‘The Elderly’ Directors On How This Stephen King Classic Shaped Their Disturbing New Film
An elderly person in horror is usually a site/sight of horror. Their aging bodies are often depicted as decrepit, weak, and an omen of looming death. But in the new film from Spanish directors Fernando González Gómez and Raúl Cerezo, The Elderly, older people aren’t weak, immobile creatures. In fact, they are the very opposite…
Read the full synopsis below:
Devastated by an unexpected loss, octogenarian Manuel (Zorian Eguileor) finds his mental state rapidly shifting as disturbing impulses take root. Manuel struggles with his changing nature as his bonds with his son and pregnant daughter-in-law are tested. As Manuel’s reality untethers, tensions around him begin to rise in a contagion of chaos set to erupt on the hottest night of the century.
Dread Central spoke with González Gómez and Cerezo, as well as co-writers Rubén Sánchez Trigos and Javier Trigales, at last year’s Fantasia Film Festival about why they wanted to use temperature, tricking their actors, and more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Dread Central: Who came up with the initial idea for The Elderly?
Fernando González Gómez: I met him [Raúl Cerezo, the co-director] 10 years ago at a festival. We were talking about movies, about projects, and he talked to me about one idea he got to make a short film. But it was so powerful that we started to think and to talk about translating it into a feature film. He said two or three things about the film, and that’s all for me. I said to him that I wanted to be in that movie, I wanted to write that movie. It was very hard work to be here now. I started to get white hair.
[Laughs]
Dread Central: [To co-writer Rubén Sánchez Trigos] How did you get involved with The Elderly?
Rubén Sánchez Trigos: So Raul contacted me because he had an amazing script, but they were stuck. They didn’t have any more ideas. The thing that I fell in love with, when I was reading The Elderly script, is that the idea that they have, what the film was attached to, was not anything that I had seen in the cinema before. It was not something that was attached to any genre in particular.
DC: Cool. So you had The Passenger come out not that long ago, and The Elderly could not be any more different. What is it like having these two projects come out so closely together, and what was it like working on this movie versus The Passenger?
FGG: I’d say it was nice. I mean, when I started to work with Raúl in The Elderly, I remember it was the last day of shooting of The Passenger, and I received a call at 12:00 at night, after 11 hours of shooting. I was in bed, and the producer called me, “Fernando, Fernando, do you think we can shoot another film before the end of the year?” And I was like, “What?” It was in November.
DC: Oh my God.
FGG: “No, no, this is impossible, it can’t be done, and I’m tired, look for another director.” I called Raúl at this time, and he was like, “Raul, the producer called me, he wants another movie.”
“When?”
“Before the end of the year.”
“This is impossible, okay.”
Finally, it was not before the end of the year, finally, we had a meeting in January with José Luis [the producer], and we talked about what the project could be to go for it. We had some ideas because our screenwriter had some projects, Raúl had another project. But Raúl told me, “But Fernando I have a project that I’ve been writing for the last 10 years, and it’s very polished. This is smooth, it’s perfect. I think we have a really good base in order to work.”
And I said, “Okay, let’s go for it.” Because I had some ideas, and we had a lot of ideas but they were still raw. And this one was cooking totally, okay. So I said, “Let’s go for it.” Also, we thought, “OK it’s going to be very interesting. It’s like a small A24 movie.”
For us it was really nice. The Elderly for us, was something totally different, with another type of narrative, with another tone, more dramatic, more like a small drama, and for us was nice in order to fight with this different tone.
DC: You don’t see old people as villains as often, so what was it like to work with that subject, and that kind of change?
Raúl Cerezo: We tricked him. The Elderly has a message at the end of their revolution, that their rebellion is something that they needed from the beginning because of the way that we treated them. We explained to them that they were the heroes of the film, and that’s how they got them to do all the things that they had to do at the end.
[Laughs]
DC: How did they react when they found out what the movie was actually about?
RC: They haven’t found out. This was a world premiere so they haven’t seen the film yet.
FGG: No one, no one. Even the main characters, even the main characters, the actors, no one watched it. I mean, the only people from the thing that watch the movie are for sure Raul, probably like 50 times.
DC: What was it like getting all of these actors into these very intense emotional spaces, especially at the end, with the non-stop screaming and tension?
FGG: Well, I think for Raul and I it was really interesting to work with this different type of movie compared to The Passenger. If you can remember Paula Gallego, the girl, is the main character in both films. Also, we started to work with Paula to change totally her character and move farther between the girl that you can see in The Passenger, and the girl one year later, less than six months later.
