John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush star in James Ashcroft’s sophomore outing, Aotearoa-set thriller The Rule of Jenny Pen. Steve Newall chats to the filmmaker about his new pic.
Aotearoa director James Ashcroft made a splash with his debut, 2021 psychological thriller Coming Home in the Dark. Now we get to see his follow-up, the Stephen King-approved The Rule of Jenny Pen. It’s another NZ-set thriller, taking place in an aged care facility in which the film’s international stars John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush join many familiar homegrown faces.
Seen from the perspective of Rush’s character Stefan Mortensen, a judge who’s suffering debilitating strokes, it’s a story that sees the inhabitants of generic Aotearoa rest home tormented by bullies in their midst—the sadistic Crealy (Lithgow) and the puppet he wields (or is that vice versa?) Jenny Pen.
The Rule of Jenny Pen has taken a minute to get to screens here, with its US premiere at Fantastic Fest in September 2024, and then launching in Europe at Sitges Film Festival the following month.
“The first audience you always want to share the work with is the local audience, not only because they were the ones who were so heavily involved with making it,” James Ashcroft concedes. “I think local audiences are great because I find that they’re still very democratic.”
“That being said, what was nice about where we premiered in Austin, Texas last year, and then in Siches in Barcelona, was getting two very, very different audiences. Two very, very different cultures, but also equally as genre passionate as each other.” Ashcroft felt a great weight lift after those screenings last year, seeing that the intentions of the work landing with people who couldn’t be more polar opposite from one another culturally speaking.
“I like genre audiences,” Ashcroft says, explaining that really passionate genre audiences, are usually all cinephiles—well versed in cinema and literature, and very, very adventurous. Open in their tastes to being surprised and trying something outside the square, the filmmaker finds them a real pleasure to engage with afterwards.
“It was a film that, you know, is a bit divisive,” he says. “I think, I hope it is.” Some of the best conversations Ashcroft recalls having about The Rule of Jenny Pen were people who fell on either side of the response, audience members who didn’t see their own emotional response as the be all and end all, but who viewed cinema as an art.
Cinema is indeed an art, but not everyone who works in it could be considered an artist. John Lithgow definitely fits the criteria though, and serves up a delightfully villainous turn in The Rule of Jenny Pen. “John’s just one of those great actors,” says Ashcroft. “He can do everything. He works across all the mediums—theater, film, television, radio. He’s an author. He’s written a couple of satirical, political verse books. He’s done children’s books. He’s done an autobiography.”
“I think the commonality which makes him such a great villain, as well as a great comedian or a great dramatic actor, is that he just loves acting and creating, and he has such relish in whatever he’s doing,” Ashcroft muses, speculating Lithgow has never been bored. “I doubt he’s seen more than a month’s worth of unemployment his entire life. He’s just a thoroughbred in that respect, and it’s infectious.”
While much of The Rule of Jenny Pen is quite grounded, I suggest the film still gives Lithgow license to go big—the horror tinges lining up with his comedy chops in the same application of tension, release and timing. Ashcroft, too, sees comedy and horror as close cousins. “You can kill both very simply,” he says. “I tell this to my kids—if you want to neuter a horror film and make it not scary, just turn the volume down, and that’s it. It’s gone.”
“A lot of great, great comedians make strong dramatic actors as well, and vice versa. The two references I always said to John were Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers, who were both, you know, strong dramatic actors, but also had flair for comedy.”
“John’s just fearless,” Ashcroft continues. “And Geoffrey [Rush] too. Geoffrey is very similar to those actors as well, there’s a real embracing of vulnerability to both of them.” Ashcroft highlights a couple of literal examples of this, where each of their characters are seen naked in the shower—moments that he says both actors fought for: “Like, we have to keep those moments, because it’s not something that you often see in a film, the vulnerability of a naked person of senior years, without it being ridiculed, or the butt of a joke, or in some kind of menacing way.”
At a time when New Zealand seems to be on screen more than ever—both as a stand-in for other locations or telling our own unique stories—I asked Ashcroft what it was about The Rule of Jenny Pen that meant it had to be told as an Aotearoa story. Yes, like Coming Home in the Dark it’s based on a short story by New Zealand author Owen Marshall, but led by international actors and with a setup that will resonate across many Western societies, just how much Aotearoa is in its DNA?
For Ashcroft and his writing partner Eli Kent, it lay in the specifics of the three main characters, the director explains. There’s Lithgow’s character Crealy: “a man who’s sort of come from very little and now finds himself in an extreme power, and wielding that with impunity”. George Henare’s Tony: “a ‘former rugby player who played for New Zealand’ because we were never allowed and given permission to use the name of that particular team, which everyone can identify.” And then “somebody who was from the upper classes, and a certain affluence—Geoffrey’s character, Judge Mortensen.”
