As I mentioned in another post, Matthew Harbour is a Canadian actor who I first came across in the 2002 Montreal film festival, starring in the film
Two Summers. The interview that follows is taken from the press kit for
Silent Night, a Canadian telefilm.
Although he is young and innocent, 12-year-old Matthew Harbour is not a newcomer to the film world. He has acted in many feature films and television movies, among them, Two Summers, Equilibrium, After Amy, Forgotten Attic, Growing Pains Reunion Movie and No Ordinary Baby.
Harbour has the ability to put himself into the skin of his characters. That is exactly what he did on the set of Silent Night when he played Fritz Vincken. “I tried to imagine what a boy would do if he saw all these Americans and Germans come raging into his house. I imagined how it would feel to have them in our house and at the table during the dinner. I tried to think of it not as a movie but as something really happening.”
Director Rodney Gibbons was immediately taken by Harbour during the young boy’s casting call. “He is a naturally talented young actor who exudes enthusiasm, energy and confidence. Moreover, he has a beautiful face and expressive eyes,” says Gibbons.
Harbour says that acting in Silent Night was easy. What was difficult was the German language. He had to learn to speak German – and to speak English with a German accent. " I found the pronunciation of the words and the German accent pretty difficult,” says Harbour. “I had to learn to pronounce from the front part of my mouth. I sometimes got confused with the ends of some words, such as ‘ick’ and ‘ich’,” Harbour recounted. But Harbour worked really hard with his German dialogue coach Jurgen Buche, even off the set. “Jurgen put every German line of the movie for every character on his website and I constantly went on that site to learn my lines perfectly,” he says.
Harbour already speaks fluent French and hopes to learn other languages. He is in Grade 7 in a French language school and is learning Latin, which is on the curriculum. Harbour became interested in acting when he visited his brother on a movie set. “I was very attracted by all the free chocolates, chips and candy,” he says. A year later, at the age of nine, he had an agent and his first role in Time at the Top, a film for Showtime. Harbour has never had acting lessons. His life is very full with school and work. But if he wasn’t working in movies, he says, he would be skateboarding in the summer and snowboarding in the winter. He also enjoys break dancing, “anything that involves speed,” he says, and has a brown belt in karate.
Harbour hopes that millions of people will watch Silent Night and learn from it. “This story about Fritz and his mother giving shelter to enemy soldiers is very important,” he says. “The film shows that soldiers, beneath all their armour, weaponry and clothing are just normal people.”
(You need to Login or Register to view media files and links) (You need to Login or Register to view media files and links) (You need to Login or Register to view media files and links) (You need to Login or Register to view media files and links)The top two pictures are from
Silent Night, the others are DVD caps from
Equilibrium.
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Matthew Harbour (Read 4,434 times)
