When Covid-19 hit hard and the world collectively hid for survival, creative people became restless. This resulted in a plethora of little ‘bottle movies’ in which some of the actors used one space to tell a story. Recent examples of Covid cinema like Windfall, 7 days, language lessons, hostand much more attests to the unbridled artistry of bored, trapped people who just wanted to keep doing what they do best: making a movie.
Director Lucky McKeewho proved he was a horror genius with his modernized Frankenstein film Be able to and his masterpiece The woman, was no different. Nor was the great actor Stephen Lang who, after excelling in films like Gods and Generals and Avatarwas no stranger to the horror-thriller genre thanks to his intense performance in don’t breathe. When the underrated actor Marc Senter shared his friend Joel Veach’s play Old man with them all knew that this tight, suspenseful film with few actors and sparse settings was perfect for a Covid project. McKee, Lang and Senter spoke to MovieWeb about: Old manhis great performances and his dark themes of paranoia and regret.
Stephen Lang and the Old Man’s Inner Demons
Old man is a mystery film, and although it’s labeled as a horror thriller, it’s much harder to define; After all, labels are better for supermarkets and libraries than for art. The titular character, played by Lang, lives in a remote cabin amid endless forests and appears to be suffering from some sort of insanity (or perhaps the warning signs of dementia). When Joe, a lost traveler played by Senter, knocks on the old man’s door, the graying and gritty dude becomes suspicious of his intentions. What follows is a twisting, suspenseful film where you’re never really sure who’s telling the truth and what’s real.
“I really think it’s about a man, Stephen Lang’s character, who was a little lost in his life, who felt like he might have missed the boat on a handful of things,” Senter explains. “Not to point the finger at the why, but that’s why he makes a tragic decision. And that decision will now haunt him for the rest of his life. That’s it in a nutshell, but it’s also about those voices and those demons the mind is a crazy thing, and we hear these voices all the time, and these judgments or whatever, all day every day […] So what I found really interesting is investigating whether those demons and those voices are really attacking you, what might that look like? How is that going?”
Because Old man often existing at the intersection of a physical space and a disrupted headspace, the film has an almost surreal, darkly ambiguous quality that barely succumbs to easy analysis, which was basically its selling point for Lang. “When I read it, and I discovered I didn’t understand it, I was intrigued by it,” explained the Tombstone actor.
“It kept making an impression,” Lang continued. “It reminded me of certain things like Allen Ginsberg, there was a beat quality to it. It reminded me of Lewis Carroll’s craziness, the way the words coming out of this man’s mouth spin on their own and create a ghost and a life of his own, that was interesting. He was clearly a man who went down a very, very strange rabbit hole, and I thought it was worth making the journey.”
Lang and Lucky McKee leave Old Man open to interpretation
Old man is definitely a movie for actors, with Lang and Senter playing almost the only two characters in the movie, usually describing the day and night they spend in the old man’s cabin during a storm. The performances in this bottle thriller are exceptional, with the two actors cleverly bouncing on each other in McKee’s nightmarish funhouse. For various secret reasons, the old man is suspicious of Joe, who seems like he couldn’t hurt a fly. Stephen Lang’s character shoves a shotgun in his face and essentially interrogates him, but the intimidation and fear of their interactions is gradually complicated by vulnerability, melancholy, memories and madness.
As juicy as the role is for Lang, it wasn’t exactly easy to sort out. “I think I had as concrete a handle as I needed, or really wanted, when I did it,” Lang said. “He’s an unhinged man in many ways. What’s real? What’s not real? What’s history and what’s myth? Of course I don’t know either. But what? [I’m] doing was just massaging the whole bundle of psychosis and emotion and words, and seeing what comes up over and over, and it keeps changing. It’s very protein.”
Even McKee, who skillfully creates a geographic sense of space to trap these characters and choreograph their movements, is perfectly capable of missing every aspect of Old man and its eponymous character. “The way that movie ends up playing out, I have a different feel about what actually happened than Stephen Lang, and I think Marc has his own opinion. One thing we really tried to achieve was not to capture everything. laying with a perfect arc,” said McKee, “and to go a little way… [Old Man] open and let the audience project their own meaning into the film.” He went on, working out something important about art in general.
