No masks and no phones: how filming 'Old' allowed Gael Garcia Bernal a break from pandemic

When Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal first heard the pitch for Old, he was sold.

“It’s a very appealing premise,” The Motorcycle Diaries star tells The National. “I was very obviously into it.”

And who wouldn’t be? After all, this is the latest thriller from M Night Shyamalan, director of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. Adapted from the French graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, a brilliant – and disconcerting – high concept forms the core of this unsettling tale. Think The Twilight Zone crossed with The Beach and you’re somewhere close to this eerie effort.

Bernal plays Guy, a family man who travels to a luxury resort with his wife (Vicky Krieps) and two young children. But when they, and some other hotel guests, journey to a secluded cove, strange things start to happen. If they try to leave, they black out. And then comes the real twist: they are now ageing so rapidly, that every half hour that passes is the equivalent of a year.

By coincidence, Bernal, 42, who rose to fame in films including Amores Perros, had just watched Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel. The 1962 Surrealist masterpiece is centred on a bourgeois dinner party where the guests suddenly find they can’t leave.

“It reminded me of this and other films that establish a kind of limitation or impossibility and you have to work around it," he says, comparing the shoot to a mad experiment in a laboratory. “How are we going to tell the story?”

It’s a salient point. As Bernal points out: “The concept of time is something that we have so engraved in our lives that all of a sudden accelerating [it] ... it is mind-blowing. What would the characters do in this situation?”

How would Bernal react if he was trapped in this supernatural horror show? “I don’t know. I guess that’s something ... it’s a question that I can have a different answer for at every moment. It’s very difficult to put oneself into that kind of mindset.”

As characters start to age and wrinkle – one even has a tumour grow to the size of a grapefruit in a matter of minutes – Bernal points to the film’s “mythical setting” as fundamental. With the surrounding cliffs akin to a proscenium arch and the ocean forming the scenic backdrop, the beach was their stage. “It’s kind of a theatrical experience,” he says. It’s not hard to see that Bernal, who has directed two feature films and an episode of Mozart in the Jungle, the Amazon original series he also stars in, is a filmmaker at heart.

Old was shot 12 months ago in the Dominican Republic, amid the pandemic, with the entire cast and crew taking over an empty hotel and forming a Covid-19-safe bubble. No masks or even shoes – they were barefoot throughout – required, it was somewhat an escape from the horrors the world has been facing.

“There were no cellphones on the beach where we were shooting. So it was pretty nice to be out there, without having to be connected all the time.”

Bernal, who was born in the Mexican city of Guadalajara, admits it was the perfect chance to commune with Mother Nature – a theme the film explores.

“I enjoy being in nature and feeling connected to it. I mean, I think we all do in a way; we all kind of get something out of it and we reset. Or rather, we feel like we escape back to who we are. And then we go back to this kind of life that we live in.”

As we chat over Zoom – isolated from one another – he says: “The extreme opposite would be this interaction that we’re having right now, which has nothing to do with nature.”

For Bernal, popping up in a Shyamalan blockbuster is a little unusual in a career that’s instead paired him with auteurs such as Pedro Almodovar (Bad Education) and Alfonso Cuaron (Y tu Mama Tambien). But he’s just as excited by a Hollywood project as an art house one.

“It’s an interesting adventure also, because at the same time, I never expect the results. I hope that they’re good, of course, but you never know. I think that’s more or less the way that I kind of decide which ones to do.”

Bernal’s other recent English-language project is the coming TV series Station Eleven, alongside Himesh Patel and Mackenzie Davis. It tells the story of a group of survivors whose lives are destroyed by a devastating flu pandemic. Bernal can’t quite express how bizarre it was to be working on the show as the coronavirus pandemic began to escalate.

“It’s just one of those things … it was like, ‘Wow, this is crazy that we’re doing this.’ We actually got interrupted because of the pandemic.”

No wonder he loves acting so much – it simply never gets old.

Old is in UAE cinemas from Thursday, August 12