Unaccompanied Minors sets four kids lose in a snowed in airport, much to the chagrin of a bitter old security chief (Lewis Black). A mix of Hollywood child veterans and newcomers, the Minors were all fish out of water in the middle of Utah. As one of the more seasoned kids, Tyler James Williams appreciated the diversity.
"I think that made it a good movie for all of us just to pull from somewhere that we’ve never been before," said Williams. "We’d never met each other before, came from different parts of the country. We were all separated, and we came together, we were all here for one thing, to make this a good movie and just to have fun with it; and I think we were able to accomplish that."
Williams is joined by Gina Mantegna (Joe's son), Quinn Shephard and Dyllan Christopher. Even though most of the film is set in an airport, the kids found plenty of entertainment.
"I think we had a lot of fun on the set just creating what we could do there, like I think one of the greatest things a kid can do is play tag on a set. There are so many lights and things that you can just bump into, that you have to dodge a round them, and it’s really fun. We didn’t have to do anything outside of work to make it fun. It was like a big playground, and by the time we got home we were exhausted, not only were we shooting but we were playing most of the time."
Williams promises he's more professional on his TV show, Everybody Hates Chris, but the movie gave him a chance to go wild. "We weren’t serious, we weren’t very professional actors. You can’t expect that from five kids together shooting this crazy movie, doing all these things. We were just having fun, messing up lines sometimes. A lot of times, just having fun. It was free-flowing because it wasn’t a certain amount of time, like a series we have a week to get it done and it needs to be done now. We had two and a half months to shoot what, some 125 scenes. It wasn’t that hard. It’s not that bad for two and a half months."
Now that it's all finished, Williams had a very professional appreciation for the project. "I think the editing was good. We did a really good job. It was good to see everything just come together. We worked hard, we were there for hours at night sometimes, and everything coming together I’m really happy with it."
One form of rigidity on the set was schooling, which was required for all the teenage actors. "There was no problem with it. I think whenever you have kids together in a room doing school, you’re going to create your own little school without walls. It’s going to be classes, math, but I think the one thing about it is, everybody’s doing something different and you have one-on-one with that teacher of what you’re really doing. It’s not she has to move on quickly to the next thing. Or just to have a schedule, there’s no real schedule when you’re working on a movie with school. If you need some extra time on one thing you’ve got it."
Unaccompanied Minors may play like a horror movie to parents. "If I was unaccompanied you’d all better watch out. I would probably do the same thing, just hang out, just do stuff that I’ve always wanted to do, be sick half the time, hurt myself a couple of times doing some stupid stuff, but I’d hang out. A lot of the stuff that we did in the movie I would probably do, I’d eat everything possible, everything I couldn’t really eat, take a golf cart and just drive recklessly, try out everything in the Sharper Image store."
Unaccompanied Minors opens December 8.
