"Goonies Big Brother All Grown Up"

Josh Brolin may not be quite as famous as his legendary actor father James Brolin, but he has developed a level of acting quality as equal as his father and a reputation as one of the finest character actors in Hollywood today.

His roles include films like No Country For Old Men, Milk, the Grindhouse Planet Terror film, American Gangster, and W, of which, he is known for playing mostly villains. Now, the 42 year-old takes his penchant for playing the bad guy into being the titular antihero in the film adaptation of the comic Jonah Hill. Brolin expressed his feeling of playing a more atypical kind of comic book hero.

“[This was] stemming from a comic book that has had three lives and that wasn’t necessarily very successful, but I loved the idea that it refused to die, so it was a survivalist comic book,” Josh says of it, “But it allowed us to take luxuries and do what we wanted to do as long as we had the blessing of the comic book artists. The core of the characters is there, but we go off on all these different tangents, we’re allowed to.”

One of the first things one notices about Jonah Hex is the hideous scar on the left side of his face. We asked Josh about how it felt undergoing the makeup and prosthetics for that everyday during shooting.

“A pain in the ass,” he replies, “Because, well, it’s not that we didn’t have the money that we chose to go practical, which Lon Chaney being one of my heroes and loving the idea of morphing, and having the opportunity to do that I embrace. But it’s kind of the story that Alec Baldwin told before he did The Edge, which was out in Alaska, with a bear, and Anthony Hopkins, when he was sitting in his nice, really warm apartment in New York, reading the script, saying, ‘I think this could be cool,’

"Goonies Big Brother All Grown Up"

and then smash cut to out in the middle of nowhere, when it’s forty degrees below zero, and going, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have done this movie.’ We did three hours of makeup a day. It was very tough, there were many different layers. I had a mouthpiece that held my mouth all the way back and that was attached to the back of my neck, and then we did three more layers on top of that, and then I walked around with half a mustache and half a beard in New Orleans for three months. So there was nothing attractive.”

“We actually had the eye, which is in the comic book, and I started to get an infection like within the hour, and I’m not that dedicated,” Brolin adds, “But to be honest with you, I think, it sounds like bullshit, but it’s not, it lent to the curmudgeony feel of the character itself. I couldn’t eat, so we would really, a lot of movies, you’d say, ‘I work fourteen hours a day,’ but really you only work six, and you’re in your trailer, playing Nintendo the rest of the time, and we actually worked fourteen, sixteen hours a day, so I couldn’t eat that whole time. I would stuff myself in the morning, and then just drink water throughout the whole day, and it was a hundred degrees. So it was a pain. Would I do it again? Yeah. Because it’s like having a baby, now I look at the end result, and go, ‘That’s pretty cool.’”

Playing opposite Brolin is Megan Fox, who plays the prostitute Lilah, who is Jonah Hex’s love interest. He discussed how he impressed with what Fox brought to the table, considering her reputation with the tabloid press as a rather rebellious figure brought on by her overnight fame in the Transformers films.

“You know what’s funny though,” Josh says, “And it kind of sucks, is you go, guys, there wasn’t that

"Goonies Big Brother All Grown Up"

much thought put into it, and I know what you’re all thinking, but there actually was, because however Megan was perceived, I like the idea of giving somebody, even though this is an absurd, ridiculous, fun escapist film, I like the idea of giving somebody the opportunity like somebody gave me in saying, ‘Hey, we can go a little further with the acting here.’ Even though we made it fun, we did a lot of different takes, where she’s crying, where she’s not crying, and there’s somewhat of a dialect there, it’s kind of a generalized, bucolic dialect.”

“But when I read some of these articles that she had done, it showed how acerbic and rebellious she could be, I wanted to see how real that was,” he continues, “When you’re 22 and have that fame, nobody can handle that kind of fame that fast, at 22 years old, and I thought she was handling it really well. So when we met, I just wanted to make sure she was the real deal, and a scrapper, and that she could go head to head with John, and that she could really hold her own. There’s definitely a truck driver mentality there.”

Josh also offered us his take on how Fox has handled her overnight fame.

“Rebellion, just to be clear, can mean holding onto some of your own integrity, of not playing into the idea of sensationalism,” Brolin believes, “We all have our moments, and that’s your guys’ job, to take those moments and make them turgid, gaseous, make them big, and it’s bigger than the person is.”

“When you start believing your own press, that’s when it gets really sad,” he adds, “But that’s part of the rebellion that I responded to, because she was still her. She’s still very grounded, very gravelly, which I like.

Josh discussed with us what he believes the relationship between Jonah and Lilah represents in the story.

“It’s a Beauty and the Beast thing,

"Goonies Big Brother All Grown Up"

physically, cosmetically,” Brolin says of it, “But then, I think the parallel and the kinetic connection is because they’re equally broken. Then there’s also, I mean, I hate saying this, but I will, an older-younger type of thing. I don’t think that’s really true, but it might be.”

Another person Brolin discussed working with is acting legend John Malkovich who plays the film’s terrorist villain Quentin Turnbull. He talks about his favorite scene with the actor.

“We were doing the clay fight sequence, me and John, this was fairly early on in the movie,” he says, “We finished a take, and it was fairly violent. The great thing about John is he’s so in character, but he doesn’t stay in character. So we’ll finish a take, and will be looking at each other, and we’ll be yelling, ‘Grrrr!’ And they yell cut, and he goes, ‘So when are you doing the Woody film?’”

