There’s a lot of pressure that comes with making a movie. Millions of dollars riding on it, hundreds of cast and crew involved. And, as any actor wi
There’s a lot of pressure that comes with making a movie. Millions of dollars riding on it, hundreds of cast and crew involved. And, as any actor will tell you, during the making of a film, there’s no real way of knowing how it’s going to turn out. It’s a lot of pressure – and gut feelings can be mighty. Speaking to Empire, Josh Brolin shared that he had a major moment of doubt after his first day on the set of Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars – an apocalyptic drama depicting the aftermath of a deadly flu virus – in which he stars opposite Jacob Elordi as gun-toting neighbour Bruce Bangley.
Arriving to set after a string of other back-to-back movie productions – including Weapons, Wake Up Dead Man, and The Running Man – Brolin landed in Italy for a rehearsal session with Scott (who he’d previously worked with on American Gangster) and Elordi. But once there, he felt his fight-or-flight kick in. “Ridley was talking a lot of stories and not really rehearsing,” Brolin explains, “and it bugged me out, and I got really scared. I went back, called my agent and said, ‘I want out. Something’s really wrong, and I’ve got to get the fuck out of here.’ Luckily my agent is a close friend and he said, ‘Rest for a day.’ I was like, ‘No, man, I know what the fuck you’re doing. It’s not one of those day-things.’ And I was right.”
With some hindsight, he attributes his reaction to Scott’s unconventional filmmaking process. These days, the great director is airy on rehearsal, preferring to keep the immediately energy of a scene, and famously shoots multiple-camera set-ups to ensure brisk production. It was a process that took Brolin some adjusting to. “[Ridley] goes, ‘Come here,’ and he brought me into his trailer, and played the scene we had just finished,” says Brolin. “It was a really good, very dynamic scene between me and Jacob, and he goes, ‘Okay?’ I go, ‘Okay,’ and then I started to feed off that.”
Brolin is thankful he stayed – getting into the unique Ridley Scott rhythm as filming progressed. “It took about a day or two for me to really embrace that, and then I got super into it because it was stratospherically creative and stratospherically dangerous,” he says. “It was like, ‘This is what I’ve been asking for but now I’m getting it, I’m fighting it, because there’s zero comfort in it.’ It became one of the more creative, satisfying projects that I’ve ever been involved with.” The risk paid off – and, simply put, nobody does it like Ridley Scott.
Read Empire’s full The Dog Stars feature – speaking to Ridley Scott, Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin and Margaret Qualley on making a different kind of apocalypse movie – in The Odyssey issue, on sale Thursday July 2. Pre-order a copy online here. The Dog Stars comes to UK cinemas from August 26.
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