Simon West has directed some classic action pictures including Con Air, Jason Statham’s The Mechanic and The Expendables 2. Now he has helmed his latest picture Old Guy starring Christoph Waltz. He stopped by to chat with me about the film and working with Christoph Waltz.
Hey Simon, great to meet you.
Hi Eoin, you too, like the JCVD hat. Oh yes and you’ve got the Con Air poster in the background.
Yes, it’s pretty much my all-time favourite movie.
Oh wow.
I saw it five times when it came out in the theatre.
Really, well done. That’s amazing. Thank you for that.
My pleasure. I loved Old Guy as well, what was it about the script for it that really made you want to direct this one?
It’s just the lead character. I mean, obviously it’s a Hitman movie and I’ve done a Hitman movie before with Jason Statham, but it was the exact opposite. That was like a ruthless, at the peak of his talents, an absolute machine and cut off from the rest of the world and doesn’t have any friends, doesn’t have any family that we know of. It was sort of pretty typical Hitman in some ways, but this was the opposite, the antithesis. This was a Hitman who likes to party, likes to drink, he stays out all night, picks up younger women that are inappropriate, but he’s really warm and funny and people like him, and he’s sort of living life like he did 30 years before. So, that was what attracted me. It’s just like a guy that was fun to be with, because when you make a film, you want people to like the person. Because they’ve got to spend that time in the movie with them and if you like them, you want them to survive, you want them to do well, you want them to succeed. So, I liked the character, I liked him as a person; generally, you have some horrendous monster and you like that monster because he’s scary, but actually you want to spend time with Danny Dolinski because he would be a good time, good conversationalist, but he just also happens to be a Hitman. So, it’s that and someone having a very exotic job in some way, but living a very normal, degenerate, older guy lifestyle that he shouldn’t be. And then of course, coming up against the Gen Z, you get all the fun of the Boomer versus the Gen Z person, and you get to play with that. So, you could see where the humor would be; you start envisaging who could play it and what actors, trying out different versions in your head of how they would interact. That’s why I sort of came up with Christoph Waltz, because it’s something unexpected, because you always want to give someone fresh. You don’t want to go, rent a Hitman who was big in the nineties and is now both a washed-up action hero, but also a washed-up character in the film. They kind of did that in Expendables. So, it’s more, I’m trying to find an actor who you wouldn’t expect to be like this, and I think people wouldn’t expect Christoph, who’s normally buttoned up and precise and super intelligent and you wouldn’t expect him to be like this. You expect him to be the other type of Hitman. That’s why it’s interesting to me to cast him because it was fresh, and you get to watch somebody who think you might perceive in one way, do something quite different. And he loved it. I think that’s why he wanted to do it because he’s not like that at all. He’s not like that character at all. Actors want to play people that are not like them a lot of the time. So, it’s fun because Christoph is the exact opposite of that character. But he’s great though.
It is very different from what we’ve seen before, but even within the first few seconds, you kind of love the character; it just opens up with him dancing in the club so we’re thinking “oh, this isn’t what we’re used to seeing from Christoph Waltz” and that’s what’s so interesting about it.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I do with the opening scene. I wanted to do that because it wasn’t in the script. The script started with him, just sort of waking up after the night after, but I wanted to hit people in the face straight away with like, this is how crazy this character gets between jobs and both it’s unusual for a Hitman to behave like that and it’s very unusual for Christoph to be seen like that. So, I want to make everybody understand in the first few shots what the character in the film is going to be like.
What’s Christoph actually like to work with?
He’s incredibly professional I mean, he’s a consummate, because I think his massive success came later in life. He was acting for many years doing all sorts of things and he comes from a theatrical family. He’s very highly educated, speaks five or six languages, including ancient Greek and you can talk to him about anything. One day on the set, we were waiting for some light to be set up and we both were looking at a building in Belfast and going, “look at the perspective on that”. And so, we started talking about perspective and when it came into medieval art and things like that. So, you can go off on a tangent with him about almost anything. And he’s lived everywhere; he’s lived in England, he’s lived in America, he’s lived all over Europe. He’s a really interesting person to talk with, even if it’s never about film and it’s never about acting. It’s always about something else because he’s interested in a lot of things. A pleasure to work with and then, of course you shout action and boom, he’s completely focused on it. He knows what he’s going to do. He’s so skillful that you kind of at some point have to stop doing takes because you have to move on time wise. But I could watch him all day acting. He’s just really fascinating. Watching somebody who’s so good in real life, I’ve become like an audience member. I’m sitting on set watching like I’m at home, but getting one scene at a time. So, yeah, you turn into a bit of a film fan then.
I love that a lot of it took place in Northern Ireland where my family’s originally from. What was the shoot like there?
It was great to shoot Belfast for Belfast because most people go there and try and turn it into something else. The crew and the locals were saying it’s really unusual. We don’t have to cover up signs. We don’t have to pretend we’re in New York. This is great. We’re shooting, so that was nice. It was nothing to do with the troubles. It was like there’s a lot more going on there than that. You know, that’s history. But it’s just a normal European city. So, it’s just plain old crime going on (laughs). So, that was refreshing to do that.
I was just watching The Mechanic recently and the behind-the-scenes interviews with it. You were saying how you liked to do a lot of the action in camera and practically; it was real stunts and set-pieces. Do you still like to try and do as much of the action in camera and for real as possible?
Yeah, I mean, going back to Con Air, that was just at the beginning of CGI coming in and I did everything in Con Air in camera. I think it’s like one shot that was impossible to do that had to have a little bit of CGI in it. But then the whole CGI revolution happened. But all the way along, I’ve tried doing things in camera and it’s more realistic to me, more believable, and the audience, I think, can tell the difference. Unless you’re doing a big CGI film, which is more of an animation type of action-adventure film, I always try and hide if there is any CG, because you can’t do something practically, use it very limited. But generally speaking, try to do everything in camera.
Were there any scenes that you had to cut from this movie that you regretted or is the final film exactly the way you wanted it?
No, not cut. I mean, the way I shoot, actually, I’m one of those people that doesn’t have a lot of extra scenes. It’s kind of a lot of the time I’m struggling to get the film up to the length of a feature film. You have to be at least 93 minutes for a film, and I quite often struggle because I don’t shoot a lot of extra scenes, or I very rarely throw any scenes away. Sometimes, they want me to do a director’s cut and extend it and I go, “I’ve got nothing else. What’s in the film is in the film. There aren’t any extra scenes”. I mean, a couple of times on Old Guy something that may have been written more elaborately that I felt in the action parts, went out of reality and became like an action film instead of a real drama where people are doing action things. So, there was a couple of scenes I made more realistic than were written. They were written more like your traditional, this guy can do anything; he can fight 10 men at once. And you go, wait, the film’s called Old Guy and we’ve just established that he’s losing his powers. This, we have to make it look like he’s only just surviving, not like they’re not going to get 10 guys down in one punch.
Yeah, exactly. Finally, how would you like the film to resonate with audiences?
I just hope people just enjoy being with those people, the characters and emotionally moved by it because it’s got action in it, but it’s got a lot of humour. I just hope people are warm to it. You come out with a feeling like you’ve spent time with three great characters that you followed. So, that’s what I hope.
Well, thank you very much for taking time to chat. I would love to talk for several hours with you at some point (laughs) but all the best with the film.
All right. Nice to see you. Thanks a lot. Bye bye.
OLD GUY WILL BE IN SELECT THEATERS AND ON DIGITAL: February 21, 2025