Interviews
Filming in Australia Led to Terrifying Snake & Spider Encounters for ‘Anaconda’ Cast [Interview]
Art imitated life on the set of Anaconda, a meta-comedy reimagining of the 1997 creature feature.
Whereas the plot sees four friends set off to the Amazon to remake their all-time favorite movie, director Tom Gormican‘s (The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent) reimagining was filmed on location in Australia.
That meant that the cast and crew also had to look out for the local flora and fauna.
Bloody Disgusting spoke with stars Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Thandiwe Newton, and Steven Zahn ahead of the film’s opening in theaters on December 25, where they discussed what it was like on set. Humor was in spades, of course, but also a few moments of genuine fear thanks to some unexpected spiders and insects.
Oh, and a fear of snakes.
Paul Rudd plays Griff, the best friend to Jack Black’s Doug and the inspiration behind the foursome’s movie-making pursuits. It turns out that Rudd shares one key trait in common with his character: a fear of snakes. That’s not so bad when your giant snake co-star is made up of VFX, but less so when an early scene requires wading into the swamp at night to collect specimens.
“That scene was one of the very first scenes we shot in a whole movie,” Rudd said. “It was about 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, and it was in a swamp in water up to here. And I knew that there was tons of things swimming around in that. I was not excited to film that scene at all. Even the drivers were like, ‘Whoa, you’re going in that?’ Because in Australia, yes, you said it, everything can kill you. But that sucked. It was terrible. Thankfully, I made it out unscathed, but it was not a pleasant experience.”
Filming on location in Australia also required an actual snake handler who would clear the natural set of any dangerous critters.
Thandiwe Newton explained, “They’d always go before we turned up. They’d go a couple of hours before and just clear the area. And then we’d always turn up and go, ‘What’d you find? What’d you find today?'”
Steve Zahn adds, “He would say, like, ‘I found a brown snake that was really poisonous.'”
It wasn’t the snakes that terrified Newton, though, but an Australian specialty- the Huntsman spider.
“I actually saw the biggest spider I’ve ever seen in my life on the set, and no one was with me,” Newton recounts. “We were shooting by the river, okay? So it was like an old boatyard, a disused boatyard. And they had this restroom there just for the staff. Okay? So it was outside, but inside at the same time. So I just go because I wanted to use a proper loo and not the porta loos because I’m a princess. So I go in there, and I do what I need to do, my wee wees. Come out, and I’m washing my hands. I put the soap on my hands. And I’ve seen everything. In Mexico, I’ve seen tarantulas and wolf spiders in LA. The biggest spider that was literally, literally the size of my hand. It looked like a Thanksgiving turkey. It was massive. I’m literally going to put water on my hands, covered in soap. This thing comes up over the side of the sink.”
Watch the full story below and get ready for a meta-comedy adventure on Christmas Day.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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