Josh Brolin almost dropped out of “The Dog Stars” because of Ridley Scott’s unconventional rehearsal style and filming methods.
While talking with Empire in an interview published Tuesday, Brolin recalled arriving to set for the upcoming post-apocalyptic film after back-to-back shoots for “Weapons,” “Wake Up Dead Man,” and “The Running Man,” and immediately not enjoying the energy on the set. Most of it came from the way Scott liked to rehearse.
“Ridley was talking a lot of stories and not really rehearsing, and it bugged me out, and I got really scared,” Brolin said. “I went back, called my agent and said, ‘I want out. Something’s really wrong, and I’ve got to get the f–k 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 f–k you’re doing. It’s not one of those day-things.’ And I was right.”
Scott’s tendencies with directing his films these days is to put less of an emphasis on long rehearsals so the energy feels fresh when the cameras get rolling. The director’s pace and light-rehearsal methods took some getting used to for Brolin, but once he settled in he admitted he enjoyed the process and was glad he stayed.
“[Ridley] goes, ‘Come here,’ and he brought me into his trailer, and played the scene we had just finished,” Brolin said. “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.”
He added: “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. 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.”
Scott’s latest film stars Brolin and Jacob Elordi as two people surviving in a post-apocalyptic world that has been ravaged by a deadly flu pandemic. The film lands in theaters on Aug. 28.
