One-on-one with ‘The Old Ways’ Director Chris Alender

In Christopher Alender and Marcos Gabriel’s The Old Ways, possession and witchcraft narratives meet at the nexus of a painful journey back to one’s homeland. Brigitte Kali Canales plays Cristina, a young Latina journalist who ventures into the caves (La Boca--The Mouth) of the Veracruz city of Catemaco for a story, only to face an ancient evil instead. In a disorientated state following her expedition, she wakes up sequestered by a bruja and her son: Luz (Julia Vera) and Javi (Sal Lopez). Along with them is Cristina’s cousin Miranda (Andrea Cortés). In this claustrophobic setting, Cristina is forced by the three of them to confront Postehki--the demon who attacked her inside La Boca. The film is a chamber piece whose intimacy is matched by an overwhelming sense of terror, from which there is seemingly no escape.

What follows below is a conversation between myself and Mr. Alender, the film’s director.

RC: Before we get into The Old Ways, I’d like to talk to you about your previous genre shorts. I feel that your feature is an expansion of several of the themes presented in them. You have one called Subject 232, for example, that creatively relates its protagonist’s supernatural abilities. Can you elaborate on your methods?

Chris Alender: I’m always trying to identify my voice with these little projects, along with tone. I tend to be pretty serious [laughs]. Even if the subject matter is outlandish I think my movie takes itself seriously, if that makes any sense.

Subject 232 was kind of a phone exercise. Some friends of mine were doing a film festival every other month where the whole idea was to do just three shots. And I thought that was an interesting idea because it kind of took procrastination or perfectionism out of the equation. The film was mostly about trying to do an “oner” that didn’t get boring. A lot of times I've been on projects either as a producer or director where once you get into the editing room time moves at a different speed and the thing you thought was so exciting and cool is just painfully boring. I can’t remember how long those shots lasted [in Subject 232] but the whole point of that script was just trying to make sure that at every moment there’s new information to pique your interest without having any escape hatches. Rehearsing and prepping with iPhones, getting it dialled in, watching playback on set was important.

RC: Fix is another short that has a palpably dark aesthetic guiding it. How did you and your screenwriting partner [Marcos Gabriel] bring it to life?

CA: Fix was kind of a proof of concept for something we were developing for Paramount and Bad Robot. We had an idea for a feature and it had been a long time since we shot anything that wasn’t for a job so we just whipped something together. We ran around filming some stuff to get a flavor and said “is there an android movie in the tone of [Nicholas Winding Refn’s] Drive that we could make?” It helped inform some outlining we did afterwards but we just tried to do a tone poem to get a tangible version of what we’re thinking about. It’s nice to have these little rough sketches.

RC: You know, there’s a lot of violence in your films--
CA: [Laughs]

RC: --but I love how in your short East Gate, as well as The Old Ways, you draw the monster from the shadows. Your direction style is also completely empathetic. You’re on the subject as they gaze into the abyss.
CA: I think the empathy side is just intuitive in the way I film. But hiding the monster is more of an intellectual choice based on the movies I loved growing up. Jaws and Alien employed those techniques to great success. Half of it is a necessity based on, you know, not having a fully articulated monster that can just waltz around in front of the camera. It’s a little bit of both taste and situations that you have no control over. You just make the best movie you can with what you’ve got.

RC: For a film as mythologically dense as The Old Ways, I’m curious how you and Marcos approached the story.

CA: There were a lot of guidelines. We knew we were going to try to make this one on our own. Every independent film we’ve ever done has been on location and has seen their own challenges. We were really inspired by a smaller drama I was producing. It was such a great experience. We were getting so many more takes and opportunities to experiment. So we were like: “why don’t we come up with something like this?

Marcos and I have been making movies since the mid-90s in college and he’d always had these stories that his mom told him that he wanted to do something with. Once he had the idea that the story would take place in one room, it helped shape the overarching structure. He hammered out a few pages to show to me and I thought it was cool. So then we started writing. The first draft had a male lead and then the story, almost like a ouija board, took it to where it needed to be. We rewrote the whole thing for a female lead. The themes emerged from that. 

