CHRIS NEUMER: How often to you take into consideration casting for height?
JANE JENKINS: (laughs)
CHRIS NEUMER: For example: if Michael J. Fox is your lead, do you need to consider the height of his co-stars, either as a romantic lead, or if you need to cast a bad guy opposite him
JANE JENKINS: It depends. It’s a hard question to answer. There’s a zillion answers for a zillion actors or various heights. It depends on the sensitivity of the actor involved. Dustin Hoffman never cared if his leading ladies were taller than he is. Tom Cruise, notoriously hasn’t… Nicole Kidman was taller than him. I think that it depends on what serves the production and what serves the script. If the director is sensitive to it and feels that he wants two actors who match each other more physically, then you worry about it. There’s never a clearly delineated black-and-white answer. I don’t know that Michael J. Fox, for example, has any particular hang-ups about his height. I think actually, that Tracy Pollan his wife may be taller than he is.
CHRIS NEUMER: Everybody is taller than he is.
JANE JENKINS: (laughs)
CHRIS NEUMER: Do you have to take height into consideration, let’s say, in an action film?
JANE JENKINS: You do have to take it into consideration if you have somebody who is enormous. If you have somebody who is 6’5” and somebody who is 5’5”, it becomes a matter of, “What does the two-shot look like? How would you frame it?” So, that becomes a consideration, but not necessarily because of an actor’s ego. More than likely you’re going to try and cast two people, no matter if she may be taller than he is, for their actual chemistry together. With the difference in somebody’s size, you can do so many things photographically, like position the actors, to get around it.
CHRIS NEUMER: Oh, sure.
JANE JENKINS: If the guy is just midget-short, you could put him in a pair of shoes that have lifts in them.
CHRIS NEUMER: Or put them on a box.
JANE JENKINS: There are a lot of ways to deal with that issue. Years ago, when we did a film called Beetlejuice, the first person that we were interested in hiring, was Geena Davis.
CHRIS NEUMER: And, she’s twelve feet tall, if I understand correctly.
JANE JENKINS: She is six feet tall, and we did not have a leading man yet. So, we held off hiring her, until we knew who our leading man was going to be. We had to see how they would fit together. The fact that she was so tall was a part of that equation—but you would do that anyway, just to see how this couple would work together. It was their chemistry as much as anything else. Because there were a lot of two-shots of them, [director] Tim Burton didn’t want her to be taller than whomever we cast, and when we got Alex [Baldwin], who was also six-feet tall—
CHRIS NEUMER: It all worked out nicely.
JANE JENKINS: And, she wore flats and they were pretty nose-to-nose. It wasn’t a movie where she was going to be running around in high-heeled shoes.
CHRIS NEUMER: I’m not even sure if this is something that falls onto your plate, but if you’re dealing with good, and bad, is it ever the type of thing where you want the good guy to be taller than the bad guy in the same vein as making the good guy wear white?
JANE JENKINS: Not in my experience, really.
CHRIS NEUMER: In regards to width, rather than height—is there any special process that you use, if the script calls for a really overweight person?
JANE JENKINS: There are an amazing number or extraordinarily gifted people, in all sizes and shapes. The biggest struggle that I’ve ever had casting height, was on two films that we did back-to-back. One was called Willow, where I needed people who were Daikinis and Nelwyns, and because so much of the film was shot on blue screen, there really were height-limitations. I was telling a lot of little people, who were taller than four-feet, that they were going to be too tall for the movie. (laughs)
CHRIS NEUMER: Well, you’ve got to figure that that’s going to make them feel good that they’re too tall for something.
JANE JENKINS: They would crack up. The very next movie that I did was a film called The Princess Bride and I needed to find a giant. I was telling actors who were seven-feet tall, that they were really not quite tall enough. With Willow, there were people who were going to be miniaturized and be the brownies—they were only going to be a few inches tall onscreen—and we used two very normal-sized people for that: Rick Overton and Kevin Pollak. It was all shot on blue-screen, and then you miniaturized them. As far as the entire village of Adwins, in which Billy Barty had one of the primary parts, we searched world-wide for a community of little people that all looked like they belonged to the same family of people. They had to have a pretty uniform height requirement, so when people like Val Kilmer came into this community, the ratio worked. That was very specific but not for any romantic reason. It was all because of the story-points, because of the way that film was shot, and how it would all appear on the screen. You needed to keep the people uniform. And, as for the giant [in Princess Bride], if it weren’t for Andre the Giant, I’d still be out there searching for someone who would do that part.
CHRIS NEUMER: (laughs) It’s got to be tough, when seven-feet isn’t tall enough and you’re standing next to Wallace Shawn no less. I guess this is when I should say casting that would be “inconceivable.”
JANE JENKINS: (laughs) Inconceivable, yes!
