Everyone has to retire at some point…even hit men. In ‘Old Guy‘, Christoph Waltz’s Danny Dolinski has to deal with the fact that he’s being pushed out of his longtime career, and at the same time, has to train his replacement (Cooper Hoffman.)
This action-comedy from director Simon West (‘Con Air’) explores Dolinski’s trouble relinquishing his position to a “Gen Z”, and along with West and Hoffman, Lucy Liu also joins the cast as Danny’s old friend turned confidant turned perhaps a little something more.
To chat more about this feature and what went into crafting it, both Simon West and Lucy Liu sat down to discuss ‘Old Guy.’
Why sign on with this project? What elements of it were you excited to tackle?
West: Well, you always want to get a script that you just can’t stop reading, and it’s a page-turner. A very good test is: Do you fall asleep when you’re reading it or do you want to turn the next page? And this luckily was one of those latter ones. You look for the highlights… where are the humor scenes, where are the dramatic scenes? And if there are enough of those highlights that keep you interested in the reading, then you get excited about shooting them. So I look forward to those key scenes that I read about a year before I actually shoot them, but it’s kind of nerve-wracking.
Will I get them on film as good as they are in my head? And sometimes, hopefully, most of the time you get it right and you do get them as good as they are on the page or as good as you imagined. But at the end of the day, I’m in the hands of the actors, so they have to deliver and I can just encourage them and create a world that they can do their best work. And also casting the right people like Lucy, Christoph and Cooper… you have to cast the right people so that they’re capable of doing all that.
Liu: I love that it reminded me of a movie that was before the internet, when it wasn’t complicated. It was just about their relationships, their connections, and less about special effects or aliens coming from another planet, which by the way, I do love. But it seems so compact and concise with where the directions of the characters were going emotionally. And I think it’s a very short movie. So the fact that it moves quickly and that it hits all the different levels in that very short period of time in a very authentic way was exciting to me.
With a film like this, where a lot of the plot comes from the characters and their relationships, thinking of you, Lucy, along with Chrisoph and Cooper—how do you make sure that chemistry is there?
Liu: That’s just something that you have to figure out when you get there…that’s not something that’s natural. You hope that it is when you read the script and you have this idea of what you hope it will be. And it was more than that even so when I got on the set with Christoph, and Cooper is just a lovely human being and somebody who’s enthusiastic and willing to try anything.
I mean, Christoph and I had to have that chemistry in order to really make it believable that she would transition from being rejected from this Prince Charming to then suddenly having some affection towards her old friend. And luckily, it was something that came about because of the chemistry that we had together.
Simon, from a director’s standpoint, this film is almost equal parts action and comedy. How do you blend those genres together to make it cohesive?
West: Well, it’s sort of two different sides to your brain, and so one day you’re doing a dramatic scene and I use one side of my brain, and then the next day I’m doing a technical action scene, which is using the other side of my brain. But really when I do action, it’s just making a little short film in itself. So it has to have a beginning, a middle and end. It’s just a little bit more visual and hopefully still character-driven, but it’s not relying on dialogue so much in an action sequence.
So they’re just two slightly different parts of your brain, but being told by the same person and they still have to work in the same way. You still have to bring the audience along with you…they still have to want to be with those characters in the traumatic scene, and they want to find out what happens in this action scene without just being bombarded. So it’s just that it becomes a reflex after you’ve done it a few times.
In a world full of action films, what stands out to you about ‘Old Guy’?
Liu: For me, I think it’s about being relevant and when you feel like you still are relevant [but] then the world is telling you that you’re done. That is something that Christoph mentioned in other interviews as well, that you’re not quite accepting the fact that that’s happening—you’re being pushed out and it’s not a great feeling. It’s hurtful.
At the same time, there’s a reality to what happens as we are mortal people, and how can you stay in the game when everyone else is telling you that you’re washed up? That’s the journey that he’s taking. So it’s brave and it’s, as Simon said before, it’s also a very unusual job. So you can apply that to banking, you can apply that to anything. And in this case, he’s a hit man and he can’t hit the mark he used to.
Catch ‘Old Guy‘ in select theaters and on Digital now.
