On the Set of Holes

By Sonja Bolle -- Publishers Weekly, 7/22/2002

The temperature soars as the road climbs into the high desert. It's 10 a.m. and already 96 degrees. There's nothing to see but the straight run of asphalt of 20 Mule Team Road, an endless blur of scraggly creosote bushes and the blue-gray ridge of mountains on the horizon. Suddenly the asphalt runs out, the road dwindles to a dirt track and it's out onto the middle of Cuddeback Dry Lake, which is riddled with... holes.

Hundreds of holes. Four hundred holes, to be precise, five feet deep and five feet in diameter, all neatly dug, with the excavated dirt mounds piled neatly beside them. This desolate patch of California desert is doubling for Camp Green Lake, the Texas juvenile detention facility that is the main setting for Louis Sachar's Newbery Award–winning novel and soon-to-be film, Holes .

Out in the middle of the lakebed, Sachar is watching director Andrew Davis shoot a scene in which Stanley Yelnats (played by Shia LaBeouf of the Disney TV series Even Stevens ), a good kid doing time for a crime he did not commit, has a confrontation with an antagonistic camp supervisor, Mr. Sir (played by Jon Voight).

Holes is the first project of Walden Media, a company that has a mission to produce quality family films. Davis, best known as the director of action thrillers like The Fugitive, was looking for a project like his first film, Stony Island, which he characterizes as "a warm coming-of-age story." When Teresa Tucker-Davies, a producer in his Chicago Pacific Entertainment company, stumbled across a synopsis of Holes on Amazon, she immediately felt she had found their next project.

Sachar is having a dream experience for an author new to Hollywood. The film is being shot from a script he wrote himself, and he's being treated like royalty on the set. As he occupies a chair under the director's canopy next to the video monitor—the throbbing heart of the movie set—one of the orange-jumpsuited inmates of Camp Green Lake brings him a book to autograph. Another crew member has a pile of books to be signed for the children of various friends.

The writer is delighted with the amount of creative input he has had on Holes . To begin with, he says, "I never imagined I would write the screenplay." It seemed exotic and flattering enough that by the terms of the original contract, he had the right to three vetoes over the choice of screenwriter. During one of the meetings, Sachar recalls, "They turned to me and said, 'How about you?' "

At this point, the interview is interrupted by an urgent request for the writer's presence in the director's trailer. While the cameras, lights and all the attendant paraphernalia are being moved 30 yards northeast to set up the next scene, Davis has retreated to his office and has found something he doesn't like about the upcoming lines. "We need a beat here," he says as Sachar enters. They consult for a few minutes and revise a word or two. "He could have done that by himself," Sachar says, "but it's nice to be asked."

When the conversation resumes, the topic turns to casting. "It was harder on Louis than us to cast the boys—he'd lived with the characters in his head for so long," he says. "And we didn't want TV-commercial actors. Andy doesn't do glamour well. We needed slightly goofy kids."

LaBeouf may not look like the Stanley described in the book—a fat kid who slims down as camp hardens him up—but he has a curiously soft, flexible face. "He reminds me of a French comedian," says Davis. Sigourney Weaver plays the Warden, and the list of cameos includes Henry Winkler as Stanley's father; Eartha Kitt as the gypsy great-grandmother; Rick Fox, the L.A. Laker basketball player, as Clyde "Sweetfeet" Livingston; and—the ultimate sign that the filmmakers respect his fan base—Sachar himself playing a shopkeeper in the town of Green Lake.

Being on the set has been a greater education for Sachar than simply writing the script would have been. "Everyone thinks a screenplay is just dialogue," he says. "But it's not. It's making things visual. Now that I've seen them at work out here," Sachar says with a wave that takes in the trailers, the scores of working people and the 400 holes, "I think I'd be better at it. I watch movies differently now."