‘The Paperboy’ director Lee Daniels, who is fascinated by life’s down-and-outers, the people surviving on the fringes who will never manage to make it to the center of the arena, says he fell in love with Pete Dexter’s book, on which his new movie is based, when he first read it years ago. “Like ‘Precious’ and ‘Monster’s Ball’, the characters and the events stayed with me. It is a story that needs to be told. As a filmmaker, I like giving voices to characters that don’t ordinarily have them. I’m interested in depicting the people we don’t often see, even though they exist all around us.”

As he has for his previous films, Daniels assembled an ensemble of accomplished actors who each make unexpected departures in their roles. “It is a tribute to the material that we were able to assemble such a fantastic group of actors,” says producer Hilary Shor. “The cast became so much more than the sum of its parts. Every one of them saw the opportunity to do something great, even though it is a relatively small movie and they worked for less money than they usually command.”

In ‘The Paperboy’, Jack James, former swimming champion and current newspaper delivery boy, joins his hotshot investigative journalist brother in an effort to clear a local redneck, Hillary Van Wetter, of the murder of the town sheriff. To play the naïve Jack, who falls hopelessly in love with the death-row convict’s seductive fiancée, Daniels selected Zac Efron, best known as the wide-eyed heartthrob from the teen phenomenon ‘High School Musical’. “If all you know him from is ‘High School Musical’, he seems like an unexpected choice,” says Daniels. “But I saw Zac in a movie called ‘Me and Orson Welles’ and I recognized something very different in him. He is so right for this part.”

Shor believes the role could profoundly change the path of the young actor’s career. “This is going to be a transitional moment for Zac professionally,” she says. “We watched him become a man before our eyes. It is an extraordinary performance and it will surprise a lot of people to see him in this light.”

Efron was drawn to the quality of the script and the unusual nature of the story. “My initial reaction was simply ‘wow,’” he says. “The story was intense and the ending blew me away. It’s a big journey for a young man. It goes to some very dark, twisted places and some very funny places, too.”

Daniels’ genius as a writer and director lies in his innate understanding of what makes the characters human and how they relate to each other, says Efron. “Each relationship and every part of this story is grounded and real in the crazy way things actually are. He understands the spaces in between. He wants to turn everything on its ear and he’s not afraid to improvise.”

The young actor experienced some of the same growing pains as his character during the shoot. “Jack learns huge life lessons from each of these very important people in his life,” he says. “I felt the same way working on the movie. I came as a blank slate. I haven’t been doing this as long some of the other actors have and I’m still learning what it is to make a movie or be an actor. This cast was always challenging me in different ways.”

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