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Features
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A Trash-Talking Adventurer
If our recent interview with Anacondas leading man Johnny Messner is any indication, Columbia Tristar really missed the boat by not having him do the DVD commentary.
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
By FilmStew Staff
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Lester Cohen/Wireimage.com
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Johnny B. Candid
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Johnny Messner plays Bill Johnson, the formidable, tough and reluctant hero of Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid, new today on DVD. But truth be told, nothing in the movie is even half as entertaining as spending some quality time with the actor in New York, as FilmStew did recently.
“I'm trying to bring a real man back to Hollywood,” he exclaims. “Steve McQueen, that whole thing. There hasn't been that for a long time.”
“Orlando Bloom's a hermaphrodite,” he rants. “I don't want to be prettier than the woman I'm walking with. I want people to look at me and say, ‘Now, there's a guy that can walk a woman to her f*cking car and fix her transmission. There’s a guy that can ride a horse or a motorcycle.’”
The 34-year-old Messner – who’s muscular and covered in a variety of tattoos – hopes to one day become America’s next big action hero. But for now, he’s settling for a small role in the 2005 Bruce Willis vehicle Hostage, the recent Kevin Pollack comedy Our Time Is Up and two other upcoming projects - Running Scared, the new movie by the director of The Cooler, and Cabrini Gardens, an independent romantic comedy.
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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Running on fumes?
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Messner remains repulsed by what he sees as a current trend in Hollywood towards dainty, nay, even Metrosexual leading men. “The Harrison Ford’s and the Bruce Willis’s and all these guys — they're older now, and that whole generation's gone,” he states. “Besides Russell Crowe, and he's a tough guy to work with, if you think about the whole realm of a new generation now, who is the real man?”
Everyone in the room throws out names. One catches Messner’s attention: Vin Diesel.
“Vin Diesel's my friend for a long time,” Messner says. “Nobody wants a one-note actor. That's it. If you do one thing the whole time, the public gets turned off. XXX, I couldn't even watch ten minutes of it. It was repetitive. A Man Apart, nothing. I'm not trying to sh*t on Vin Diesel. [But] I'm saying if that's what we've got now for a real man, then we've got problems.”
Of course, executives at NBC Universal and moviegoers who made its The Chronicles of Riddick a summer smash may tend to disagree just a tad. Although Anacondas co-star KaDee Strickland doesn’t have nearly as juicy an evaluation of the Hollywood biz as Messner, her initial reaction to the sequel still speaks volumes.
After the actress’s agent rang her up and said, ‘Giant killer snake movie,’ Strickland replied, ‘Are you serious?’ The young Southern blonde, also seen recently in Woody Allen’s Anything Else and Sam Raimi’s The Grudge, makes no apologies for her initial reaction to Anacondas.
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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The lovely KaDee Strickland
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“My agent was like, ‘Read the script and if you like it, you’re going to be on a plane tomorrow,’” recalls Strickland. “I had done Something’s Gotta Give and an executive over at Sony, God bless him, said, ‘Bring this girl in.’”
“I really did think, ‘Oh, snake movie, not what I want to follow Woody Allen with,’ she adds with a laugh. “And then I read the script and I just loved it; I thought it would be a lot of fun and was going to be really good for the type of film it was. Also, it was something I had never done. So I thought, why not?”
Anacondas, which slithered away from theaters in early October with a total domestic gross of $32 million, really has nothing whatsoever to do with Anaconda, the modestly successful 1997 horror movie that starred Jennifer Lopez, Jon Voight and one big snake. It also has nothing to do with reality.
The story is simple: a disparate group of people - Messner, Strickland, Morris Chestnut, Salli Richardson-Whitfield, Eugene Byrd, Karl Yune, Nicholas Gonzalez and Matthew Marsden - venture out to Borneo in search of the elusive red orchid, which apparently can extend human life. However, to reach this rare flower that only blooms for two weeks, the group must brave the whipping rains and rising waters of monsoon season, not to mention monster snakes that glide beneath the water’s surface.
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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Co-star Morris Chestnut
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The flower is fantasy, the snakes are fantasy (CGI-engineered fantasy, in fact) and so even is the notion of anacondas in Borneo – there are none.
Ask co-star Chestnut – whose credits range from Confidence to The Best Man, Boyz N the Hood and Ladder 49 - if such things matter in this kind of movie and he smiles. “The audience for this movie is not gonna be people such as yourselves,” he says, dismissing a murderer’s row of journalists gathered before him in a Manhattan hotel room. “People who are going to say, ‘OK, well, anacondas don't live in that part of the world, this, that and the other’. It's gonna be your young high school kids and younger who really wanna go to a movie just to be entertained, you know?”
“There are certain types of audiences,” he continues. “With a movie like The Terminal with Tom Hanks, for an older type of audience, then you have to be on your P's and Q's. But this is just a fun movie for young kids to go in there and entertain themselves.”
“So let me ask you; how many rules and restrictions do you want to place on entertainment?”
The man tasked with bringing in Anacondas as a Red State multiplex-friendly PG-13 rated horror-adventure is one Dwight Little. He started with horror, helming Halloween 4 and a less celebrated version of The Phantom of the Opera starring Robert Englund. Other credits include Marked for Death, Free Willy 2, Murder at 1600, The X-Files and The Practice.
“Dwight is a great actor's director,” Chestnut affirms. “He worked well with the actors and even when there were times when he and I didn't agree on certain things, we worked it out. He was great. Sometimes people hold it in a little bit longer and it affects what they do, and sometimes as adults you work it out and you move on.”
“A couple of things were real simple, but he wanted them in the movie for some reason,” the actor continues. “But it was a give and take, you know? Like I hated the end scene where I had to die and twitch there like that, but I gave in. Then there were scenes where he wanted me to have my shirt off and I wouldn't do it, and he gave in.”
| Matthew Marsden, a Brit best known for his work in Coronation Street, the cable version of Helen of Troy and the features Shiner and Black Hawk Down, is the villain of Anacondas, a threat nearly as lethal as the serpentine creatures that torment the group. As Dr. Jack Byron, the scientist heading up the expedition, he’ll stop at nothing to get to the red orchid. Marsden says he had a hoot twisting his invisible mustache and giving moviegoers someone to hate.
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“My friend Jason Isaacs, I think, was amazing in both Harry Potter and in The Patriot,” Marsden says. “There is a kind of prerequisite that if you have an English accent, you’ve given it away from the off that the guy is going to be a villain. I always thought, from my point of view, when looking at Byron, that the moment he starts becoming evil is the moment I’ll kind of lose it, because you end up coming up with a hammy kind of performance.”
“You have got to get the right mix for this kind of film,” he adds. “I wanted to make him just… driven. The whole thing was, ‘It’s about the orchid; it’s about the orchid.’ Everyone else was in his way. He’s just a man who changed as things went along; he wasn’t purposefully evil.”
Or at least, not as evil as the idea of Orlando Bloom as a Hollywood leading man. Right, Johnny?
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