Moments later a skinny little boy in a wheelchair is waving at me. Over the next two days I will learn that Kieran's performances are equally astonishing. He's able to hit his marks, deliver his lines as if he just thought of them that very moment - and do it again and again as the director works for the perfect take. At 8 o'clock it is pitch black in Toronto, and thirty or forty technicians and assistants are jammed into a tiny back yard in a working class section of the city. Illumination is provided by an enormous bank of lights suspended from a crane - think of a night game at Fenway Park.
Temperature is just above freezing.
His mother, played by Sharon Stone, comes to the back door. That may sound simple enough, but getting it on film proves gruelingly difficult. Young Mr. Culkin obliges without complaint, as does Sharon Stone, and the day doesn't wrap until midnight, by which time your not so intrepid novelist has already returned to the warmth of his hotel room. Which soon fills with the smoke of a Montecristo cigar and the fumes of a small cognac. Some things are worth celebrating in comfort.