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I've been really lucky when it comes to casting kids, and I don't particularly like child actors. Too often, they just show up, and they've had whatever real innocence that's in a child just beaten out of them. They start to perform for you, and you can just see it coming. It's no good.

I sort of look at some peers of mine and I think, 'No, you've got it all wrong!' I just want to tell them all to have babies and be happy and not get sucked into that Hollywood thing.

I think that most actors, and they're a very strange lot actors, very strange people, but I think that they attempt to keep in touch with the child.

I like showing moms what it's really like having a baby, and how it's not Hollywood life.

My experience with casting children is that... the whole movie is going to rest on their shoulders, so you have to set aside time and wait for the perfect people to appear.

Acting is a hard way to make a living, and there's a kind of dark, somewhat seedy side to the whole aspect of fame and celebrity that's not really something I would want for my child - or want him to want, if that makes any sense.

Actors, to a certain extent, never grow up, you see. It's an extension of being out in the back yard with a stick, only you're being paid to do it. It's borderline madness.

I know that people get cast based on how they look in Hollywood.

A lot of child actors keep acting for the wrong reasons.

I hate the stereotype of the pitfalls of the child actor. There are so many amazing examples - Natalie Portman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jodie Foster, Drew Barrymore - of people who have made it through.