Starting from that point this girl with no future. She’s fighting for the world. And with the other characters I mean, have Zorion [Eguileor] elevated his character a lot, but also working with Gustavo Salmerón, with all this weight on his head. We worked a lot on the tone
Exactly the same as The Passenger, when we started and I remember we were focusing on the tone. What is the tone that we need? How can we hold this atmosphere, this uncomfortable atmosphere during the movie? All this pressure, during the movie, like the heat, like the temperature, with the characters. And the evolution of the temperature going through and with the characters, and the evolution of the characters in the movie.
DC: Was the temperature aspect always part of the script, with the heat?
Javier Trigales: This is something we wanted to work with because we wanted to create a really special atmosphere that involves all the characters, all the small places where the action is happening. And we thought not only about the issue of climate change, but also about the kind of suffocating atmosphere.
RST: There are two things that we wanted to stand out. One of the things is the atmosphere, we wanted to reference The Shining in terms of everyday people doing normal things that are made scary by the film’s atmosphere.
In the beginning, we thought instead of making it really hot, we wanted to make it really cold. The other thing about the heat is that we wanted to show how the world is right now, and how these things are happening already.
RC: We also decided not to go with the cold atmosphere because it was adding to the budget.
FGG: But even then, I think it was a really good idea to use the heat because heat and wind make people go crazy. I mean, it’s 38 degrees Celsius in Madrid in Spain. 500 people have died in this heatwave in Spain.
RST: Yeah, last night, apparently one of my friends last night had heatstroke.
JT: The other thing about the temperature, was the number of the temperature increasing was not in the script. It was an idea in the meeting procedure because when we show the first draft of the movie, we watch it and we see this is so intense. We need to do something, give something, some rest to the audience in order to breathe. This is why we introduced the temperature.
At first, it was black spaces, but we needed to give info to the audience. What we can do, and we thought in The Shining, with the different days of the week, he used Monday, etc. Then we said, ‘OK we’re going to go through it, and we’re going to use increasing temperature in order to give info but also give this editing or pause or just a breath to the audience’ because we notice very uncomfortable reactions from viewers.
DC: Yeah. The reactions were great when everyone watching the temperature kept going up, and everyone was like, “Oh no.”
FGG: But also one very small detail, the movement of the numbers, like that is the same movement of the camera, following down at the beginning of the scene. There are some moments in the movie you see that the camera is something coming from the sky, and you have a sound, it’s exactly the same movement as the numbers. It’s small details.
DC: Was it actually hot when you were shooting?
JT: Not too much.
RC: It was actually very difficult for the actors to make visible that they were that hot. It was actually cold.
FGG: The scene where they are trying to find where the grandfather is, and then Mario goes to his flat, and then the two guys have this encounter with the guy with the chair? Okay, after they walked through the street at night, this night was cold. I mean, they were cold doing this scene because they were with the T-shirts, but was probably three degrees Celsius.
RC: Everything was supposed to come to an end with an eclipse before. Instead of the clouds, it was an eclipse. But we decided to change it to the clouds and now we actually like it better.
DC: And so the clouds and the lightning were not the initial idea, right?
RC: No it wasn’t. But we used a technique seen in films like E.T. where we created closed with chemical reactions within liquids.
FGG: In Ghostbusters also, they use this technique. My friend Raul hates the VFX. He likes the ones when it’s used with intelligence. When it’s like you are seeing nothing, then we like this combination. There is a minimum, only the minimum SFX that we have to have. All the clouds are digital but we follow the kind of aspect of these real clouds made with fluids, recorded in the 80s movies like Ghostbusters.
The practical effects are sometimes really expensive, and it is an art. There are not a lot of people that are able to do practical. I mean, in Spain we have three people who are VFX specialists. Three people are able to do the practical thing that is like the recreation of his half body, with his chest. I mean, not enough artists to do this. And to do the clouds, I remember we try to do, let’s do it, let’s record the fluid with ink. They put the ink and then you just see the fluid moving, and you record a lot of shots. But it wasn’t possible, because there was no one that knew how to do it. Nobody, no one in Spain, we search for it.
RC: So we had to create with CGI what we couldn’t make in the flesh.
The Elderly is out now on VOD and Blu-Ray from Dark Star Pictures.
Categorized:Interviews
