Film
Cool Hand Lukas
Eleven years after he wowed the world in Witness, Austinite Lukas Haas is a movie star again—but he swears he won’t let Hollywood go to his head.
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One resonant example Haas has seen up close is his pal Leonardo DiCaprio, a heartthrob actor whose performances in This Boy’s Life and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (for which he earned an Oscar nomination) have made him a hot commodity. As public personas go, Haas and DiCaprio couldn’t be more dissimilar. DiCaprio’s handlers blitz the major magazines whenever he has a movie coming out; by contrast, even if all of Haas’s films this year are hits, it is impossible to imagine that he will pose seductively for the cover of Details. “Leo is in this amazing place right now,” Haas says. “People want to be like him. He’s idolized. But no one is as big as he’s projected to be. Leo is just a guy—he’s my friend.” Like all friends, though, these two have had their moments of rivalry: Each auditioned for This Boy’s Life and Gilbert Grape. Haas maintains he doesn’t care that DiCaprio got both roles. “We’re both very lucky because we make money doing art,” he says. “Why should I want to be him?”
As far back as anyone can remember, Lukas Haas has always known just what he wanted. When he was still preschool age and his family was still living in L.A., he saw a live taping of a TV show his mother had written and was immediately taken with acting. “Afterward, he put his arm around me and said, ‘Mommy, this is what I’m going to do, I’m going to be a star for a little while,’” Emily remembers with a laugh. Initially, she and Berthold were reluctant to allow their son to do what could be cruel and demeaning work, but Lukas was insistent. Eventually they let him audition, and he got a role alongside Jane Alexander in the no-nukes drama Testament. He was five and a half.
With that first experience, the Haases began a tradition of discussing roles with Lukas in great depth. “We paid attention very, very carefully to whatever project he wanted to do,” Berthold says. “We wanted to make sure it was something he liked and that we felt good about, so that when he saw it, he would feel it was worth it.” Choosing scripts and roles carefully was one thing, however; guaranteeing that a finished movie would meet the family’s expectations was quite another. “There are so many variables, so many different people affecting a movie,” Lukas says. “You could give the most beautiful performance in the world and if they wanted to make it crap, they could. Somebody else could ruin it.”
This sober realization taught Lukas early on to speak his mind on a set, a trait that risked getting him pegged as an enfant terrible. “I’d say the director-actor relationship is very strange,” he observes. “You can be friends with a director, but there is a fine line where one person has control and the other doesn’t. There have been times I’ve jumped into the director’s territory. It’s the director’s movie, of course, but it’s my movie too—it’s on my record.” Many directors seem to at least consider, if not agree with, Lukas’ suggestions. “He clearly has his own opinion about things,” says Stacy Cochran, who directed Boys. “But he’s not opposed to figuring out someone else’s idea.”
Even at age seven, as he began working on Witness, Haas demonstrated a level of acting sophistication that put him far above his peers. “With a child actor, it is particularly difficult to avoid sentimentality,” says Peter Weir. “With Lukas, I needed to push into areas of pain, and this requires a great deal of cooperation.” In the hardest scene of the movie—its catalyst—Haas had to convincingly portray an innocent Amish child seeing violence for the first time in his life. “I did not want him to actually witness the murder being acted out,” says Weir. “All he had to look at was a piece of tape beside the lens that represented the crime.” When the first few takes did not yield what the director wanted, he took Haas for a walk. “I said, ‘You must find something inside of yourself that you think is scary; otherwise the picture won’t work.’ We got back, and somehow he found the required fear. That performance was crucial to the emotional fulfillment of the film.”
Not every on-set experience has been so charmed. One director, in an attempt to evoke a frightened response from Haas, tore up a photo of his mother and told him she was dead. Even the prestige of working with Woody Allen did not come without a price. “He’s this genius eccentric who has complete control over what he’s doing,” Haas says. “He’s nervous as hell about it, and he makes everyone around him nervous.” Still, Haas keeps everything in perspective. “I think my parents had a ton to do with the fact that I’m not confused,” he says. “I realize that there’s this fabricated idealism when you look at a star, but the people you idolize go through the same things as everyone else—stars are just normal people in crazy situations.”
For the Haas family, the crazy situation has most often been Hollywood. Berthold and Emily left that city when Lukas was in sixth grade; after Witness was released, they couldn’t even eat a meal out together without being hassled. “The pressures were so intense,” Berthold recalls, “that Emily and I realized it was not something a child should go through.” But the move to Austin, Emily’s childhood home, did not provide immediate relief for Lukas. “We wanted him to have this opportunity to be with kids from all walks of life, but in the beginning it was really obnoxious,” Emily says. “Kids treated him like he was lying about acting. Then when they believed him, they projected their idea of what a star should be onto him and treated him like they expected him to be snooty. Fortunately, the kids in school finally took a cue from him. He didn’t treat it like a big deal, so they didn’t either.”
Over and over, Hollywood pros who have worked with Lukas make this point—that he has never seen his success as something to be exploited or rubbed in the faces of others. “He has this remarkable kind of overview,” Weir notes. “He has a calm that is rare for anyone that age.”
Emily Tracy says that while her son has always had a good deal of clarity and self-confidence, one event really cemented his levelheadedness. “Right after making Rambling Rose, he had a big spine operation,” she recalls. “He had several vertebrae fused and rods put in.” The diagnosis was a form of scoliosis—rare in boys—that doctors feared would kill him. Haas’s response to the surgery and the six-month recuperation was, at the very least, unusual. “I remember him saying he was grateful for the pain,” Emily says. “It gave him more compassion for others, and it matured him. It really shaped who he is now more than any other single thing. After that he found a new core, a strength in himself that is unshakable.”
No doubt this core is precisely where Lukas will turn when the pressures of celebrity return to his life this year. And he’ll turn as well to his parents, who have always guided him thoughtfully through the process of making smart choices. Still, he’s cautious. “I can’t assume anything,” he says, “but the way it’s going now, it’s as good as it can be. I want my career to always be that way—as good as I can make it.”
“I don’t worry about him,” Berthold Haas says. “He’ll have to learn how to live with the rules that exist in his own way. We can’t protect him from that, and I wouldn’t care to. He’s smart, he’s not lazy, and he’s well adjusted. Deep inside, I know he’ll be okay.”
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