In Sam Green’s The Oldest Person in the World, the filmmaker journeys across the globe meeting and interviewing whomever it is – at that precise moment in time – that holds the title of the oldest person in the world. Not everyone can communicate to the same degree or has any particular wisdom to share, but they’re all united by the fact that they’ve lived longer than anyone else currently on the planet.
Awards Buzz spoke with Green about the title and whether anyone got the wrong idea about its conent:
“Well, it’s funny, because oftentimes people think it’s one person. They’re like, how old is he or she? I have to say, no, it’s a lot of people who have that. And then I think the second confusion is, after people have been conditioned by blue zones and stuff like that, they want to know the answer. They think it’s a movie that will tell them how to live to be 115. So I’m always a little bit like, okay, I’m sorry, I’m not necessarily giving you that.”
He reflected back on what he can remember from when he first started making this movie:
“If you go back to 2015, it’s almost not possible to put yourself back there. It’s funny, because if the ten years that the movie spanned had been, let’s say, 1986 to 1996, it’s ten years, but not that much happened. Maybe Bill Clinton got elected? It just feels like this ten years has been a big ten years. A lot has happened. The world is markedly different. So when I think back to when it was at first an idea, I can barely remember who I was or what the world was.”
He has complicated feelings on how much age matters:
“I think there’s definitely the idea, age is just a number. I’m sixty, but I’m young and I’m healthy. There’s that way of looking at it. In that sense, it doesn’t matter. It is just a number. But, on the other hand, I do think that having been a younger person myself, the more you live, the more experience you have of life and the world, the more you know about how things work.”
Watch the video above to hear other takeaways from making the film and the less-than-mainstream ideas Green is already preparing to explore next.
The Oldest Person in the World is now playing in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco and expands nationwide throughout the fall.
