‘The Old Guard 2’ Director Victoria Mahoney Found Inspiration in Emotional Resonance and Awe as Her Guiding Force

After a string of production delays, The Old Guard 2, Netflix and Skydance’s sequel to the 2020 immortal action film starring Charlize Theron, is now streaming. In typical sequel fashion, the follow-up to the Image Comics adaptation aims to not only raise the emotional stakes to greater heights with Theron’s Andy as she comes to grips with her newfound mortality, but it also pits her against her long-lost companion Quynh (Veronica Ngô) and an older immortal in Uma Thurman’s Discord.

io9 spoke with director Victoria Mahoney (assistant director for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker) about her guiding principle in taking over the reins of the story from previous director Gina Prince-Bythewood, as well as its ending.

Isaiah Colbert, io9: This film picks up where the 2020 original left off. What drew you to The Old Guard universe, and what made helming its sequel a must as a creative?

Victoria Mahoney: In different ratios of equal measure, the actors, the themes, [and] the action bucked against drama.

io9: What was your creative North Star in shaping the sequel’s tone, especially since it’s releasing five years after its predecessor?

Mahoney: Oh, I like that. Love a North Star. With sincere respect, Old Guard 1 was the North Star. It was very important to honor what was put forward in such a wonderful, caring, measured manner. I didn’t want to betray what Gina had put forward, and I thought that the actors did such a beautiful job with plausibility and honesty, tackling this massive theme of “what if you could live forever?” My North Star, I would say, was plausibility.

io9: Immortality remains a meditative throughline in The Old Guard, but action also serves as its heartbeat. How did you approach the choreography for the movie to reflect an elevation of the physical and emotional evolution of its characters?

Mahoney: Lovely. As a kid [I] climbed trees, jumped out of trees, fell out of trees, raced go-karts, taught myself how to ride a bike with no seat and brakes, and was always trying to get in on the action, doing whatever I saw in a fight movie when I walked out of the theater—as every other kid was at the time. I wasn’t really doing the right moves, but I thought I was. My wish [is] for some grain of emotionality when an individual moves their arm, their leg, neck, chin, or their heart and soul.

I am deeply invested in making sure that I feel why they’re fighting, I feel why they’re resisting, I feel why they’re ducking, I feel why they’re punching, I feel why they’re hitting, I feel why they’re swinging, I feel why they’re running, I feel why they’re jumping. I’m deeply invested in what it feels like inside that individual as they’re moving, breathing, and navigating, versus “Oh, that was kind of cool.” That terrified state of mind versus when someone’s like, “Holy shit!” That’s what I’m looking for.

io9: With Uma Thurman joining the cast, fans are thrilled to see her share the screen with Charlize Theron. How did their legacies as action icons influence how you staged the direction of their confrontation?

Mahoney: There’s something I want to go back to that is interesting because I want to juxtapose two key fights that are of note. There are so many, but with regards to Andy and Quynh, the components of that fight had to have 500 years of pain [and] thousands of years of history. In order to do that, I kept thinking about Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of [grief]. Don’t ask me why as far as things [not making] logically make sense. It makes sense that I had a teacher, Julie Ariola, who taught me that book [On Death and Dying] and made that a part of my studying when I was training as an actor. The long of it is a teacher gave me that and used it as a tool to study [the] human condition.

Inside of that, there are these different emotions, and those emotions can connect to archetypes. So when Andy and Quynh were fighting, I wanted, needed, fought, and demanded that we, the audience, would receive pain, shame, guilt, remorse, envy, loss, [and] excitement.

The fight had different personalities. You could break it down if you look microscopically [at] how their act breaks. When they first meet, there’s offense-defense-offense-defense. Andy does not wanna fight. She does not wanna fight. And Quynh is like, “I’m fucking taking you down.” And then, boom, they’re on the ground and then there’s another act break. Somewhere in there, it was important that Andy realizes that she misses this fight. She’s been fighting with boring mortals, you know? Like, “Oh yeah, this is what we do.”

