Big Country: Aaron Katz on Iceland road movie Land Ho!

Aaron Katz is sitting in the corner booth of a cosy London restaurant, but he looks dressed for the elements in a chunky blue pullover. Perhaps the 33-year-old is still trying to thaw out from making Land Ho!, his wise and witty new comedy set against the mythic landscapes of Iceland.

With his first three features (Dance Party USA, Quiet City, Cold Weather) Katz gave the indie movie world a trio of perfectly formed studies in aimlessness, with their Gen Y protagonists gently groping their way through the fog between adolescence and adulthood. They were urban movies, set within the cramped house parties and poorly-furnished shared apartments of Portland and Brooklyn.

Land Ho!, which Katz co-directed with fellow North Carolina School of the Arts graduate Martha Stephens, considers that other directionless period we’re all destined to go through: retirement. “I’m interested in people at crossroads,” Katz tells me when I ask why he wanted to make a film focused on older characters “Whether you’re 25 or 65, I think that we always think that in five years from now we’re going to be settled, an adult, but in the film they’re realising, ‘Oh, we’re in our 60s and things can still change.’”

The “they” in question are ex-brothers-in-law Colin (Paul Eenhoorn) and Mitch (Earl Lynn Nelson), who decide, on a whim – well, Mitch’s whim – to embark on a tour of Iceland. Katz’s most recent film, Cold Weather, took the form of a skew-whiff detective story and he’s back tinkering with an established genre here: namely, the odd couple road movie. “I really like exploring these genres that are satisfying and fun in ways that we expect, but then you can surprise the audience, take them off guard, by coming at [the genres] from an unconventional point of view.”

The film is deceptively loose; initially it feels like a home movie, something Katz and Stephens shot on a lark. But its emotional heft creeps up on you. Much of the praise for this should go to the yin and yang double act at the heart of the movie. It’s built around – and thrives on – their tension. Mitch is a loudmouth who likes to get stoned and leer at women half his age; Colin’s a softly spoken gent who spends most of the movie apologising for his boorish companion. “Martha just suggested, ‘let’s take Earl Lynn to Iceland and make a movie,’” Katz reveals. “He’d been in Martha’s previous two films and he’s just so incredibly charismatic and larger than life – I didn't think twice.”

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“I’m interested in people at crossroads” – Aaron Katz

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The question was, though: who can play the straight-man to this irrepressible rascal? “We were talking about pairing him with a nephew, someone younger.” You can imagine that being the Hollywood route – ballast the old codger with someone hip. But a lightbulb went off in Katz’s head when he saw This Is Martin Bonner (by Chad Hartigan, another North Carolina alumni), which centres on an extraordinarily subtle, lived-in performance from Paul Eenhoorn. “I loved it and I loved Paul’s performance. And then it dawned on us: brothers-in-law. It’s such a strange relationship: they’re not really friends and they’re not really related.” Eenhoorn's calming presence gives the film an emotional anchor. “Earl Lynn is this big, larger than life guy, you don’t know what he’s going to do – ever. Paul... Paul’s very focused. Not to say he can’t be loose, but he would always keep things on track.”

The final star is Iceland. Those primordial landscapes lend this small movie some grandeur, some magic. “Location is really important – even if you’re making a sci-fi film on a fictional planet [as Katz reveals he’s doing on his next project] you’ve got to make the audience feel like they know it. I just think that so much of our experience, like what we’re experiencing right now, in this interview, is so determined by where we are. A location isn’t simply a place for the character to be: their experiences are their interactions with that place.”

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