Redford name secured heist film locations

Director David Lowery shot entirely on location and mostly used Ohio as a stand-in for the story’s Texas settings. In some cases Redford’s name helped the production team shoot locally for free.

“There were some locations that didn’t want money because they were so excited about Redford being in their places,” says David Rumble, the film’s location manager, in comments to KFTV. “This is not something I run across often, though it would surely make my job easier!

“The challenges for the main locations were twofold – first we needed to find banks that we could actually film and second we needed to find banks that felt as if they were Texas.

“We did a dragnet of all closed banks first within about an hour of Cincinnati and then approached a few banks that were operating and were able to shoot two of those.”

Filming in Ohio was largely a financial decision. While Texas does have a busy production industry and a filming incentive support programme, the state offers a much smaller annual film fund than most of America’s main production hubs, so it’s rare for high-profile or big-budget productions to shoot there.

Ohio offers a 30% tax credit as a filming incentive and regularly doubles for other parts of the country.

One of the biggest location challenges for The Old Man & the Gun was a key robbery sequence with a lot of exterior shots that required a three-day shutdown of a road that was already being used as a diversion route from construction works.

“I knew the city was not going to be easy but we figured it out after being told over and over that we would not be able to shut the road for three days,” says Rumble. “It took a lot of police and communication. It also really helped that our first assistant director stayed on schedule.”

See KFTV's production guide for more on filming in Ohio.

Image: Fox Searchlight