Josh Brolin is not an actor known for cold feet. But on the first day of shooting Ridley Scott's "The Dog Stars," he says, he wanted out.
A first-day panic
In an interview with Empire, Brolin recounted phoning his agent after day one and telling him he needed to leave the production, the magazine reported. "Something's really wrong, and I've got to get the [expletive] out of here," he recalled saying. His agent, a friend, suggested he was simply having a rough day and should sleep on it. Brolin wasn't convinced it was "one of those day-things."
What spooked him
The culprit, by his account, was Scott's working method. The veteran director — famous for shooting fast, with multiple cameras and a loose, story-driven energy rather than exhaustive rehearsal — did much of that opening day talking through ideas instead of drilling scenes. "Ridley was talking a lot of stories and not really rehearsing," Brolin said, "and it bugged me out, and I got really scared." He had arrived, he noted, off a punishing run of back-to-back films, his nerves already frayed.
The footage that changed his mind
Scott's answer was to let the work speak. He brought Brolin in to watch what they had actually captured — footage of Brolin alongside co-star Jacob Elordi — and, Brolin says, it flipped his view within a day or two. He came to call the shoot "stratospherically creative and stratospherically dangerous," and, by the end, "one of the more creative, satisfying projects" of his career. It is, in other words, an actor's trust-fall story — the kind of candor that tends to surface only once a film is safely finished.
About the film
"The Dog Stars" is Scott's adaptation of Peter Heller's 2012 post-apocalyptic novel, set after a pandemic has all but emptied the world. Brolin plays a hardened survivor opposite Elordi, with a supporting cast that includes Margaret Qualley, Guy Pearce, Allison Janney and Benedict Wong, according to Wikipedia's film entry. It is due in theaters from 20th Century Studios later this year, marking a return to the kind of ambitious science-fiction storytelling that has defined much of Scott's career, from "Blade Runner" to "The Martian." (Some production details, including exact credits and locations, come from the studio and trade coverage.)
