Apart from a few shots where the Colorado had to be unmistakable, most of Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars – Le Stelle dopo la Fine was filmed in Italy, in the Dolomites and beyond; interior work also took place at the Cinecittà Studios. The 88-year-old director dragged his actors Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, and Guy Pearce into the adventure, who with him presented the post-apocalyptic thriller adapted from Peter Heller’s novel, also featuring Margaret Qualley. Read what they told us at the press conference.
The Dog Stars: An Announced Apocalypse and Interesting Books
The premise of The Dog Stars – Le Stelle dopo la Fine is a pandemic that decimated humanity and regressed it into a state of defense or predatory attack, in the style of The Walking Dead. Peter Heller had imagined it even before the Covid-19 pandemic, back in 2012, but for Ridley Scott it didn’t require much: “Just watch the news, I don’t miss a beat; I watch world news twice a day. Much of what we tell is already happening; we decided to pretend nothing about climate change, or about the chaos in certain regions. I was supposed to make a film about Ebola with Jodie Foster, then Ebola exploded in West Africa. We cut costs on the CDCs [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ndr] and in the end it happens. The United States should be the great guardian of the world, they have always been. But I don’t want to make documentaries; in a broad sense I have to entertain. Entertainment, however, should also challenge you; you don’t want to sit there smiling at a silly film. It’s nice when a film begins to speak to you. I add human behavior: empathy, sympathy, humor. Unless you’re doing Macbeth, you always try to put some humor, provided it’s not for its own sake. The rest I try to hide underneath; as a Celt I tend to be very grim.”
But what drove him back to the set again? “It depends a lot on the impression at first reading, of a book or a script. It all starts with the writer; if I like it we’re off. If the starting material is perfect, you don’t change much, but it’s never perfect. The dynamics of a film are different from those of a book. 80% of the time I’m the one who selects the project, then I find a screenwriter and we develop it together, I spend a lot of time on it. I’m very good at saying: here it’s getting boring, here we’re there, a little dull, here we are, let’s tweak, let’s tweak. Like taking the measurements of a suit, but it’s others who write.”
The Outcast Family of The Dog Stars
Hig (Jacob Elordi) survives in an abandoned air base, alongside the former Marine Bangley (Josh Brolin). Brolin jokes: “Ridley calls us the odd couple, I like the reference.” Scott immediately corrects him: “Be clear, I mean Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, when Matthau used to say: if you empty the ashtray again, I’ll smash it over your head. That Odd Couple!” Hig, however, haunted by a loss, soon sets out to explore the world, crossing paths with father Pops (Guy Pearce) and daughter Cima (Margaret Qualley). Between Hig and Cima a special bond forms, honed by the performers, as Elordi confirms: “Margaret and I spent quite a bit of time off set, tailoring the script to feel more natural for us. We worked to inject a certain realism into those moments.”
For Guy Pearce there are two moments in his gruff character: “The interesting thing to interpret is that on one hand he is a father who only knows how to try to protect her, but he almost doesn’t know who he is; he’s not someone who can articulate emotions well. Only when Hig arrives does he see that perhaps there is a future for her, because inside him he wants there to be something better. At that point he softens a little, returns a bit to who he was before, and there are funny moments.”
Ridley Scott: Unpredictable yet Steady as a Rock
Everyone knows that filming with Ridley Scott is no walk in the park, because he keeps creativity burning on the set, rethinking things at the last moment. Josh Brolin, who had collaborated with him on American Gangster, recalls as the director watches with a sly grin: “You don’t know which direction to go. You build your foundations, then you have to rewrite and experiment on set. I think of the character in the book or script, we start there and find something of our own, and in the end we trust each other, I think you can see it in the film. […] I was thinking of American Gangster, the tension of handling a big film with Denzel, Russell and those personalities. It takes someone with an ego big enough to say: here we need to change, this moment doesn’t work. Someone who is a visionary but also able to manipulate the actors without making them feel blocked. He inspires you, but then gets what he wants, and you’re happy. He manipulates you and you’re satisfied!” Brolin and Pearce recall the sense of estrangement that Margaret Qualley felt when she arrived on set after the others and found herself in this working method.
Listening to these reflections, Ridley needles everyone, anticipating the standard question: “What was the greatest difficulty you faced on set?” “I think it was me!” But directing, Scott notes, is not just about directing actors: “Poetry resides in the image. The photography is the visual translation of poetry. It’s the poetry of a film, whether it’s horror or comedy. The problem is that it’s rarely so, because people don’t know where to place the camera.”
Filming in Italy… to Avoid Filming in Canada: Too Dangerous!
Although the story of The Dog Stars is set in Colorado, with aerial shooting apparently confirming it, much of the film was actually shot in Italy, especially in the Dolomites but also in Abruzzo, with interiors at Cinecittà Studios. Many crew members were Italian, and the film benefited from ministerial tax incentives. But why this unusual choice? Scott jokes, but not entirely: “I was in Canada doing scouting, in Calgary. Canada is majestic. You step out of the car to pee, walk five minutes through the forest, you turn around and realize you’re lost. And you die there. There are wolves and bears. It’s threatening. I had already done sopralluoghi nelle Dolomiti. I asked the small crew I had brought for scouting: are you a little scared? They said yes, so we came to Italy. A capricious decision. I shouldn’t say it, but in Italy you eat better, sorry Canada.”
Brolin already has a fond memory: “We stayed in a small village, my family with me, there were these fantastic chapels, only two or three restaurants, a small community. Old-fashioned. You don’t shoot this often—everyone lived nearby, we saw each other all the time, on set or off. It’s special.”
Ridley allows himself some reflections and memories of our country: “It’s impossible to forget the importance of cinema when you shoot in Italy. I trained myself with Italian and French cinema more than with American. I met both Fellini and Sergio Leone. Fellini took me around; it was the set of that film with the big ship [from the description it seems E la nave va], there were two pistons as big as this building. It was all so proud.”
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