Interview With Filmmaker Lucky McKee For ‘Old Man’

Back in 2002, filmmaker Lucky McKee gifted us horror fans with his offbeat horror comedy gem, May. Starring Angela Bettis (Carrie 2002), Jeremy Sisto (Clueless 1995) and newcomer Anna Faris (Scary Movie 2000), May helped cement Lucky as the horror director to watch. As the years have gone by, Lucky’s career has grown and he has given the horror community The Woman (2011), two versions of All Cheerleaders Die (2001 and 2013), segments in Masters of Horror (2006) and Tales of Halloween (2015), and so much more. Now he has given us the thriller, Old Man (2022).

When a lost hiker stumbles upon an erratic old man living in the woods, he could never have imagined the nightmare that awaits.

To celebrate the digital release of the film in the UK, I chatted with Lucky about how he became attached to the project, the casting process, why he loves horror, and more!

PopHorror: Old Man was amazing and I’m a huge fan so I’m super excited to speak with you.

Lucky McKee: Aw man, thanks. I really appreciate that.

PopHorror: Of course! I thought it really showed your range as a filmmaker because it’s different from the other stuff that you’re known for.

Lucky McKee: Yeah, it’s male-driven, which is new territory for me.

PopHorror: Yeah! So what intrigued you about Old Man and how did the project come about?

Lucky McKee: The script came to me from Marc Senter, the actor that plays Joe in the movie. Marc and I had been really close friends ever since this movie I produced called The Lost. We’d always wanted to make a feature as actor/director over the years and we got to dabble a little bit. I did this segment for this anthology called Tales of Halloween. That was our first chance to work as actor/director, but we still wanted that full meal of a feature. Marc had this script that his buddy had written as a play and by the time I had got it, he had put it into a screenplay format. For me, I thought his dialogue was really great, and also I could relate to it pretty well because of the way I grew up. I grew up in a rural area and my grandad was an old man that lived in a cabin in Oklahoma. I saw a lot of my father and grandfather in it, and I thought that would be a pretty interesting portrait to paint, without being too judgmental about those generations and that way of life. I just found a personal connection to the material, which is always kind of amazing, especially when someone else wrote it, to be able to find that personal connection.

PopHorror: You mentioned the dialogue. In something that’s so dialogue heavy, it really would help to have amazing dialogue written because what’s going to carry the film? Something that’s so reliant on what the characters are saying. There’s your whole film, so if the dialogue isn’t strong, what are you going to do with it? This film only has two main characters, and I read it was shot over just 15 days with a very small crew. It’s only in one location, which I really like. I’m a big fan of locked-room thrillers or mysteries.

Lucky McKee: Me too.

PopHorror: How did you prepare for shooting?

Lucky McKee: It was really different. Obviously, you go with what you know when you approach the material at first, then eventually the material – you work with it enough and figure out what the correct approach is to that specific material. In this case, I went in thinking I was going to storyboard it within an inch of its life like I do everything where I create these intense shot lists and draw my little thumbnails of where I went to the camera to be. But my DP, Alex Vendler, who had shot a couple movies for me before this, we had a really good secondhand language with each other and we were really comfortable with each other, and we realized this isn’t a movie that you can storyboard. It’s really so performance based that it’s about getting the actors in that space in the morning and rehearsing until it feels like they’re moving around the set the right way. We didn’t the camera to dictate where they had to be so we would feel it out with the actors and once we kind of got them moving around to the places that felt right and behaving the way that felt right according to the material, we would just figure out the best place to put the camera to honor their performances. It was very different for me in that I couldn’t be as prepared as I usually was on the camera side of things, but there was something kind of liberating about that, and I’ve taken it with me on everything I’ve done since.

PopHorror: Marc Senter is amazing. I’ve been a huge fan of his since the Devil’s Carnival.

Lucky McKee: Oh, me too.

PopHorror: And Stephen Lang, I have no words. He’s amazing.

Lucky McKee: He’s a legend!

PopHorror: What was your casting process like?