For Marcos, the Latin American setting and brujeria was inspiring to him. For me, I really latched onto the way the American “melting pot” sort of strips away all our knowledge of where we may have come from and where our ancestors are from. We wanted to write about how our connections to the past were being dissolved with each generation. 

RC: The film draws heavily on the history of Brujeria across the Caribbean and Latin America. How did you and Marcos come to terms with what to include?

CA: A lot of stuff came backwards. We started with something we felt passionate about or something we had to do for logistical reasons and kinda worked backwards and forwards again to make it make sense and feel inevitable once we got to the end. We researched pre-Columbian archeological history throughout those regions and we didn’t even know we wanted to set the film in Mexico originally. The research guided us there. There are places where having Aztec mythology doesn’t make sense, like Puerto Rico where we shot. But there’s this place in southern Mexico where the northern part of the Mayan Empire and the southern part of the Aztec Empire meet. Then you have all the post-Colombian catholic influences that come in from the east coast and Caribbean influences. So we just started to look more into the brujas of the world. 

There’s not one bible that says “here’s how you do it” [laughs]. It’s very bespoke to the person and it’s them cobbling together whatever knowledge or influences they have and dealing with whatever particular issues may be going on in their town or village. It’s all very personalized and unique. So after all that we discovered this amazing town called Catemaco that’s actually the brujo capital of the world and thought it had to be there for sure. 

RC: The story feels personal. Something that I latched onto from the beginning was the disconnect that is present in Cristina. Her dual personas as both immigrant and returning native, not being in touch with her culture, impacts how she relates to people. Was that something you emphasized early on?

CA: I think in good stories the characters have a debate. Whether or not you agree with either side while you’re making it isn’t important. You just want to set up all the figures and story to have a really strong point of view. You create that conflict and may never really resolve the question, or maybe in a lot of cases, the answer to the question is a synthesis by the end. We really thought of the four cast members as quadrants of an argument, if you can call it that. There’s kind of a debate between modernism and ancient methods.

RC: Like whether or not to force goat milk down someone’s throat [laughs]

CA: [Laughs] Yeah goat milk is good. 

But we thought of the four of them on religious, secular, modern, ancient scales. Cristina has no religion or connection to her ancient culture. She lives in the US. Drinks frappuccinos, goes to bars, clubs. Her cousin Miranda (Andrea Cortés) appreciates her culture and is educated and knowledgeable about the world but she’s chosen a kind of integration. The idea was that she went to college for archaeology or anthropology and came back as an expert. I’ve met people like her in places like Belize who went off to school, came back, and now are ecologists or preservationists for their hometown.

Then you have Luz who’s all ancient, very religious. She can barely relate to people like Cristina. If we ever get to do a sequel we will get into all this more, but she actually sees the demon world, the spirit world at all times out of one eye. There’s a lot more going on around her that she’s always privy to. Javi, her son, is very dutiful and sticks to the more older methodologies but he’s not super devout anymore. Each of them have their own angle and are pushing back on each other throughout. Ideally at the end, Cristina cherry-picks things from everyone, including herself, and becomes a more robust character.

RC: I admire how digestible you’ve made the film. Especially considering where Cristina ends up by the end. As an immigrant myself I was able to pick up on her identity crisis and you hardly ever see that in horror.

CA: Yeah I loved the idea that Cristina came to the US and, I wouldn’t call it “westernized” because [Mexico] is as west, but became kind of “Americanized.” It was interesting to merge the past with a modern sensibility. There are people who miss the old days but there are even older days before that and everything is a mishmashed version of something before it. It’d be a fun idea if in a future sequel we can explore this.

RC: Cristina is incredibly lived-in as a character. I think Brigitte is great in that role. What was it like to cast that part and work with her on set? 

CA: It took us forever to find her. Kim, our casting director, did an amazing job. On the first day, we had almost everyone. We thought it was gonna be easy but we just couldn’t land on a Cristina and it got to a point where we thought we were gonna have to cancel the movie. We kept asking the crew to wait one more week and they had to take other jobs. 

We luckily found Brigitte last minute because she had either been traveling or doing another show and just wasn’t on our radar. It was amazing. She really hit that character, who we discovered through the audition process was very multi-faceted. Other people came in and hit some aspects but others didn’t feel quite believable. We thought it was impossible to cast. But luckily we found her. And then we had no time before filming to get to know each other or to rehearse. We did one rehearsal I think, a couple phone calls. We really hit the ground running.

