He has an ability to be still on camera, to be himself on camera, which a lot of kids, when they start acting, don’t have. KM: Sunny just has this soulfulness that you could just see. It took a little bit longer for Kirsty to get into that, but for me, it was pretty instant. I just felt like we were watching our movie. As soon as I saw him, he just felt like the kid that I’d been imagining and feeling, and then we got him into the rehearsal space and I put a camera on him. But it was never a bull’s-eye, really, until one day, this little Sunny came into the room and he was kind of pretty instant for me. GD: For me, when I’m looking at all the kids, anyone who kind of touched that place in me, I thought we were getting close. We took our acting coach to India with us, Miranda Harcourt, who’s fantastic, and she devised some exercises as well as we started narrowing down the groups. We’d have maybe ten kids in at a time, and we would do some scene work, we’d play some games. And then we narrowed down to those who just felt right, and then the callbacks we did in big groups to start with. KM: There’s a little scene in the film where Saroo is trying to convince Guddu that he wants to go with him, and he picks up the bike and says, “Look how strong I am!” So they were just doing a little improvisation around that, half a page basically, and it’s just to see the kids, see how natural they were on camera, getting a sense of their spirit, really. I could start to feel him and see his spirit, and I could really feel his character. Garth Davis: The way I work is that I try and spend as much time in the real-life places as possible, and meeting the real-life people, and there was a point where I started to imagine who this little boy was. We went through all of them, and Garth and I came up with our short list of who we wanted to meet, and then we flew over to India and we did callbacks, really intensive callbacks for ten days with about 200 of the kids over three cities. They probably put approximately 2,000 kids on tape across three different cities, and they would send all of the tapes to me and to Garth. It was the old method, really, going to schools and finding kids who wanted to audition, and then they would send all of the tapes to me. But we hired Tess, who then put together a team of people who went out on foot to schools - we traveled to New Delhi, to Mumbai, and to Punna, and went to dozens and dozens of schools and put kids on tape in the schools. In Australia it’s a lot easier - you can do community casting through social media and people come to you. Garth wanted to turn over every stone that we possibly could. We interviewed a couple of local casting people and we hired Tess Joseph, who’s a fantastic casting director in Mumbai. Ultimately, that meant we were going to have to go through schools. We weren’t going to be able to search everywhere, because we knew that we needed to find a child who had papers, basically, because we knew we’d have to get him a visa to shoot in Australia. Kirsty McGregor: Firstly, we were aware of the pitfalls of casting in India. Casting Saroo was one of the first tasks that faced director Garth Davis and casting director Kirsty McGregor as they prepared to shoot fortunately, the four-month search turned up Sunny Pawar, one of the breakout stars of the year in film. To adapt Saroo Brierley’s autobiography A Long Way Home - which tells the story of how Brierley was separated from his family at the age of 5, and eventually found his way back as an adult - into a movie, you’d need a child who could convincingly portray a complex human experience, including feelings of loneliness, grief, confusion, and fear. In theory, the act of casting Lion seems like a herculean feat. Photo: Mark Rodgers/Long Way Home Productions 2015
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