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEksj9jIL1E[/embed]

Then there was a beat that Quynh—if you look close, you’ll see. I gave her a note before we rehearsed the scene. I’d sit with her every day, and I talked to her a lot about the body atrophying if you were in the water for 500 years, so how does that impact how you swing, punch, or kick? I talked with her and said, “I don’t care where it is. At some point in your fight, you have to notice something’s different about her. [Andy] doesn’t know that you lost your immortality, but Quynh realizes it.” It was a distinct place, I said, “Do it wherever you want. It must happen. When you take all that with those two people, and you have history, that becomes far more than just really a dope fight in the alley with a cool music cue.

When you bring that to the end with Andy and Discord, two people at different ends of the rope for different reasons, and have lived thousands of years, factors of mortality and immortality are alive in each of them for different reasons without the other one knowing. There’s a ruse. There’s a cat-and-mouse in the dialogue to the fight. It’s so much fun. Tempo and rhythm are everything. Emotionally, physically, psychologically, spiritually. It’s everything.

io9: The film ends on a cliffhanger, practically begging for a follow-up. Was a third installment already in mind during production, or are you hoping fan enthusiasm and Netflix viewership will help greenlight a final chapter?

Mahoney: It depends on who you ask whether they had the third film installment in mind or not. I did not because I went to work every day with the task of the job at hand. There are things that I did in certain sequences that I wanted to make sure I was aware, in the same way when I came in and inherited the film, that you wanna be aware you could cause a problem for someone later. So there were little things that I was aware if we do this, you will have openness to go east or west story-wise.

But with regards to day-to-day filming, the story, and protecting what’s occurring in the given day, in the given moment, and what I have to do [with] the sequence at hand, I’m very in the moment. This is the only thing we’re doing. There’s no film before, no film prior. It’s just in this moment.

The homework prior to the day’s work—before camera ever goes up in pre-production—I’ve done all the labor that allows me to make sure I’m protecting the first film. And then I ask questions with regard to maybe a third one, but the rest is none of my business. I won’t be there. Someone else will be there, and it’s gonna be great and fun, and I’m excited for audiences.

io9: As the sequel finally arrives, what do you hope viewers carry with them, not just as a payoff for the wait, but as a lasting reminder of why this story still cuts deep and why it deserves to endure?

Mahoney: Part of why I picked this movie is that I love a sense of wonderment when I watch movies. I wanna wonder where the characters are coming from and where they’re going. I wanna wonder what they eat in the morning and what they’re gonna eat at night. I wanna wonder if the person they love is gonna love them back. I wanna wonder if, when they don’t lock the double bolt on the door in a chase scene, why they didn’t fucking lock the double bolt on the door when you’re being chased, right? I just wanna know why, when you jump out a window in a chase scene you leave the window open. Close the window so they don’t know you went out, right? I wanna wonder.

I also wanna wonder how did they get that shot? “Oh my God, how did they devise that? Oh wow, what lens did they use?” I wanna wonder how did they build that space? How long did it take to build that set? I wanna wonder on both fronts of what’s on screen and how they captured what’s on screen.

Then, when it’s all said and done, any movie I ever watch, I wanna wonder something, and it’s not specific, and I don’t care what it is. I want the movie to surprise me. But when I get up and walk away from a movie theater, or when I’m at home, I want wonderment.

In this movie, if we could get people to wonder what it’s like to live your life with some granule of honesty and care, about “Life is short, even when it’s long.” Everything happens in a fleeting minute, and how we treat people in a given second. You could walk through the day and meet 42 people, but to one of those individuals, you may be the only person they talk to or make eye contact with. For whatever reason in that person’s life, they may not have had a human connection. They may not have seen anyone, no one has looked them in the eyes in years or months. So when I look at that one person and smile, saying, “Hello, how are you?” Wonderment.

The Old Guard 2 is streaming on Netflix.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.