Opening today is Unaccompanied Minors, the new film from Paul Feig. If his name sounds familiar it’s because he was the one who created one of the best television shows of the last decade, Freaks and Geeks. Before we go any further, if you’ve never seen Freaks, I strongly recommend buying the amazing box set and spending a day with it. Once you see how good it was and watch how many amazing actors got their big break on it, you’ll understand why it has such a following.

But even if you’ve not seen the short lived series, all you need to know about Paul is that he has this amazing ability to make you feel for the characters on-screen. And rather than focusing on the popular ones, he always is looking for the outsiders or people on the fringe.

And that’s the cast of Unaccompanied Minors.

A bunch of random kids get thrown together on Christmas Eve due to a massive blizzard hitting the airport they're all traveling through, and it forces all the flights to get cancelled. While it’s not exactly a remake of The Breakfast Club, it has some similarities. But while Breakfast Club was more senior year of High School, Minors is more 7^th Grade, thus the humor and situations are more kid friendly.

And while I didn’t get into the film as much as the kids around me in the theater, it’s really hard to judge as I’m clearly not the demographic the film is aiming to get. But I can say is if you have some younger cousins or family members, it’s perfectly safe and you won’t be bored while watching. Also for all you adults, there are a number of cameos from people you’ll definitely recognize.

Now back to the interview at hand.

A few weeks ago they held the junket for this film and paired up a number of the kids. One of the groupings was Tyler James Williams and Quinn Shephard and their interview can be listened to here or read below. And while I didn’t transcribe the Gina Mantegna and Dyllan Christopher interview, you can listen to the audio of it here.

Also, I’m almost done transcribing the Paul Feig piece and that will go up tomorrow.

And just in case I don’t get to them, here is the audio of Wilmer Valderrama and here is the audio of Lauren Shuler Donner and Michael Aguilar. Tomorrow I’ll post selected answers but probably not entire transcripts.

Q: Have either of you ever traveled unaccompanied?

Quinn (pictured on right): Um, no.

Tyler (pictured on left): Um, no

You’ve never had an experience quite like the airport?

Quinn: No.

Tyler: I think that made it a good movie for all of us just to pull from somewhere that we’ve never been before.

This movie talks about forming a family with people who are strangers, did that happen for you on the set while filming?

Quinn: Um, yeah.

Tyler: Yeah, I’d have to say that we’d never met each other before, came from different parts of the country, New Jersey –

Quinn: New Jersey, California, Canada, we were all over the place.

Tyler: 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.

Is it Tyler or Tyler James?

Tyler: Tyler.

Was the dancing your choreography?

Tyler: There was no real choreography in the original script. The one that I first got said a cross between Napoleon Dynamite and ants in your pants. I’m happy that wasn’t one of the first things we did. We started off and we kind of led into it, so I could kind of get more of a feel for the character as to what he would do, him coming from these older times, he would do older dance moves, and that’s basically what I had to pull from.

Are you a dancer normally? Is that something that you enjoy doing?

Tyler: Yeah, I do dance. I’ve been dancing forever, since I remember that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve never done that kind of dance before, I’ve never really kind of got into it, I was more hip-hop, break, all these other kind of dances, but I think that was kind of cool that I had to take some of those new dances that are out now and kind of mold it into an older form and a goofier form.

Quinn, you seem so sweet, your character was tougher than the others, what did you fall back on to do it?

Quinn: I’m really nothing like my character, and I think when I was playing the character I was sort of just thinking exactly about where she grew up and what she was like, and I was trying to put that in because it’s really hard for me to act that way, because I’m totally different than that in real life, and so it was really hard to get the nerve to act that way, but hopefully I got it.

How was driving that cart?

Quinn: Oh that was very fun.

Did they show you physically how to do it?

Quinn: The stunt coordinator gave me driving lessons around the – wherever we were, because we were never in an airport except for one scene.

So it was all in other locations?

