Interviews
‘Old Man’: Lucky McKee on Working with Stephen Lang and Finding Catharsis in Horror [Interview]
Since directing his first film All Cheerleaders Die in 2001, to May in 2002, and segments in Masters of Horror and Tales of Halloween, it’s safe to say filmmaker Lucky McKee has gained a cult following. His work usually explores some of the darker sides of humanity and things that most of us would never do, but the characters are relatable, and this is what makes McKee’s films appealing—it can be liberating to exorcise your demons by watching a movie about characters who do monstrous things, but without any of the messy consequences.
Written by Joel Veach in his screenwriting debut, McKee’s new film Old Man, stars the incomparable Stephen Lang (Avatar, Don’t Breathe) as the Old Man, who lives in a cabin deep in the woods. When a lost hiker named Joe, played by Marc Senter (Tales of Halloween, Starry Eyes), knocks on the Old Man’s door asking for help, a charged conversation ensues between the two men. Joe just wants directions, but first he will have to listen to a few stories from the Old Man and prove that he is trustworthy. Stephen Lang gives an incredible performance as the Old Man, who becomes more mysterious and terrifying with each tale he tells Joe. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that each man may have something to hide.
Bloody Disgusting was delighted to have the opportunity to chat with Lucky McKee about Old Man, working with Stephen Lang and Marc Senter, his previous films, and a lot more. Read on to find out what we talked about.
RLJE Films will release Old Man in theaters, on demand, and digital on October 14.
Bloody Disgusting: I’ve seen Old Man and I loved it! It was written by Joel Veach, in his screenwriting debut, and of course, you directed. This film feels slightly different from your previous work. What appealed to you most about this script?
Lucky McKee: It’s my first male-driven film [laughs]. What appealed to me was the character of the Old Man. I knew these kinds of characters growing up. I was raised by them in a way. I always felt very different from them [laughs]. But there was always the need and the want as a kid to try to understand why somebody thinks that way or acts that way. I just saw a lot of truth in what he had written, and I connected with it in a really personal way, which is what you have to do if you want to spend as much time as we do making these things.
BD: Stephen Lang is always awesome and he’s just perfect in this movie. Why did you want him for the role of the Old Man and what was it like working with him?
LM: Isn’t he rad? He had an understanding of the character that I thought was great; he had a lot of ideas he was bringing to the table that I thought were great. Years back, they made a little film of this tour he was going on; he was going around and doing this one-man show for veterans where he would become these different characters, different veterans from different eras. He would be one guy and then he would switch over and become another guy and it was just this fantastic thing and it was also very theatrical. The more research I did on him, and I realized how deeply rooted in the theater he is, I thought, “This is an actor I can shoot a ten-minute long, uninterrupted take of, who is going to know his lines and who knows how to map out a performance from beginning to end, like great theater actors do.”
And we just got along. We talked on the phone, and we got along and he’s a grade A ball-buster in the best possible way. That made things really fun. He’s from my parents’ generation and that was kind of cool. He just brought so much to it. The thing that I loved about it is also quite often you’ve seen him playing the heavy, or playing the tough guy, or playing the supporting part, but this is a real showcase. This is a real opportunity for him to go a lot of different places emotionally and just use the kind of the skill set that this man has acquired over forty years of acting. It was a real honor to get to do that.
BD: There are some really long takes on him in this movie that are very interesting.
LM: Yeah, why cut away if he’s giving the goods [laughs]?
BD: The bulk of the story takes place in one location and involves an intense conversation between the Old Man and a lost hiker Joe, played by Marc Senter, who is also great. What was it like filming, as far as the location, and the way you wanted to tell the story?
LM: It was really great because we got to work on a stage and we got to build the set from scratch, so that meant we got to really build a lot of meaning into it and a lot of texture, and design it in a way that went with the type of lenses we wanted to use. So, that was really important. Then it was on me and my DP going into it, but this was not a storyboarded movie, this was not a shot list movie. We would show up in the morning, we knew we had a ten-minute run that we were going to shoot or like an eight-minute run, and we would just rehearse for like an hour. We would be like, “What if you stand over here?” Guys like Lang and Marc Senter have these deep roots in theater, so they really know how to work a set. So, it wasn’t about me being a puppet master telling them to stand here or say it like this or that. It was like, “Let’s just put it on its feet and see what happens.”
Sometimes the notions I had before would work and sometimes they didn’t work at all because we discovered something more exciting. Then it was on me and the DP to just get the camera in the right place to capture all the great stuff these guys were doing. I’m glad you liked Marc’s performance too. This clearly has Stephen Lang’s name over the title, but this movie does not work without what Marc is doing and the way he reacts to the Old Man and the mystery that comes with his character is just vital to the way it functions. I’m really, really proud of the performance Marc turned in for this film. I’m just so excited. It’s so unique. Nobody else would have played that character that same way and that’s really exciting to me.
BD: The conversations feel authentic and natural, and this film is really good at building tension. I didn’t trust either one of the characters up to the big reveal.
LM: Good! Hopefully, after those revelations that you have watching the movie, the movie is very much inviting you to look at it again. And the second time you look at it, you’re going to have a completely different emotional reaction to it, which is really cool. The thing transforms after the first viewing.
BD: Marc Senter also starred in your Tales of Halloween segment ‘Ding Dong,’ which I love, with Pollyanna McIntosh. You’ve worked with each of them a couple of times, and Angela Bettis a couple of times, for May and Sick Girl. What is it that you enjoy most about working with these actors, since you’ve worked with them multiple times?
LM: Just that we have a connection, we have an emotional connection. I don’t like to work with people who don’t have fire in their belly for what they do, that don’t have that obsession like they do [laughs]. The people that you brought up, they all bring something totally unique to the game and it’s fascinating to me. Words on a page are one thing and you and I can picture things one way, but when an actor comes in with behavior and with their emotional baggage and is able to plug-in underneath that and create something that is so much more than what you could have imagined with the written words on the page, that’s exciting to me. That keeps it exciting, and those actors have the ability to do that. They elevate material that they work on.
BD: I’m a big fan of your work, especially May and the Masters of Horror episode you did called Sick Girl. A lot of your films, including Old Man, feature people who are tormented or haunted by something, whether it’s real or imaginary. Why do you enjoy telling stories about these kinds of people?
LM: Well, aren’t we all kind of tortured or tormented in some way or another to varying degrees [laughs]? Movies have the ability to explore those things and explore those feelings that are kind of bubbling inside of us in a heightened, dramatic context. I think that’s why horror is such a wonderful genre because they literally get to the point of those emotions meaning life or death; making the right decisions and who you are as a person. I’m also really fascinated with showing monsters and monstrous behavior but also showing that there is a three-dimensional being there, that there is a reason underneath that. Not everything is a hundred percent good or a hundred percent bad. We all have that kind of battle going on inside us. I find that fascinating and just continue to explore it [laughs].
BD: That’s exactly why I’m such a big fan of your work, because of those kinds of characters.
LM: Thank you! And to not be judgmental of those people.
BD: Oh yeah, I relate to May. I’m not killing people, but she’s relatable [laughs].
LM: Oh me, too! [laughs] Absolutely! Those impulses and urges and those frustrations and all that stuff gets bottled up inside most of us, but in a movie that person can act those feelings out. There’s something cathartic about that.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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