Brody has been a fan of Shyamalan’s films and had auditioned for “Signs.” Brody says, “This character is such a stretch for me and something I can really fall into too. It has made me enjoy the process a lot more than I normally do. I really feel fortunate working with Night. He has a wonderful sense of humor too, and here I am having worked with a director just about my age. We have a lot in common and it has been a pleasure.”
Since “The Village” is a small community that is self-contained, it was a challenge for the extras casting department to provide background players that resembled a realistic genealogy.
Crowds of 3,000 showed up over two consecutive weekends to open casting calls in southeast Pennsylvania, for people ranging from ages 3-63. Many of the people who stood in line for hours said they didn’t know the story of “The Village,” they just wanted to be part of an M. Night Shyamalan film.
Those that were cast resembled Shyamalan’s brief to extras casting director Dee Dee Rickets (“8 Mile,” “Training Day”). Shyamalan requested an ancestry similar to a European, Dutch, English, or German origin. He asked the acting candidates be photographed not smiling, the same way people were photographed during that era.
Shyamalan was looking for something intriguing about the face and asked for “a sense of innocence in their eyes.” He also wanted to match families to the principal cast so audiences could make up their own imaginary family trees.
Because “The Village” is such a close knit community, all of the background extra players will more than likely be seen at some point in the film. People had to be chosen who fit Shyamalan’s description and also could perform some of the duties that were needed in the late nineteenth century.
In the end, the extras casting department found a couple of hundred people who fit the bill. Because these extras would be seen over and over again they had to make themselves available to the production crew for the entire shooting period. Their ability to be flexible in their schedule was the last deciding factor that got them the job.
About half of the extras cast in “The Village” were minors. All children had to attend supervised school lessons every day on set. It was an interesting visual that in the middle of any given shooting day you could walk into the large meeting hall structure in the middle of “The Village” set and see the young ones working away at their modern-day studies. Extras casting encouraged hiring siblings so that a sense of real family life could be depicted in “The Village.”As a result of the careful planning and hard work of the individual casting of each of these background players, the set did indeed feel like the harmonious village that Shyamalan describes in “The Village.”
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