Lucky McKee: Marc was banked in from the beginning. He brought me the material and obviously really wanted to play the Joe part. I’d really been wanting to make something with Marc and thought this was a good fit. So then it was about finding the old man. We danced around some names and stuff like that but I had some mutual friends who worked with Stephen Lang and they were just singing his praises and gave just really glowing endorsements. Not only about his skill set, but also just who he was as a person and what he’s like to work with is important. You dive into a project with somebody and you’re spending 12-14 hours a day with someone, it helps if it’s a good person and it’s someone that’s fun to work with and truly enjoys collaboration. I’ve been in cases a lot of times where things start to become an ego battle and that’s really destructive to the creative process. Slang and I had some phone calls and we got along really, really well. I liked how he was looking at the material and thought he was bringing a lot to it and he liked some of my ideas. It was really just an effortless collaboration once we decided he was going to be on board.

PopHorror: It makes me excited to see what else he has for us because it looks like he really immersed himself into the character.

Lucky McKee: Yeah, he’s a fine, fine actor. He also has years and years of theater experience which was actually really beneficial for this, beneficial to me as a filmmaker because both he and Marc could, word for word, just have a whole chunk of the script on lock in their brains so if I could and I could shoot, I could shoot a 10-15 minute run of just them acting without having to cut the camera because they were just so into it. They had a great rhythm with each other and then by the time I get to cutting, it’s really their performances that are dictating the way I edit the movie. It’s like how do I get the best out of each angle I have of these guys.

PopHorror: This is not your first foray into horror. Your name is thrown around the horror community quite a bit. What is it that draws you to the genre?

Lucky McKee: I’m a huge fan of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and the tradition of sitting around a campfire trying to freak each other out. The way Grimm’s Fairy Tales kind of function as instructional and cautionary tales. They’re meant to teach you something, I think, whether it’s a moral or a simple everyday facet of life or anything like that. I think that movies are an extension of that. I can’t really say exactly why I’m drawn to it but that’s part of it. 

PopHorror: What do you think would be your weapon of choice in a zombie apocalypse? 

Lucky McKee: My weapon of choice in a zombie apocalypse… That’s a really good question. I don’t know. I think the weapon of choice to just exist would be compassion. In general, not even in a zombie apocalypse, just life. Try to be compassionate and try to get out of yourself and understand other people’s perspective or other beings’ perspective before taking any sort of action against them.

PopHorror: I like that. I like that a lot. What is up next for you?

Lucky McKee: The last thing I did was an episode of a show called Poker Face, which was really fun. I got to do episode five of that show. That came out a few months ago. That was a thrilling highlight in my career so far, to get to work on that big of a show with that kind of a cast. I got to work with Judith Light and S. Epatha Merkerson – who are just legends – and Reed Birney, and Simon Helberg, and Natasha obviously. That was really exciting and I was hoping that it would start opening some doors for me in the TV world if it went over well. It seems like it’s gone over pretty well.

PopHorror: That’s awesome!

Lucky McKee: The minute I start to try to dip my toes in the TV space, the whole business shuts down from the strike. I’m hoping when the lights turn back on, I can do some more television while at the same time developing my next film, which the script that I have now I’m really, really happy with. It’s a piece of material that I’ve wanted to make as a feature since I was about 20 years old. So it’s coming up on 30 years that I’ve been wanting to make this very personal story about the rural environment that I grew up in, what it’s like to grow up in the middle of nowhere in America. That seems like it’s on a really good path to getting made. And in between that, it would be really fun to just keep working in television and keep my skills sharp. The thing that’s cool about working in TV is that working on Poker Face, I got to do a detective story. It’s not the type of material that I would ever generate myself or would have ever seen myself doing, but it was so challenging to go into a new frontier like that, genre-wise. I’m hoping television can be a way for me to keep stretching in different directions.

PopHorror: I like that. That is exciting. I haven’t seen Poker Face but now you’ve made me want to watch it.

Lucky McKee: Watch episode five! I’m really happy with it. It’s about some homicidal old gals who live in a retirement home. It’s pretty wild!

PopHorror: You’ve intrigued me! I’ll have to look it up. I have just one last question for you today. What is your favorite scary movie?

Lucky McKee: I think The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is the best horror movie that will ever be made. It’s just a stunning achievement on so many levels.

Thank you so much to Lucky for taking the time to speak with us. You can watch Old Man on digital and On Demand now!