Josh Brolin said he nearly walked away from Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars after the first day of filming left him rattled by how the director worked. He called his agent and said he wanted out, then stayed only after Scott pulled him aside and showed him the scene they had just finished.
The timing matters because Brolin’s comments surfaced in a new feature published June 30, as the film heads toward an Aug. 28 release. The movie, adapted by Mark L. Smith from Peter Heller’s 2012 novel, stars Jacob Elordi, Margaret Qualley, Guy Pearce, Benedict Wong and Allison Janney, with Brolin playing ex-Marine Bangley in a post-apocalyptic story built around Elordi’s civilian pilot Hig and a radio transmission that sends him searching for hope.
Brolin said the problem was not the material itself but the way Scott was working. He said the director was not really rehearsing, was moving quickly, and was running the set in a brisk, multi-camera style that made him feel lost at first. After that first day, Brolin said he phoned his agent and pleaded to get off the film, then was told to rest for a day.
What changed his mind was the scene Scott played back for him in the trailer. Brolin said it was a strong, dynamic exchange between him and Jacob Elordi, and that he realized the director knew exactly what he was doing. Within a day or two, he said, he stopped fighting the process and got super into it because it felt “stratospherically creative and stratospherically dangerous.”
That reversal is the real story here. Brolin said he had been asking for challenging projects, and The Dog Stars turned into one of the more creative and satisfying jobs he has ever done. He had worked with Scott before on American Gangster in 2007, but this time the pace and lack of rehearsal nearly drove him out before they became the very things that pulled him in. The remaining question is not whether he stayed; it is what that kind of shoot will look like when audiences finally see it in theaters next month.