“So there was one take that we did, and John says, ‘Josh, can you come here for a second?’ Josh continues, “And I said, ‘Yeah, John, what’s up?’ and he says, ‘Um, can you pull my finger?’ And I said, ‘Seriously?’ And he says, ‘Yeah, just grab my finger, and just pull it.’ And I pulled his finger, and I heard a crack, and I go, ‘Oh fuck, man. Are you alright?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, I think you broke it. But I’m fine.’ That’s my best John Malkovich.”

Josh was asked to discuss his relationship with retribution, which is a theme that consistently runs through Jonah Hex.

“Look, this is how I’ll bullshit my way through this answer,” Brolin replies, “Retribution, if you go back to these Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson movies, the last movie that I saw, the last character that I saw that I wanted to be, because he did almost superhuman things, and I just wanted that escape for an hour and a half, was Jackie Chan in Rumble In The Bronx.

"Goonies Big Brother All Grown Up"

But Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, that whole thing of whatever anger you feel in your life, whatever, you’re riding your bike down the street when you’re 13, and somebody yells something at you, or throws something at you, for some reason or another, and you don’t feel the ability to fight back, those little things that happen in your life, you do.”

“It’s like the cartoon on the back of the comic book where someone kicks sand in your face,” he adds, “You want that one moment where you have the perfect thing to say, or the perfect punch where you don’t have to get in a fight, you can just knock the guy out in one punch and walk away. This is my version of that. This is my wanting to live that. It’s my attempt at other people coming to the movie saying, Jonah Hex is really cool, he does these things, he’s with people like Lilah, they’re broke and it comes from a dark place, but we find levity in the movie, I want to be that guy for an hour and a half. The intention is to leave the movie theater and feel a bit puffed up, but not so much that you go put a cap in somebody’s ass, white version of saying that.”

Brolin also discussed the notion of playing a fictional character who has such an extensive background like Jonah Hex.

“Yeah, it’s nice to be able to springboard from a place that, even though it’s not real, it’s real for me,” Josh says, “Once you look at the comic book and you say, okay, I have a sketch here. You know, I’ve said before that a lot of times I’ll do a movie and I’ll go to my son, and he’ll sketch out the character. I’ll explain it to him, I won’t even read the script, or anything, sometimes, but I’ll say, this is how I see this character, and

"Goonies Big Brother All Grown Up"

this is the ambiance of the story, all that, and he’ll sit there and sketch stuff out.”

“Sometimes I can use it, and sometimes I can’t,” he continues, “Like Grindhouse, I used it, and he made the character really fat, and I was like, ‘Fuck.’ I was used to springboarding from that kind of place, so this was great for me. And look, as fun as it is, as dark as it stems from, it’s good to have people in mind. Or even if I use characters, like actors, whether it be Robert Mitchum or whoever, and I watch some of his movies, is there one little gem that I can steal, and extrapolate on that.”

Josh also commented on reported reshoots that took place with Francis Lawrence.

“There’s a difference between reshoots and additional shoots,” he explains, “There’s always perception, like oh, is there a problem? First of all, who cares, because the end result is all that matters. And the one thing is, is that when we saw the initial cut, the base cut, we go, oh wow, there’s a lot more humor than we thought here, so maybe it’s not as dark and gritty throughout the whole thing. Maybe we can base the movie as dark, and then we can get and find some kind of different colors of levity. So it was more about enhancing what already was. I think that we missed some things during additional shooting that we didn’t realize, because tonally, there’s no model for this.”

“It’s like three different genres in one- not quite spaghetti western, supernatural movie, or action movie, but there’s elements of all those things,” Brolin adds, “It was kind of like plowing out a completely new genre road, and saying, now okay, now we know what we have, how can we extrapolate on that? And also someone who knows scope. Francis is the pinnacle of scope, what he’s done. That was really important to us, when we

"Goonies Big Brother All Grown Up"

realized what we had. The whole color palette and the whole thing. It was like, wow, this could be seem much bigger than it is, with the budget that we used. We did this movie for six thousand dollars.”

While most film adaptations of mature comics like Watchmen and Kick-Ass have tended to be rated R, Jonah Hex was given a PG-13 rating. Brolin discussed whether or not there would be an unrated version on the DVD release.

“I think it belongs on DVD,” Josh says, “I was very against them going PG-13 in the beginning. Then I was very happy, and I think they made the much better decision in going PG-13 because it’s not gratuitous. When you watch this movie, you expect it to be gratuitous, and it’s not, and I think that’s much more interesting than if it were a grindhouse type of thing.”

Josh was asked if she collected things today like the guns and knives people collected in the Old West.

“Just adult toys,” Brolin replies with a laugh.

It was also asked whether the rumors was true that Brolin is playing a younger version of Tommy Lee Jones’s Agent K character in an upcoming third Men In Black in the works.

“Uh-huh,” Josh replies, point blank.

Josh, then, shared his other film projects he has going in the works. Including “his Woody”.

“Uh, I’ve got a woody next,” Brolin states, “I’ve got chubby after that. And then I have a half-mast after that. And then after that, I’m just going to relax and be flaccid. Thank you so much for that, by the way, it made my day. I’ve got Woody [Allen] ‘s movie that was in Cannes, I’ve got Oliver [Stone]‘s movie, Wall Street: [Money Never Sleeps], that was in Cannes, which was very special to me, that I had those two movies in Cannes.”

“We got this coming out,” he continues, “We got True Grit coming out Christmas, Men In Black [III-D], if it all works

"Goonies Big Brother All Grown Up"

out, is going to happen. We just sold something to Warner Bros. that I’ll direct probably next year, and a couple of other projects that are really good that I can’t talk about.”