After directing John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush in a psychological thriller set in a rest home, James Ashcroft’s next job is a Robert De Niro movie.
It’s May 2024. In the darkened screening room of a post-production facility in central Auckland, director James Ashcroft is spending much of the day on the sound mix for his second feature, The Rule of Jenny Pen, and what will prove to be one of its most alarming scenes. On screen, Geoffrey Rush is stirring from sleep or a blackout, and finds his wheelchair is accelerating down a corridor. His head rolls back to see it’s being pushed by John Lithgow, all mad grin and cold grey eyes.
The challenge today is to get the sound to evoke the Rush character’s discombobulating experience and raise the tension through the 50-second sequence to its crashing end.
Rush comes hurtling down the corridor again and again as different layers of sonic texture, ambient sound and a tinnitus-like whine are adjusted for effect. In between, Ashcroft genially tries to articulate what he thinks it needs to the mixing team behind the computer screens in front. “How can we make it feel more intense?” he says at one point. “It’s just not the right sound. It needs to be more more, or too too …”
In the finished film, the scene is one of many in which the sound does a lot of heavy lifting in turning the supposedly benign, quiet environment of a rest home into something deeply unsettling.
“I always say to my children, you know, if something scary comes on TV just press mute, and then you’re left with something that has lost 90% of its tone and power. Tension in the films that I really love obviously comes from the visuals. But emotionally, 70% of that work is being lifted by sound and sound design, composition, and how you use that in an unsettling way. I despise jump scares. But sound shortcuts the synapses and gets straight to the emotional impact. It’s a very primal thing.”
The Rule of Jenny Pen is Ashcroft’s second adaptation of an Owen Marshall short story – but it’s also his first. When 10 or so years ago he decided to go all-in on film-making after coming up as an actor and spending nearly a decade as artistic director of Wellington-based Māori theatre company Taki Rua Productions, he optioned two of Marshall’s tales.
The first script he and writing partner Eli Kent tackled was Jenny Pen. Marshall’s story was about Dave Crealy, a sadistic man making life hell for his fellow rest home residents while staff remained oblivious. Among those he tormented with a hand puppet he dubbed “Jenny Pen” was Stefan Mortensen, a judge residing there after a debilitating stroke, and Tony Garfield, a former rugby great now a frail figure.
But the setting and the ensemble required made it too ambitious for a first-time feature director. So, Ashcroft and Kent turned to the other Marshall story, Coming Home in the Dark. With a budget of $1.4 million and filmed in 20 nights during the winter of 2019, the movie debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2021. On screen, its brutal story of a road-tripping family of four abducted by two men gripped with its chilling sense of dread. And because the pandemic-affected festival was largely online, more virtual attendees saw it than might have otherwise at cinema screenings, generating its own wave of buzz and being picked up by Netflix.
Signed with major US talent managers Creative Artists Agency, Ashcroft was taking calls on US projects. But first, his new Hollywood connections would help get The Rule of Jenny Pen script under the noses of Rush and Lithgow. Both quickly said yes to the roles of Mortensen and Crealy and a trip to Taupō to film it.
Speaking to the Listener earlier this month, Ashcroft jokes that the pair weren’t actually his and Kent’s first choices. “Our first choices were Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers but obviously they were unavailable.”
Still, Rush played Sellers in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, a 2004 biopic – which also starred Lithgow – and which also had Rush-as-Sellers as the wheelchair-bound Dr Strangelove of the Stanley Kubrick film.
“It was wanting that formidable duel between those two acting icons. John and Geoffrey are literally two of my cinematic heroes. I’ve grown up watching them … they always felt very aligned to me in general, in terms of my tastes and preferences. They felt like the perfect fit for both of these roles.”
Lithgow has played plenty of psychopaths and baddies in his time, but this character wasn’t designed as such.
“The note I always had for Crealy was, whoever plays this role, I’m not after somebody playing a villain. I’m wanting somebody who is just brimming over with joy in what they do. For the first time in this guy’s life, he’s starting to experience something close to ecstasy, or complete abandonment and enjoyment.
“That was the terrifying thing with Crealy – the smallest nobody can still become the biggest somebody in a terrifying way, given the right circumstances.”
