Haley Joel Osment says he hasn't seen "Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star," the current film about washed-up child stars.

And maybe he doesn't need to.

Unlike the actors in "Dickie Roberts," who grew out of their TV roles, the 15-year-old Osment can really act.

His biggest hurdle right now is a lack of film roles for kids his age.

"At this point, it's not like being a younger kid where you can play anywhere between the ages of 8 and 12," he said during a telephone interview to promote his new film, "Secondhand Lions." "Being a teenager, you really have to play your age because you look it. On top of that, not a lot of roles are written for this age. It's hard to find a really good character leading up to age 18."

In "Secondhand Lions" Osment plays Walter, a 14-year-old who is left with his eccentric great uncles, played by Michael Caine and Robert Duvall, for a summer in which all their lives are changed for the better.

The Los Angeles native, who was 14 during the filming, says he grew taller, although he's not sure how much. "Walter's clothes . . . that was sort of intentional to have his clothes look smaller by the end of the film simply to show Walter was growing. . . . He was supposed to by the end of that summer. The timing turned out to be really convenient."

In conversation, Osment sounds wise beyond his years. And he's already learned diplomacy, saying he'd love to work again with all of his many co-stars, including Caine and Duvall. When he found out those two would be playing his uncles, "that doubled the excitement of the project."

Osment's entire resume of TV, movie and voice work, which includes everything from guest appearances in TV series to starring in feature films, is long enough to belong to someone twice his age.

He rocketed to fame in 1999's "The Sixth Sense," in which he uttered the now-famous line "I see dead people." He wound up receiving a best supporting actor Oscar nomination.

The actor who won that year? Caine, for his role of the good doctor in "The Cider House Rules." Accepting his Oscar, Caine paid tribute to Osment as an amazing talent.

By the time "The Sixth Sense" came out, Osment was a show-business veteran. He had played Forrest Jr. in 1994's "Forrest Gump" and stole 1996's "Bogus" from Whoopi Goldberg and Gerard Depardieu. On television, he made his acting debut opposite Ed Asner in the 1994 TV series "Thunder Alley," produced and written by Evansville's Matt Williams.

Some may remember him as Jeff Foxworthy's son Matt in 1995 on "The Jeff Foxworthy Show," or Murphy Brown's (Candice Bergen) son, Avery, during the 1997-98 season of "Murphy Brown."

He's starred with some of the best actors around, including Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt and Jim Caviezel in "Pay It Forward," Jude Law in "Artificial Intelligence: AI," and Maureen O'Hara in TV's "Cab to Canada."

He's outspoken on the subject of computer-generated imagery and movies that are made with actors going through all their paces in front of a green or blue screen so that other elements can be plugged in later. "As an actor, you sort of have to be against something that will put you out of a job.

"Digital effects have been really helpful for films," he said. "They can really enhance a lot of things you can't always do and shoot in real life. . . (but) there's a point where it ends being a movie and just becomes a cartoon or a computer game, and that's not what film is."

Osment admits some movie magic went on during his scenes with a lion in "Secondhand Lions." [My note: the use of the animatronic lion for the close up scenes with Haley and the lion.]

He wanted to do it all, but the producers "got nervous."

He praised director/writer Tim McCanlies, who had tried to make this movie for several years, for shooting "huge, sweeping fantasy sequences in seven days, outside of Austin, Texas. In a water drainage ditch, or in a quarry outside of Austin. That's really movie magic: The talent of a director to get around the constraints he has to still make his movie possible."