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Not a lot of people make that transition from child actor to bigger, better roles.

Most child actors go through that. Unless you can transition into an adult star, your career is over.

A lot of the time with child actors, you get the feeling they're trying to have a kind of poise or presentation that's beyond their years that might be put on, but also might be because they've spent years just hanging out with adults and they don't even have a sense of what it's like to grow up with kids their own age.

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.

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

The hardest thing in acting is going from child actor to adult actor. It's taken me a long time.

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 think it's great to see how they've grown up, not just as actors but as people. They're still very much the same kids that I met many years ago. They've grown up and they are funny and wicked and naughty and bright, and I think as actors their work is just getting better and better. They've blossomed.

I always think it's hard for any young actor to make that transition to more grown-up roles. Because you don't want to alienate your audience who has been supportive of you for so many years, so you kind of have to tiptoe through that process.

When child actors act well they're just reacting to situations, and they're acting very real because their life experience is so short; there's no history to fall back on.