Quinn: Yeah, in other locations they’d have me drive around special areas, so I could get used to it.

Have there been any birthdays? How old are you both now?

Quinn: I’m eleven, I’m turning twelve on February 28th.

Tyler: And I just turned fourteen.

You guys really did that sliding down the hill in the snow – that wasn’t green screen?

Quinn: We did some of it.

Tyler: We did most of it actually.

Was it cold, was it fun?

Tyler: It was freezing.

Quinn: It was so cold, it was six degrees one night.

Tyler: Yeah, one night we got down to six.

Quinn: And it was so wet, I remember I was freezing, and I had so many layers of clothing I was so freezing.

Tyler: A lot of it we did, there were only certain things that we just couldn’t do, like going off the snow drift that we just couldn’t do, there were certain takes where the canoe just flipped over, and so we just kind of played what was actually happening. It was moving fast, we were scared, it was cold, there was acting involved but there wasn’t much of it.

Quinn: Yeah, we were scared and we were screaming because it was just crazy.

What about sliding down the airport luggage thing – did you both do that?

Quinn: Yeah, I did some of it; my stunt double did some of it too.

Tyler: I didn’t do most of it, it was just the plain suitcase with nothing in it when everything was going down, we mixed in everything else in ADR, but we shot most of the suitcase scenes away from the whole enclosure, the suitcase was like spliced in four different areas, they stuck me in it, tied me in, just turned it with a wheel, and I just read lines.

Your characters torment Lewis Black, did that happen during the filming as well?

Quinn: No, we were too scared of him (laughs), well, I was.

Did you interact with him at all between scenes?

Tyler: Yeah we had to because in order to get a chemistry with the character, and to become more of your character, we had to interact with him, make sure that we were pushing it in the right way, that it wasn’t too evil, we didn’t want to be evil children. We just wanted to have some fun.

Quinn, were you saying that he was terrifying off-screen too?

Quinn: Well when I first met him I had no idea who he was or what character he was playing, because he was there on set but I didn’t know who he was, and I remember just thinking that he seemed a little bit scary, just the whole way he talked and everything is like a little bit intimidating.

Quinn, you’re very young, is Tyler the first boy you’ve ever kissed?

Quinn: Yes (giggles)

Tyler: Wow, I didn’t know that.

Was it nerve-wracking that day?

Quinn: Yeah. I don’t really remember.

Tyler: I think it was one of those scenes, it was at the end of our shoot, we were almost done, we had like two more weeks to go, and we had progressed as the characters, we were at this time, most of the time, no longer really Tyler or Quinn.

Quinn: Yeah.

Tyler: Most of the time, even when we were outside, we were Donna and Charlie doing this thing. And I think that made it easier, it wasn’t one of those things where we had to really concentrate, okay, now when we do this make sure there’s nothing really going on there, it was just we were having fun with it, and that was our job to do there and we did it.

Quinn: Yeah, we were totally into our characters at that point, so we weren’t really concentrating on what we were doing so much as being our characters the most.

Tyler, how many scripts were you getting once the show took off.

Tyler: Wow, I’d gotten about three others besides this movie here. I read them all, the other ones were great, they were really great, another one I did the character’s name was Charlie, but there was just something about this, it seemed really fun to shoot, from everything that I read, some of the stuff wasn’t even in the actual movie, but it just seemed like a great read and a great shoot, and it was going to be a success no matter who played it, no matter who did any role, it was going to be great.

How long did you guys shoot in Utah?

Quinn: Two and a half months.

Tyler: Yeah, two and a half months.

When you guys were not shooting what did you do to have fun in Utah?

Quinn: We went to arcades and stuff and the mall.

Tyler: We went to some arcades; it is still Utah (everyone laughs).

Quinn: Utah’s flat, except for the mountains.

Tyler: I think we had a lot of fun on the set just creating what we could do there, like playing – 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.

Quinn: And they gave us scooters.

Tyler: Yeah, 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.

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