you’re a child actor. In most cases, you’re accompanied by a supervisor on set who coordinates your schedule so you don’t exceed your legal work hours. You’re shuffled from hair and makeup to wardrobe, to rehearsal, to set. You spend time studying with tutors. You’re surrounded by adults, whose attention you find intimidating or perhaps special; either way, you don’t want to be the problem. “Kids in front of the camera have a higher propensity for creating a bit of a false self,” Fran Walfish, a child psychologist based in Los Angeles, told me, “because they want to please everybody.”
Marie Kreutzer, the writer-director of Gentle Monster, aimed to avoid this scenario. When she was casting for Johnny, the boy whose relationship with his father gets scrutinized, she made sure to “audition” the parents of her finalists. She talked with the caregivers at length about their reasons for allowing their kids to be on camera in a mature drama. Their level of enthusiasm for getting their children cast, she told me, could be telling. “When you have difficult conversations like that in the beginning, you immediately get a very good feeling about them and how they are as parents,” she explained. After the then-7-year-old Malo Blanchet was cast as Johnny, his parents asked whether he wanted them around while he filmed. Kreutzer said Blanchet declined because having them there seemed stressful.
On set, Kreutzer tried to keep Blanchet from becoming overly attached to crew members. “Being the center of attention of a whole film crew for a while can really do something to you as a person when you are young,” Kreutzer said. She pointed out that the separation anxiety that comes at the end of filming can be disorienting, no matter a person’s age. “We even get that wrong, you know?” she said. “When I’m shooting a film and I wrap, I always miss the people.”
[Read: How Daniel Radcliffe outran Harry Potter]
Every filmmaker I spoke with discussed the importance of creating distance between young actors’ normal life and the grown-up stories they help tell. Mungiu, of Fjord, calls his younger cast members “interpreters” rather than “actors,” and said he aims to give them simple, direct instructions about how to portray their characters. “We shouldn’t project our personalities as adults on children,” he said. Kreutzer said she wanted to explain the story of Gentle Monster to Blanchet in terms he would understand by offering him, as she put it, “a part of the truth.” She spoke with Blanchet’s parents about what he’d be able to handle; together, they agreed to describe Gentle Monster to him as a film about a mom and a dad having a hard time separating, a concept he grasped because he had friends whose parents had divorced.
Josephine, with its story rooted in a traumatic sexual-assault case, required similar discretion, especially because Reeves is in almost every scene. De Araújo told me she worked closely with Reeves’s parents to come up with a plan that would let Reeves avoid undergoing the same emotional turmoil as Josephine, while still understanding her character’s arc. She and Reeves mapped out Josephine’s emotions by revisiting Reeves’s own memories; if Reeves had to portray Josephine being angry, she’d recall the time her sister ruined a drawing she made, for example. De Araújo hoped that this would protect the 8-year-old from being too immersed in the particulars of her character’s story. In addition, Reeves saw only portions of the script, was not on set for the filming of the opening scene, and was told that the movie boils down to “Josephine sees something bad and it makes her scared, and then the film is about Josephine overcoming her fear and being stronger,” de Araújo said.
De Araújo also pushed for Reeves’s needs to come first. If she was hungry, the filming schedule would adjust so she didn’t have to wait until the scheduled lunch break to eat. If she was tired, they’d rethink what to shoot. “A child’s going to act like a child,” de Araújo explained. “Because of that, you need to be paying such close attention to where they are emotionally.”
Even so, no strategy can guarantee a safe future. Child-labor laws largely don’t engage with the emotional complications child stars can face. The Coogan Law, passed in 1939, serves as the basis for most legislation pertaining to young performers, including proposals recently introduced seeking to protect the rights of child influencers—the latest type of child star. But the Coogan Law, like most of its successors, focuses exclusively on compensation, meaning that there are few if any enforceable safeguards around a young performer’s mental well-being.
And there is no legal fix for the fact that once a film hits theaters, the children in it will be exposed to a level of scrutiny that can be overwhelming. Young performers can easily get pigeonholed into archetypes that then shape their budding personal identities. As Pill wrote in her essay, “It is difficult, if not impossible, to develop an independent sense of self when what feels like the entire world pillories you for deviating from your type and heaps praise on you when you conform to it.”
To de Araújo, that’s a dilemma that’s remained largely unresolved. “I don’t think child acting is necessarily the problem,” she said. “I think it’s then the press and the fame that they get around it.” There is no way to control how an audience responds to children on-screen—to prevent fandoms from going overboard, or to limit the public conversations around child actors’ work. No laws dictate how their caregivers raise them. There are only guidelines for productions and parents, which can in many ways amount to guesswork about how a child will turn out.
For now, Reeves seems thoroughly content with all things Josephine. She’s been traveling the world—Berlin! Toronto! Los Angeles!—on the film festival tour with de Araújo. On her Instagram page, she posted an essay she put together for a fourth-grade assignment, titled “Acting Is the Best Job!!!!!!!!!!” (That’s 10 exclamation points.) “Acting is the best job,” she writes, “because you can learn different skills and do new things, you can meet new people and last but not least Acting is FUN!!!” It’s easy to understand why she wants to get back on set. Rooting for that to happen, though, is harder.