Soon to be seen in Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars, Josh Brolin nearly walked off the set mid-shoot before deciding to stay on.
When people discuss Ridley Scott, they often highlight his handful of landmark works (Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator…), his knack for cranking out projects (roughly 30 films and a sprinkling of TV episodes in under five decades) or his recent films that have sparked more debate than the early days of his career. Yet it’s not unusual to also linger on his working method, a method that isn’t quite the Hollywood norm.
According to many of his recent collaborators, the director operates with a system that can be unsettling. He doesn’t care much for repetition, shoots at a blistering pace, captures each scene from multiple angles simultaneously with several cameras, and prefers watching the different takes live in a caravan full of monitors rather than standing beside the actors… A method that has sometimes ruffled feathers among his collaborators, including Josh Brolin on The Dog Stars.
HE DOESN’T GET RIDLEY
In his already storied career, Josh Brolin had previously teamed with Ridley Scott once, back in 2007 on American Gangster. Is the actor forgetting the past or has the director’s famed approach to filmmaking evolved quite a bit since then? Brolin certainly had a troubling sense from the early stages of production on The Dog Stars. As he recounted to Empire magazine, that distrust first surfaced during rehearsals with Jacob Elordi and Ridley Scott in Italy:
“Ridley was telling a bunch of stories instead of actually rehearsing. And that unsettled me. I was really scared. I went back, called my agent and said: ‘I want to drop out. There’s a real problem, I need to get out of here fast.’” Fortunately, my agent is a close friend and he told me: ‘Take a day off.’ I responded: ‘No, man, I know exactly what you’re up to. This isn’t the kind of thing that gets resolved in one day.’ And I was right.”
The rest of the shoot, which followed the method described above, continued to destabilize the Thanos actor. Before Ridley Scott finally persuaded him that an actor could thrive under such conditions:
“[Ridley Scott] told me: ‘Come see.’ He takes me to his caravan and shows me the scene we’d just shot. It was a really good, highly dynamic scene, between Jacob and me. He asks, ‘Does this work for you?’ I say, ‘Yeah, it works.’ And that’s when I started to soak in this way of doing things. It took me a day or two to truly buy into the concept, but once I did, I embraced it, because it was a level of creativity and audacity that was dizzying. I kept thinking, ‘This is exactly what I asked for, but now that I have it, I’m fighting against it because it offers no real comfort.’ In the end, it became one of the most creative and rewarding projects I’ve ever been involved with.”
Ridley Scott’s method ultimately won Josh Brolin over. But will it win over audiences entirely, after a run of films that were far less acclaimed than the early stretch of his career? The answer arrives in theaters on August 26, 2026 in France.