Once Ashcroft and Kent started to really develop those characters, that’s when it began to feel like they were talking and touching on things that were familiar. “Especially New Zealand’s attitude to masculinity being so tied up in the rugby culture,” Ashcroft says, identifying our country’s long-held idealism of strength and masculinity. Yet in The Rule of Jenny Pen, it’s the rugby great who we see picked on the most and targeted the most…
For Ashcroft, Crealy felt very at home with any number of villains seen in New Zealand news reports: “The banality of evil, the banality of what that really looks like in the every day. It’s not glamorous. It’s not Hannibal Lecter. It’s power and it corrupts absolutely. And if it gets a hold, like a weed, it will grow very, very quickly and usually out of control in a short amount of time. Cultural institutions around the world are always a hotbed for that kind of power imbalance and bad behaviour.”
For someone as affluent and as powerful as Geoffrey’s character, Judge Mortensen, being brought down into a democratic kind of community where there is no special treatment, is something Ashcroft imagines is difficult to adjust to. “It doesn’t matter what kind of world you come from, what kind of status you enjoy—at a certain age, age becomes very democratising, and that environment is a very democratising environment. It’s like a school yard in that sense.”
“Geoffrey, his character before the home, was a very punitive man,” Ashcroft says. “He was a man who has been the hanging judge in many ways. He’s been the bully, just in a legal or ‘acceptable’ way.” Putting those two bullies in close proximity became a really interesting clash of big egos to Ashcroft. Running through it all, was this specifically New Zealand notion of punishment.
“It’s something very punitive that we’re looking at,” explains Ashcroft. “Not that I view this as a horror, but like Italy has giallo, which is all about corruption and repression of sexuality and corruption of politics and things like that. I always think New Zealand horror has a flavour of the punitive and the isolation that comes from being in a small island almost removed, but also in the shadow of England and other places that have come in and forced their stamp of how to do things.”
One of the challenges for Ashcroft’s stars, as they embodied New Zealanders, was tackling our notoriously tricky accent. Ashcroft acknowledges a couple of strong previous screen examples, including Sir Anthony Hopkins and Elisabeth Moss, before explaining more about how Lithgow approached our specific diction (try saying that ten times quickly with a thick Kiwi accent). “John did work with a dialect coach,” he says. “He was very studious, and wanting to give that authenticity. My only direction back to him about that was ‘I don’t want you to be too good a student about it, so that the technical work is getting in the way’. For me, it was about recognising that John’s from the East Coast, with a certain sound, so how do we remove those sounds so you can still be free.”
“The biggest thing for me is that if the actor is enjoying it, even if it’s not technically accurate, I’m still going to be enjoying what they’re doing, because of that relish and playfulness. So as long as the logistics and the technical work of acting doesn’t get in the way of the thing which is actually going to get me engaged—which is that joy.”
There’s a definite joy to be had in seeing Aotearoa screen greats like Ginette McDonald, Nathaniel Lees, Ian Mune and Tinā star Anapela Polataivao alongside the film’s leads. Some don’t have a lot of lines, but still add gravitas to the cast, something that Ashcroft says was deliberate. “The way we approached that was that we never thought of it as extras casting,” he shares. If the camera wanted to suddenly just follow Ginette McDonald as she got up and had an interaction with John or Geoffrey, Ashcroft wanted that actor to be able to hold their own, to be up for the acting equivalent of a tennis rally.
“Those are all the actors that I grew up watching, ushering in theaters where they were performing, watching on TV,” Ashcroft says. “Some have hired me. One of them fired me.” He recalls one of the most rewarding things about the shoot was seeing that big circle of New Zealand’s best every night down at the bar with John and Geoffrey, just reminiscing. “The bar made a killing from them.”
You get a sense then, that this is something of a logical destination for Ashcroft. So I asked him when he first seriously thought he was going to be a filmmaker. “Honestly, probably since I was 10, 11, 12,” he says. “I started work in a video store when I was 13, which was where maths and science was meant to go. But I’ve just filled it with film. And I think ever since I’ve really engaged in loving film as a viewer, I’ve wanted to be involved in it.”
Originally, he thought that was acting. But deeper than that, it was always about the whole. Ashcroft found himself asking questions about how things are done, or why he would get a certain emotional response to specific sound and lighting.
“I could have stepped into it a lot earlier, but at the same time, I think it happened exactly when it was meant to happen,” he says. “I’m 46, I’ve got very strong anchors with a wife and three children, and they keep me grounded. It’s very nice working in the United States and Hollywood, you get treated very well as a director. But if that had happened to me in my 20s, I’d probably be, you know, lying in a gutter somewhere by now. So, yeah, I’m very glad it’s happened now. I’m very aware of the good fortune and opportunity, and I don’t feel like it’s something I’m squandering.”
That good fortune and opportunity sees him make The Whisper Man for Netflix next. Our conversation about that thriller, and its star Robert De Niro, ran on Flicks last month (though our chat pre-empted the recent casting of Michelle Monaghan and Adam Scott, stars of two of the biggest shows on TV right now).
You get the sense there are more big things to come for James Ashcroft. For now though, let’s keep our focus on an Aotearoa care facility, and the two heavyweights going toe-to-toe in The Rule of Jenny Pen—in cinemas soon.
INTERVIEW EDITED FOR LENGTH AND CLARITY
