When Covid-19 hit hard and the world collectively hid to survive, creative people got restless. This resulted in a plethora ofsmall ‘bottle movies’in which a few actors utilized a single space to tell a story. Recentexamples of Covid cinemalikeWindfall, 7 Days, Language Lessons, Host, and many more attests to the unbridled artistry of bored, entrapped people who just wanted to keep doing what they do best — make a movie.
DirectorLucky McKee, who proved he was a horror genius with hismodernized Frankenstein movieMayand his masterpieceThe Woman, was no different. Neither was the great actorStephen Langwho, after excelling in films likeGods and GeneralsandAvatar, was no stranger to the horror-thriller genre thanks to his intense performance inDon’t Breathe. When the underrated actorMarc Sentershared his friend Joel Veach’s playOld Manwith them, they all knew that this tightly contained, tense film with few actors and sparse settings was perfect for a Covid project. McKee, Lang, and Senter spoke with MovieWeb aboutOld Man, its great performances, and its dark themes of paranoia and regret.
Stephen Lang and the Inner Demons of Old Man
Old Manis a mysterious film, and while it’s labeled as a horror thriller, it’s much harder to define; labels are better for grocery stores and libraries than they are for art, after all. The titular character, played by Lang, lives in an isolated cabin amidst endless woods, and seems to be suffering from some kind of madness (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 geezer becomes suspicious of his intentions. What follows is a twisty, tense film in which you’re never truly certain about who is telling the truth and what is actually real.
“I really think it’s about a guy, Stephen Lang’s character, who was kind of lost in his life, who felt like he potentially missed the boat on a handful of things,” explained Senter. “Not to get into pointing fingers as to why, but because of that, he makes a tragic decision. And that decision is now going to haunt him for the rest of his life. That’s really what it is in a nutshell, but it’s also about those voices and those demons inside of us. The mind is a crazy thing, and we’re constantly hearing these voices, and these judgments or whatever, all day every day […] So what I thought was really interesting is exploring, like, if those demons and those voices are really kind of attacking you, what could that look like? How does that unfold?”
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BecauseOld Manoften exists at the intersection of a physical space and a disturbed headspace, there is an almost surreal, darkly ambiguous quality to the film which hardly succumbs to easy analysis, which was actually the selling point for Lang. “When I read it, and I found that I didn’t understand it, I was intrigued by it,” explained theTombstoneactor.
“It kept leaving impressions,” continued Lang. “It would remind me of certain things like Allen Ginsberg, there was a beat quality to it. It reminded me of the craziness of Lewis Carroll, the way the words coming out of this guy’s mouth just sort of spin off on themselves and have a mind and a life of their own, that was interesting. He was clearly a man who has gone down some kind of a very, very odd rabbit hole, and that struck me as worth taking the journey.”
Lang and Lucky McKee Leave Old Man Open to Interpretation
Old Manis certainly a film for actors, with Lang and Senter playing nearly the only two characters in the film, which mostly chronicles the day and night they spend holed up in the old man’s cabin during a storm. The performancesin this bottle thrillerare exceptional, with the two actors cleverly bouncing off each other in McKee’s nightmarish funhouse. For various secretive reasons, the old man is suspicious of Joe, who seems like he couldn’t hurt a fly. Shoving a shotgun in his face,Stephen Lang’s characteressentially interrogates him, but the intimidation and fear of their interactions gradually become complicated by vulnerability, melancholy, memories, and madness.
As juicy as the role is for Lang, it wasn’t exactly an easy one to suss out. “I think I had as concrete a handle as I needed to have, or really wanted to have, when I was doing it,” said Lang. “He’s an unhinged guy in a lot of ways. What’s real? What’s not real? What is history, and what is myth? What’s story, and what’s legend, and everything like that. He doesn’t know, and I’m quite sure I don’t know either. But what [I’m] doing was just massaging the whole bundle of psychosis and emotion and words, and see what kind of keeps emerging, and it keeps changing. It’s very protean.”
