It wasn't only Jack Clayton who identified with the themes of The Innocents. Here's Martin Stephens who, at the age of 11, played Miles, remembering the making of the film.
He has spoken about his career in general to filminc blog.
I can’t say that I was a natural actor but what I would say is that I was very directable. If you look at my fifteen, sixteen, eighteen films, whatever it was, you will see that when it was a good director I tended to be reasonably good and when it was a weak or poor director I was relatively mediocre. I would absorb what was going on. Also, to be honest, I didn’t have much of an ego in terms of what I was doing. ...
I’ll give you an example. I played Oliver in the musical in London when I was twelve. I did that for about seven months and my mom used to come a collect me. Every day she would come up and sometimes she would be a few minutes early so she would go into the wings and see the final curtain calls before she would whisk me off to go to bed.
One day the stage manager actually turned to her and said – as I was taking the bows and there was uproarious applause going on, and curtain call after curtain call – the stage manager actually turned to her and said "do you know that Martin couldn’t care less?" It was just doing a job. I was enjoying it, but it didn’t really matter to me too much, I didn’t invest my ego into it.
And isn't the opening scene from the film disturbing? I do wonder if Clayton had seen Benjamin Britten's opera The Turn of the Screw.
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