I don’t think she even realized until a week after that she was method acting in this role. Any precautions we had to make it easier on her she never wanted any of those. And so I didn’t even know who she was until the last couple of days. She was very in the character and her real self is very light. You see her Instagram and she’s all about “peace and love and happiness” but there was a very different side of her on set. It was a month straight of being tied to beds and fighting demons. [Brigitte] was always concerned with the believability, the motivations, on a beat by beat basis. And she would show up super prepared and usually right on the money. We would talk about the scene the day before and then she would go home and memorize this stuff. We only had one day of filming somebody that wasn’t her. It was intense. 

RC: That level of craft is felt throughout the entire film. The cast has such a wonderful dynamic. I’m curious to know what your approach was to directing them altogether.

CA: To be honest it was a bit of a tunnel vision for me. You have your preconceptions of what this thing is gonna be but then it all changes once there is somebody coming at it from one particular character’s point of view. It was a lot of calibrating. Marcos did a great job with the script. Everybody was 80 or 90% there just from reading it. And then we all had to zero in on the things that were true about the script and that we could all agree on day in and day out.

The funny thing is Hollywood is a big town but everyone kind of knew each other from acting classes or auditions or having been in a movie together. I think Julia was buddies with Andrea’s mom. There was a little bit of familiarity at play on set. Which helped because we didn’t get weeks of rehearsal. They were all just loving people and down to earth so we got super lucky. I like to make it a family experience.

One of the hard things about the film was for the first half, Luz and Javi are antagonists to our lead. It was important for us to not lie about who they were. We wanted them to be the same people at the end of the movie so that on rewatch you wouldn’t go “why is [Javi] all of a sudden twirling his moustache?” We wanted to make sure that Cristina’s point of view was making sense and that everyone’s actions were ambiguous enough that, with the wrong frame of mind, you could assume Javi was evil. But in fact, he wasn’t at all.

Those were conversations I had with Sal. He would say “well why am I shoving goat milk down her throat? That seems pretty violent.” So I said, let’s think about it like your mother [Luz] is a vet and you’re her vet tech. You’ve been kicked in the face many times by a horse who didn’t want to take their medicine. You just have to get it done. It’s very matter-of-fact. You’ve done It a hundred times and if you don’t do it right the horse dies or you get hurt.

RC: Right. There is a thread in the film dealing with Javi’s exhaustion with people who run around in La Boca, US travelers in particular. Given that context among the older characters in the film, and the fact that the work environment was so familiar, what was the dynamic like between Julia and Sal on set?

CA: They were open to bonding as quickly as they could with the time constraints we had. Sal was in a dance troupe so he was great at warming people up. That kept things light. [Julia and Sal] really leaned on personal experience to act as proxies for the roles they played. Sal and Julia had experiences with older family members and were able to transpose that onto a stranger. They tapped into that connection or loss or whatever that may be. All of them were masters of their craft so it was amazing to see it happen. Everyone was executing at such a high level.

RC: It’s like a kind of alchemy coming together.

CA: Yeah.

RC: And the acting is one aspect but delving backwards a little bit into the work you’ve done, I want to ask about the special effects for this film. The way that CGI is used in the film is incredibly thoughtful. What kind of planning went into that?

CA: I did most of the effects myself so it had to be thoughtful [laughs]. Every time I thought of something to do I knew it was all on me. I have a background doing digital effects but I’m not a full-time VFX artist so a bunch of stuff was just out of my comfort zone. And I was able to spend a lot of time during the pandemic learning how to do fluid simulation for all the smoke that’s moving around and teach myself how to sculpt and rig characters for some of the CG creature work. It was very important for me to get the footage right so it feels integrated.

I’ve worked on a lot of projects where the footage wasn’t shot right or lit right. VFX artists have to overcome those challenges in the editing room. I do my own drawings and at our company, we have an amazing storyboard artist who did much more refined drawings than we could do for certain scenes. And we would shoot stuff on our iPads and iPhones.

