THE OLD MAN PRODUCTION
Erik Henry, Dan Shotz, Jon Steinberg and myself have been working together since Black Sails . We like to stay true to the photography and not imbue it with anything that isn’t grounded.” This carried over into lighting and grading, with O’Loughlin and his team embracing naturalism. “The big thing we went with in Season 1 and carried through to Season 2 was that it had to feel real.” This occasionally posed a problem, especially since many of the Afghanistan scenes were instead shot in Santa Clarita, California. Normally a dry, dusty area, the region had recently received an unexpected amount of rainfall, making the ordinarily brown terrain “look like the rolling green hills of Ireland,” laughs O’Loughlin. He did his best to shape the light, sporadically adding practicals to ‘get a bit of a pop in an actor’s eyes’, but he mainly stuck to natural sources and stayed true to the environment. IN THEIR ELEMENT As a DOP, O’Loughlin most enjoys observing actors. “It’s why I got into the business and why I wanted to leave my fair shores of Australia to become an international cinematographer – to work with this calibre of actors,” he reveals of series leads Jeff Bridges, John Lithgow,
Alia Shawkat and Amy Brenneman. “To be able to sit behind my monitor and watch John and Jeff shred a scene together is such a thrill for me.” That being said, O’Loughlin also relishes the odd action sequence, of which The Old Man has a fair few. In the Season 2 opening, Chase and Harper follow a man named Omar into a small encampment, where they find several men who have been killed. “Omar and
Chase have that fight, then a chase ensues with some Taliban bike riders,” details O’Loughlin, who had to film the sequence with the actors on horseback. “It’s really difficult,” he summarises. In order to film this action sequence, O’Loughlin employed a DJI Ronin 4D – a part-gimbal, part-camera that provides stabilisation and remote control. “In the end, it turned out to be amazing,” he enthuses. “We had the camera head mounted on a little spigot. The stunt rider would hold that out, away from his body. Remotely, using a video screen linked to the camera head through wireless control, I could operate it by moving the screen,” he describes. “That became a significant asset for the sequence. “The concept of The Old Man is all about human drama, relationships and what’s going on between those principal characters,” O’Loughlin continues, “but in episodes 1 and 3, we also got to do some cool stuff. We did the horse chase, a big fight sequence. Those were a lot of fun in the making.” Nearly five years have come and gone since O’Loughlin’s work on The Old Man began, and his overarching reflection is how lucky he’s been. “I know it sounds like something of a cliché, but this crew is world-class. It’s that combination – that recipe – of people which keeps bringing me back to The Old Man .” The Old Man Season 2 is streaming on Hulu (US) and Disney+ (UK)
WET FOR DRY Unexpected inclement weather made the environment greener than anticipated
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