Even McKee, who expertly creates a geographic sense of space with which to entrap these characters and choreograph their movements, is perfectly fine not understanding every aspect ofOld Manand its eponymous character. “The way that film ultimately plays out, I have a different feeling about what’s actually transpired than Stephen Lang does, and I think Marc has his own. One thing that we really tried hard to achieve was to not tie everything up with a perfect bow,” said McKee, “and to kind of leave [Old Man] open and let the audience project their own meaning into the film.” He continued, elaborating something important about art in general.
I think that there’s something powerful in that, and that’s something that I love about my favorite works of art — your interpretation of a great work of art may not have anything to do with the artist’s intent, and then it becomes about you. That’s that’s what makes me grab onto certain pieces of art, because they’re speaking to something in me that’s very personal. We really tried to achieve that in the film.
Marc Senter on the Themes of Old Man
Regardless of its inherent mystery,Old Manhas some prominent, poignant themes that resonated with everyone involved. Whatever one’s ultimate interpretation of the film, it hauntingly conveys feelings of regret and loss, along with the doom of being condemned to remember terrible things. Senter in particular was emotionally attuned toOld Man, having to embody different facets of the film’s meditation on the ravenous appetite of our internal demons (which is a fancy way of saying “no spoilers”).
Related:Old Man Review: Stephen Lang’s Good in Lean Psychological Thriller
“[The film captures] that feeling of looking back at your past, and it’s almost like you’re very aware of the times when you didn’t stick up for yourself, or you just kind of felt like you were on autopilot going through things. That builds a lot of things, like resentment,” said Senter. The actor is right to highlight a certain monologue from the film, in which his character Joe almost breaks through the film’s mystery and lucidly describes the aching heart of the film, saying:
You ever get the feeling that sometimes life is conspiring against you? […] I’ve been feeling that way a lot lately, like there’s something much larger than me out there, trying to smother me, trying to extinguish me in some way, and no matter what I do and how hard I try I just can’t seem to make it go away or let up a little […] My whole life I’ve done everything right. I went to school, I made good marks, I never got in trouble, always had a job, I never disrespected anybody, I never broke the rules. Yes sir, no sir, all of it. I did everything I was told to do, everything I was supposed to do, and still I feel this weight. I feel like it’s been crushing me lately.
“I think that’s something we can all relate to and understand,” said Senter. “We all feel like that in a lot of ways, don’t we?”
Lucky McKee Turns a Play Into a Movie With Old Man
Like many ofthe single-location moviesmade during Covid-19,Old Manis built upon a stagey premise that could have become a one-act play rather than actual cinema, which was a challenge McKee was keen to accept. “How do you take that challenge of something that is so confined, that’s literally in a box, and make that cinematic?” asked McKee, phrasing the challenge itself. The way McKee approachedOld Manis a model example for the Covid era of how to navigate a small space in a way that evokes cinema more than theater. He explained:
Theater is wonderful, but when you’re watching a play, it’s one master shot that you’re watching play out. So how do we use close-ups like weapons? When do we switch to medium shots? When do we put a little move in there, how do we build the set in such a way that it informs what’s going on emotionally? Any film that you make, you’re going to be working within a box. Sometimes that box is very large, and sometimes it’s very small, but in this case, it was small and intimate, and intimacy is such an interesting thing to capture on film. It’s a great challenge. When you have two actors like Marc Senter and Stephen Lang, it’s just a pleasure to get to capture that kind of magic.
The Horror of Old Man is Character-Based
Despite (or perhaps because of) the claustrophobic, stagey conditions, “that kind of magic” is undoubtedly 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 fromthe horror movie genreover the past decade,Old Manis a kind of return to form for the filmmaker, though the film is hardly a genre exercise. At the end of the day, it (like all of McKee’s films) is about fascinating, unsettling characters.
“I love horror films, and it’s a great place to start, but even from the beginning, it wasn’t primarily about the genre. It’s always been primarily about character,” said McKee. “Specifically about characters that are 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 kind of within all of us. I think that the more that we understand monsters or monstrous people, the closer we can get to understanding more about ourselves and understanding that [evil] is something that exists, and then maybe find new ways of circumventing it or pushing it back.”
Old Mancertainly asks dark questions about the human experience, and it’s up to each viewer to answer them.Old Manis a production of XYZ Films, Paper Street Pictures, and AMP International, and will have a VOD and limited theatrical release on October 14th fromRLJE films.
