Young actors lands starring role in first feature
IMTA Press Release October 25, 2007
Film opens in limited release Friday, October 26
"He has this old soul, but a young face. He's a great little actor, and I hope he ends up being someone that can kind of grow into being an adult actor." – Director Alison Eastwood
Young Davey Danner holds a terrible weight on his shoulders. When his mother commits suicide by parking her car on a train track, Davey knows that he was the only one who could have stopped her—but didn't. Meanwhile, the engineer who was driving the train that killed Davey's mom suffers from terrible depression after the accident and struggles to hold onto his relationship with his own terminally ill wife. So goes the story of Rails and Ties from first-time director Alison Eastwood.
IMTA alum Miles Heizer also carries weight on his shoulders that helped him tie into the emotion required for the role of Davey Danner in Rails and Ties. In his feature film debut, he is starring opposite two of Hollywood’s most sought-after A-list actors: Kevin Bacon and Marcia Gay Hardin. Weighing on him also is the personal toll his family has paid for him to get to this point. “I think he's got stuff going on in his own life,” said Director Eastwood. “He can tap into a lot of emotion. It's totally genuine…His mom was on the set all the time, she told me this story that really broke my heart…him and his mom and his sister, they lived in Kentucky, and he wanted to be an actor. So they up and moved to California so that he could pursue his dream. And so he's got all this pressure. They moved for him! His sister cries because she misses her friends, his mom had to find a new job.”
With a current multi-episode story arc on the long-running “ER,” a recent guest star gig on “Bones” and the release of Rails and Ties in theatres, most of the pressure Heizer has been feeling since he attended the NY04 IMTA will be lifted. At IMTA, Heizer won Pre-Teen Male Model of the Year and First Runner Up to Pre-Teen Actor of the Year. It was his success at the Convention that led to the family’s decision to relocate to Los Angeles, where he signed with TJ Stein of the Stein Entertainment Group. He immediately started living his dream with a guest starring role on “CSI:Miami,” followed by a starring role in the short film Paramedic, and guest star turns on the hit TV shows “Ghost Whisperer” and “Shark.”
Eastwood, for one, is convinced Heizer should ease up on himself. “As soon as I saw him on tape, I knew it was him,” she said. “When I interviewed him…I asked him, ‘Do you think you could handle this role?’ And he was the only one, out of the two or three kids that I really liked, who said, ‘I don't know, but I'll try my hardest.’ He was really a great kid."