The Retirement Plan focuses on Matt (Nicolas Cage), a self-styled beach bum living in the Cayman Islands. Estranged from his daughter Ashley (Ashley Greene), he's more surprised than anyone when his granddaughter Sarah (Thalia Campbell) comes seeking help. On the run from the dangerous gang leader Donnie (Jackie Earle Haley) and his enforcer Bobo (Ron Perlman), Sarah and Ashley need his help, and Matt is forced to pull out some of his old tricks to protect them.
On paper, the film could have been a tense thriller -- and it does feature some fun action sequences. But an important element of the movie is the way it balances comedy with all the intensity, fleshing out the characters and world in unexpected ways. In an interview with CBR, Retirement Plan Director/Writer Tim Brown broke down the film's tonal balance, playing with the conventions of the action genre, and what separates stars like Nicolas Cage, Ron Perlman, and Jackie Earle Haley from the rest of Hollywood.
CBR: First off, congrats on The Retirement Plan! It's a really fun blend of old-style action and comedy.
Tim Brown: Thanks! Yeah, exactly. I grew up in the '70s on comedy and in the '80s on action.
How did you approach that tonal balance without leaning too far one way or the other?
It was always meant to be a genre picture. But it flipped on its head, somewhat, in that I always make the audience aware they're watching a genre picture. I think I put my tongue in cheek a lot during the movie. There are a lot of inside jokes. The whole concept of the MacGuffin is a hard drive. In the end, I remember thinking, "Do we need to tell everyone what's actually on the hard drive? I mean, who cares? That's not remotely relevant." That might be a payoff to a certain degree. But in all these action films, there's always a hard drive. In every James Bond movie or Mission Impossible movie, they're always looking for a hard drive that contains something. What it contains is almost irrelevant -- only that it might be good [or] it might be evil. We don't know what it is. It's a floating MacGuffin that drives everybody forward.
From that aspect, I was conscious from the very beginning of what this was. As I wrote, you're writing just two people. I always found [that] Quentin Tarantino's dialogue is so great because it is just two people. What they're talking about is not really relevant to what their actions are. It's two hitmen talking about a burger in France. I mean, it's just very irreverent and funny. It's out-of-the-box dialogue, and I think it is terrific. So I emulated that a little bit and used that to my advantage. As I wrote, I generally like to keep it light. I found comedy in all these aspects. What I basically did was turn off the action part of my brain and turn up the comic part. When it was finally done, Jackie Earle Haley and Nic Cage pulled me aside and said, "Well, it's funny, but is it supposed to be funny?" Because these situations are normally where comedy would not come in. But I tried to interject comedy into it.
Jackie is so funny throughout the film. He should be terrifying, but he's got so many unexpected comedic turns.
There were a lot of points where Jackie was just being Jackie. Jackie brings so much to the table. I mean, his range is wild. He can do anything and be very convincing. His character, Donnie, was the most volatile thing in the movie. He's nitroglycerin. You don't know if he's going to blow up at any given time. So, I told all the stunt guys around him, "Picture you're walking around a snake that you don't know if it's going to bite you or not." I wanted to juxtapose these 6'6, 6'7 monsters against Donnie. Jackie's not that big. I really wanted it to be important that he was this smaller mob boss. It's almost like the old Bugs Bunny cartoons. In Looney Tunes, there was the cigar-smoking Fedora-wearing big boss, who's like two feet tall. And he's surrounded by monster henchmen. I love that image. I embraced that.
Jackie brings a lot of that to the table. We always question whether he's at a zero or at a ten. There were times we had dialogue. That sequence on the plane was one of them. But I told him, "Just don't say anything, just look forward, like you're just begging someone to shoot you in the head, just to end the misery you're in right now." And then we surrounded him with pirates. It was just ridiculous. You've got him giving orders, and then one of his guys goes, "Great idea, boss," and then [Donnie] would just look at the guy like he's the stupidest person alive. It's the Monty Python of it all. Jackie brings so much to the table. He has so much range. It was a blast working with Jackie.
I love Ron Perlman's performance in the film. He brings such sweet conflicted energy to what should be, on paper, a very threatening role.
Writing it, that element organically sort of grew out of these characters. I always wanted a guy [like] Luca Brazi from The Godfather or Marv from Sin City -- someone who's just so physically intimidating and focused. You tell Luca to kill a kid, and Luca takes him out to the bushes and kills the kid. He doesn't question it. That's who this Ron Perlman character is.
How can someone break Luca Brazi? Well, what if Luca had to take a kid out to the swamp? But it took days, so the kid talked to Luca... I thought juxtaposing this giant man with this young girl, where he has the full power, but slowly, you give her the full power -- it's a perfect irony. That story evolved, and then the slam dunk was the casting. Not just Ron, but Thalia Campbell as well.
She's amazing. She's such a great young actor and a joy to be around. She was thoroughly prepared. The highlight of the whole production for me, was the Zoom call where I got to tell her she had the part. We auditioned a lot of people. She was just tremendous to work with. And then Ron, his presence on screen, on camera -- when I first saw him on the monitor, it almost took me aback. I was like, "Oh my God, what lens are we using?" Because he just encompassed everything. It's not just physical size. There's an aura around him that jumps off the screen. When I was looking at the monitor, it really was like, "Damn! Ron, have you seen yourself on camera?" He's like, "Yeah, hey, thanks. I appreciate it." He's a phenomenal guy.
And then there's Nicolas Cage, who remains one of the truly unique performers in Hollywood. What separates Nic from anyone else you've worked with? What surprised you the most about him?
Well, I mean, just getting him in general. He's done maybe 120 films now. And we're not talking like he was an extra in these things. He's been the lead for 100-some-odd films. To carry that much product and be fresh, different, and unpredictable performance-wise was the best gift of all. All this work happened even before we met. We talked on the phone beforehand for weeks on end about the character. By the time we were on set together, we'd spent hours going over every nuance of this guy.
We'd use cinema as our encyclopedia that we would pull from. He has this massive cinematic library in his brain. That's really amazing. We would talk a lot about his stuff. He introduced me to a lot of films. I would randomly introduce him to a couple of things he hadn't been aware of. But for the most part, he's seen a lot. He pulls from old films into new characters. I always laugh because he talked about how, in Raising Arizona, he would use Woody Woodpecker as his reference for the character. And then you're like, "Oh, now I get it." It's absolutely genius.
He did that with The Retirement Plan. He brought a lot to the table. He brought up The Scarlet Pimpernel with Leslie Howard, a film not everyone will be familiar with. We went over that a lot. What I discovered is that he meant it's how he's going to evolve the character of Matt as part of that. What we discovered was Matt was a master of disguises. You see this old drunk beach bum, and you make assumptions. When he beats a guy up, there's a bit of a layer peeled back. Through the film, more layers get peeled away. [Nic] and I would always refer together on set about how many layers we are at until all the layers have been pulled back to fully reveal who this character is. So those were really in-depth conversations before he even showed up.
For Matt, I wrote a five-page biography for Matt. I gave it to Nic. "This is his life, where he was born, everything that he's done." That added to what his knowledge base of this character was. So, between the two of us, having a shorthand of Matt was super simple. I mean, I could answer any question about Matt. Nic was always about what sort of spice could he add to make Matt more flavorful. That's what I could call the Nic Cage spice. It's not cumin, it's not paprika. It's hard to explain it. But you love it. It's savory. It's sweet. It's spicy. And that's the performance that he brings to everything he does. Not just on this one, but all his films. He works his ass off. He's dedicated to his craft like no one I've ever seen. It was a privilege to work with him.
The Retirement Plan opens in theaters on Sept. 15.