Josh Brolin names his most harshly treated movie: “That was going to be a huge film”
As Josh Brolin himself will freely admit, his career can be neatly divided into two halves: pre and post-2007. This is because, despite making a huge splash with his feature film debut in 1985’s The Goonies, he struggled to make much of an impact in Hollywood over the next 22 years.
Astonishingly, Brolin’s career had panned out so poorly by the mid-’90s that he considered quitting acting entirely. At that point, he began trading stocks full-time and made such a healthy amount that leaving acting behind was a real possibility. However, in the late ’90s, his work in Hollywood picked up again, so the thought of quitting was put on the back burner.
Frustratingly for Brolin, this uptick in his Hollywood fortunes lasted about as long as his initial boost in fame from The Goonies. By the mid-’00s, he was firmly circling the drain again as an actor, equally dissatisfied with the work he was getting and the work he wasn’t getting. But he was thrown a lifeline in the unlikely form of No Country for Old Men.
Seemingly out of nowhere, the Coen brothers took a chance on him to lead their Oscar-winning neo-western classic. Brolin had the machismo to make such a role feel powerful, but it was the vulnerability of his performance as the small-time crook Llewelyn Moss that finally showed the world what he could do.
Brolin followed No Country up with three other hit movies in the same year: Ridley Scott’s drug dealer epic American Gangster, Paul Haggis’ military mystery In the Valley of Elah, and Robert Rodriguez’s zombie flick Planet Terror. All things considered, it was a great year for him, as he suddenly found himself one of the hottest properties in the industry, after enduring so many years where he could barely get arrested in Hollywood.
As Brolin seized on his opportunities and cemented himself in the A-list ranks over the next couple of years, though, there was one thing about the fateful year that changed his career that stuck in his craw. Try as he might, he couldn’t help feeling that Planet Terror, one half of a unique theatrical double bill entitled Grindhouse alongside Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, didn’t get a fair shake with critics or at the box office.
Indeed, when asked by Ain’t It Cool News why Grindhouse, and specifically Planet Terror, failed so thoroughly to catch on with audiences, Brolin lamented, “It kills me. I don’t understand, because I truly love that movie.” Then, after a few moments of pondering the studio’s decision to release the films separately in other territories after Grindhouse tanked in the US, he added, “I don’t know. Maybe separate was the smart thing to do, but it kind of defies the whole purpose to me. I wish I knew. That, to me, was going to be a huge film.”
For Brolin, the experience of making Planet Terror, in which he played a sinister doctor nicknamed ‘Doc Block’, was a blast from start to finish. He would get together regularly with director Robert Rodriguez and Tarantino to watch the lurid old horror movies and thrillers that were touchstones for the Grindhouse tone, and watch in astonishment as Tarantino regaled the room with passionate diatribes about films most people would dub trashy.
“He would get up and give these 30-minute drunken introductions to zombie movies,” Brolin recalled with a smile. “Robert has it all on video. He just loves to talk. So, we would watch these movies and just crack up.” However, once Brolin was brought onto the same wavelength as Tarantino, he would begin to recognise the good in them that the Pulp Fiction helmer saw.
“He knew everything, and we’d watch these movies, and even though they were ridiculous sometimes, you started to see that it was actually a really well-structured story,” Brolin mused. “They just only had $5.65 to do it, so that’s why it looks the way it does.”
To Brolin, Grindhouse was a “very studied passionate homage to that time” in filmmaking history, and he felt Rodriguez and Tarantino nailed it. Sadly for them, it was quite quickly discovered that the gruesome appeal of the ’70s and ’80s video nasties wasn’t exactly a mainstream one. “I guess it was just too geeky,” Brolin surmised with a sigh.
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