I think there’s something powerful in that, and that’s something I like about my favorite artworks – your interpretation of a great artwork might have nothing to do with the artist’s intent, and then it’s about you. That is why I reach for certain works of art, because they appeal to something in me that is very personal. That’s what we really tried to achieve in the film.
Marc Senter on the themes of the old man
Regardless of the inherent mystery, Old man has some prominent, poignant themes that resonated with everyone involved. Whatever your final interpretation of the film, it terrifyingly conveys feelings of regret and loss, along with the mischief of being condemned to remember terrible things. Senter in particular was emotionally attuned to Old manembody different facets of the film’s meditation on the voracious appetites of our internal demons (which is a fancy way of saying “no spoilers”).
“[The film captures] that feeling of looking back at your past, and it’s almost like you’re very aware of the times you weren’t standing up for yourself, or you just felt like you were going through things on autopilot. That builds a lot of things, like resentment,” Senter said. The actor is right in highlighting a particular monologue from the film, in which his character Joe almost breaks the mystery of the film and clearly describes the aching heart of the film by saying :
Do you ever feel like life is conspiring against you sometimes? […] I’ve often felt this way lately, like there’s something much bigger than me out there, trying to suffocate me, trying to put me out somehow, and no matter what I do and no matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to make it go away or hold up for a bit […] All my life I’ve done everything right. I went to school, I got good grades, I never got into trouble, I always had a job, I never disrespected anyone, I never broke the rules. Yes sir, no sir, everything. I did everything I was told, everything I had to do, and I still feel this weight. I feel like it’s crushing me lately.
“I think we can all understand and understand that,” Senter said. “That’s how we all feel in many ways, don’t we?”
Lucky McKee turns a play into a movie with the old man
Like many of the movies shot in one location during Covid-19, Old man is built on a stage premise that could have been a one-act play rather than an actual movie theater, which was a challenge McKee was happy to take on. “How do you take on the challenge of something that is so limited, that’s literally in a box, and make it cinematic?” asked McKee, formulating the challenge himself. The way McKee approached? Old man is a model example for the Covid era of how to navigate a small space in a way that is more reminiscent of cinema than theater. He explained:
Theater is great, but when you’re watching a play, it’s a masterpiece you’re watching. So how do we use close-ups as weapons? When do we switch to medium shots? When do we put in a move, how do we build up the set so that it emotionally informs what’s going on? Every movie you make, you’re going to work in a box. Sometimes that box is really big and sometimes very small, but in this case it was small and intimate, and intimacy is so interesting to capture on film. It’s a great challenge. When you have two actors like Marc Senter and Stephen Lang, it’s just a joy to capture that kind of magic.
The horror of the old man is based on character
Despite (or perhaps because of) the claustrophobic, stage-like conditions, no doubt “that kind of magic” is produced between Senter and Lang. The film is small, but these performances are deep and complex; combined they form a sad, disturbing and poignant portrait of loneliness, paranoia, bitterness and guilt. While McKee has strayed from the horror film genre over the past decade, Old man is a sort of return to form for the filmmaker, although the film is hardly a genre exercise. Ultimately, like all McKee films, it’s about fascinating, disturbing characters.
“I love horror movies and it’s a great place to start, but even from the start, it wasn’t about the genre in the first place. It was always about the character first,” said McKee. “Specifically about characters doing bad things, without turning them into villains. I try not to have villains, I always try to paint the full picture […] to create a three-dimensional person with that conflict that’s inside all of us. I think the more we understand monsters or monstrous people, the closer we are to understanding ourselves and that [evil] is something that exists, and then maybe find new ways to get around it or push it back.”
Old man certainly poses murky questions about the human experience, and it’s up to each viewer to answer them. Old man is a production of XYZ Films, Paper Street Pictures and AMP International, and will have a VOD and limited theatrical release on October 14 from RLJE movies.