The film flips the main perspective of the Marshall story from Crealy to Mortensen and expands on it. We first meet Mortensen as he’s passing judgment at a sentencing. “Mortensen is a bit of a prick. He’s a bully to begin with … and there’s a real steel and intellectual coldness that Geoffrey brings to that role.”
The courtroom scene’s packed public gallery has among it a well-known, Timaru-based author. “I was adamant on Owen having a cameo, considering how supportive and generous he has been with his material.”
Much of the rest home scenes were shot at the Wairakei Resort Taupō in late 2023 and had many local actors in support. George Henare’s Garfield faces the full brunt of Crealy’s cruelty in a heartbreaking turn. “I don’t view this as a two-hander. It’s about these three men. It wasn’t a case of him holding his own; George was just match fit.”
The other notable veterans included Ian Mune, Ginette McDonald, Nathaniel Lees, Bruce Phillips, Jane Waddell and Irene Wood. “The sad reality is – and this goes for the leads as well – the older you get, the less, you know, substantial work opportunities present themselves. “I think everyone probably slept for a month straight after filming wrapped, because they would have been exhausted. But they had more enthusiasm and energy and willingness to be vulnerable and try new things and put themselves out there as an ensemble and as a wider group than I’ve seen in most drama schools.”
It’s also a film about the vulnerabilities and powerlessness of old age. Anyone relying on homes to care for their elders might find it unnerving.
Ashcroft (Ngāti Kahu, Ngāpuhi), says he grew up with elderly people his whole life. His mother died in 2023 in the home he built for her and his father behind his house in Mt Maunganui. “And that’s why we built it for them – to be there.”
But he doesn’t have anything against rest homes, even if his film and Marshall’s story may take a dim view of them. “Those environments are very easy to judge in a negative way, when actually there’s a lot of life in them, too.”
Still, it’s unlikely Jenny Pen will be movie-night fare at any aged care institution. Though Ashcroft doesn’t think he’s made a horror film. “I’ve never referred to it once as a horror movie. I probably said this ad nauseam behind the scenes when we were making it about it not being a horror movie. Yes, horrific things happen in it, but we wrote a psychological thriller. And once they’ve seen it, people have been incredibly surprised how disturbing and poignant emotionally the film is.
“It was always a film about tyranny and that is why I wanted to tell it now.”
Anyone relying on homes to care for their elders might find it unnerving.
That said, he’s comfortable with the film’s sale to Shudder, a US-based horror streaming platform, meaning it will have a limited cinema release internationally. “Looking for the fastest bite of the market is one of the challenges that film-makers have now.” He lost a battle with Shudder, he says, on having the Jenny Pen doll on the poster, marketing it as another horror-doll flick.
On the day Ashcroft talks to the Listener, he is busy packing for another US trip, but it’s a one-way ticket. He’ll be spending much of the rest of the year there working on The Whisper Man, an adaptation of the 2019 Alex North bestseller. The story is about a crime writer and the abduction of his 8-year-old son and possible connections to a case once investigated by his retired detective father. Robert De Niro plays the former cop. The film is being made for Netflix by AGBO, the production company founded by Joe and Anthony Russo, the directors of the Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame movies. The company has been producing a raft of big-budget genre movies and shows for streamers.
The Whisper Man is the first to make it to the top of Ashcroft’s growing pile of possible projects in the US since Coming Home in the Dark. That also now includes an adaptation of Stephen King’s 2024 novella Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream, which King offered Ashcroft after seeing Jenny Pen. After Pen’s world premiere at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, in September, King tweeted that it was “one of the best movies I’ve seen this year”.
“That tweet was a gift that kept giving,” says Ashcroft.
Well, squint a bit at some scenes in Jenny Pen and you might be reminded of Kubrick’s film of King’s The Shining.
“It’s hard to shoot a long corridor scene without anyone saying that. But aesthetics wise, The Shining was definitely always a strong reference point.”
He’s already been to the US to meet De Niro and get his stamp of approval. At 81 and recently starring in the Netflix series Zero Day as a former US president showing signs of memory loss, De Niro is even older than Ashcroft’s Jenny Pen leads.
“It’s never too late to do some good work.”
The Rule of Jenny Pen is in cinemas from March 20 and streams on AMC+/Shudder from March 28.