John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush reveal their character inspirations for 'The Rule of Jenny Pen'

Personally, I was excited because I'm a big Psycho Biddy thriller fan

Are you guys... Psycho Biddy? What is that? Oh, exciting. I'm a judge in the city

What you doing in a shit hole like this? I'll be better soon. Then I'm gone

We can both look forward to that day then, can't we? In the meantime, why don't you try and make some friends

It's dear to that lot over there. Giving toys to play with like children

Some of them think they are too. So Psycho Bitty is kind of when it typically centers on old women who are kind of mad

One of my favorites is Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. Yeah. You invoke it all the time

Yeah, this movie definitely has some of that tone. So I'd love to hear from you if that was an inspiration point or if not, what were inspiration points for you in pursuing this film

My first conversation with James Ashcroft, the director, was, you know, I loved the script

I loved it on page three where the first key event happens and it doesn't let up in the narrative being so textured and so engaging

And I said, I don't like mashups of films. It's this meets this

Eddie Izzard, the English comedian, he always had the best one for any film He say it like Mary Poppins meets Zulu And I go yeah that would be a great film But I did say to James you know

the detail and the tone of this film is going to be so important

because there are, there is a Baby Jane meets a cuckoo's nest

Both the institutionalized thing and the eccentricity of two particular characters, gunning with each other

And that power dynamic within there. Yeah. Yeah, we did. Well, occasionally, I don't know if there are any outtakes of them

but you are, Dave. You are. James made this beautiful statement in a letter that he wrote to me

when I was offered the job. He said that he has three daughters

which means he thinks all the time about bullying. But it had never occurred to him that his parents, his aging parents

might face the same challenge in the last years of their life

You know, and that's, again, I keep talking over and over again about James's serious intent

He loves the horror genre, but he wants to use it in ways that it's never used, been used before

Mm Yeah We were all so committed to his project because that how he saw it We all get what coming to us in the end I want to talk about the teeth that you wear in this film

How did that come about? Well, for some reason, it was the first thing I thought of

I thought, he's got to have scary teeth. I've done that occasionally, most in my mind, most notably in Buckaroo Banzai way back in the in the 1980s

It has a way of completely changing you and changing your people's expectations

You simply look like a different person instantly when you click in those teeth

I happened to be in England for something or other, weeks and weeks out from doing the film

And I was able to call up this wonderful craftsperson named Christopher Lyons, who's the toothmeister

He does all of Tilda Swinton's teeth. He did Meryl Streep's Margaret Thatcher teeth

He did my prompels, what I played Winston Churchill, all inside my mouth

I called him up and I said, look, I'm playing a horrific character and I want his teeth to be among the most scary things about him

So he came over to my hotel. He took a new cast of my teeth make sure that the new ones would clip on there And he gave me several examples photographs of other teeth he made I sent them all to James and I said I think this is a good

idea. What do you think? And he was a little scared. He said, well, maybe a little subtler

than that. I said, fine, fine. And, and, you know, Chris made the teeth literally took him a little

a while. By that time, I was back in L.A. They arrived in the mail

and I clipped them on. I felt, wow, I'm Dave Creeley. And I also thought

my eyes should be scarier. There's going to be an awful lot of eye

action, so let's make them kind of silvery gray. And we found an equally

adept eye meister in Los Angeles, and she created those contact lenses for me

That, and growing some whiskers, and I was home free. I love that you can have a sentence in an interview

that involves the words, my early work and then buckaroo bonsai. Yes, you're right

How many people get to claim that one? They were very memorable teeth

I've used them several times since. Who rules