The nice thing is that as they were building the set at our soundstage in Burbank, we were able to just be in there planning stuff out with our stunt choreographer Valerie or Adam the DP. We were able to see what worked and what didn’t work, just getting stuff as well planned out as we could so it fit together as seamlessly as possible. We did a bunch of stuff in-camera as well, like the demon, but we knew we were going to have to supplement the stuff we couldn’t afford. We got a lot of shots that are fully in camera which helps the actors and the atmosphere. I mean, you always mess stuff up but hopefully, that didn’t show too much.

RC: Not at all! It all looked good to me [laughs].

CA: [Laughs] Well you know one night I woke up in a pool of sweat because there’s that one scene where Cristina walks up to the portal threshold and tries to move it with her arms. And I knew Brigitte could pull it off but I was still worried that it would look fake. I work with Muppets and puppets and stuff all the time and you can tell when it looks off for certain logistical reasons. You can tell how something is being motivated and I knew that if Brigitte was trying to move something that wasn’t there and she was using her shoulders instead of her triceps to make that happen, there’s something off about that.

So someone left the set and someone went out to get a massage gun, but it wasn't strong enough. Then I thought about this tool, you know, a Sawzall. It’s like a tiny jackhammer that usually has a blade at the end but you use it to take the dry walls down in your house. It’s not an elegant thing [laughs]. We used that and tied it around [Brigitte’s] arm. At that point, it was pretty late in the filming and [Brigitte] said “yeah let’s do it!.” So we put some foam around the crook of her elbow and just cut it out of the frame as much as we could. We did that and the shot looked so much better.

RC: The physical struggle that Brigitte channels through Cristina is seamless there. I had no idea you could even use a Sawzall to manipulate movement like that. It looks like the portal is fighting.

CA: Yeah. It was always about how to make it look more real, physical. And it didn't have to be expensive. We just made it safe and removed the saw from it. Those little things kind of add up and hopefully make [the film] feel a little bit more tangible.

And that effect was one of the easier ones to do in the movie. If it’s all about selling it, you don’t really have to do much. I mean, it’s so barebones. The biggest special effect was actually the window, the blue screen. Convincing an audience they were looking out at a jungle and not in Burbank, California [laughs]. Hopefully, no one even notices that. But now they will because I spoiled it.

RC: I’ll edit around this part and try not to blow up your spot too much. 

CA: [Laughs] Don’t worry about it.

RC: [Laughs] Fair enough. To bring this home though, I want to ask you about an interview you did where you mentioned that one of the things filmmakers lost out on last year was the ability to see their work with an audience for the first time. With the film being out on Netflix and soon to be on digital, do you see the potential for intimacy on these platforms?

CA: Yeah I mean in the early days before a film is about to be released, I really do love seeing it with an audience and figuring out where it’s too slow or boring or what works tone-wise. We definitely lost that opportunity. Although now that I’ve seen it a few times with people, I’m happy with it. You do miss that kind of midnight scream, throwing popcorn in the air type thing. 

But, for instance, it wasn’t clear how the story between Cristina and Miranda rekindling their relationship as family would play out on set. Then as we got into the editing room we really started to focus on that and make it pop a little more. And I think a lot of the pure drama elements of the movie hold up on any size screen. Cristina herself also seems to be resonating, from what I can gather on Twitter. There are teenage girls doing videos on how to do the make-up in the finale so I’m excited about the influence it’s having.

And it’s scary to watch a movie by yourself at home or with a friend or two. I think this movie has that kind of haunted house vibe, and that element will really play for the home audience. Another thing that’s fun about the Blu-Ray is that there are tons of behind the scenes stuff on there that you never get when you go to the theater. We wanted to make sure there would be a reason to get the disc so we got over 2 hours of bonus material plus the commentary. We have a behind-the-scenes documentary, storyboard comparisons, a storyboarded alternate ending. There’s a bunch of cool stuff on there to make it educational and fun. There’s a record also coming out when we get over the hurdle of shortages created by the pandemic.

RC: As a physical media dork I’ll definitely be keeping my eye out for those. Thank you for sitting down with me, Chris. It was a total pleasure.

CA: Thank you for having me.

THE OLD WAYS is currently streaming on Netflix and is available on digital and Blu-ray/DVD October 12, 2021.