JUNGLE FEVER
Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt get their old-school adventure on in Jungle Cruise.
acrumby-looking passenger boat, La Quila, bobs up and down by the side of a wooden dock that has seen better days. Passengers, dressed in early-20thcentury finery, are making their way off this less-than-seaworthy vessel, given instructions by the rather familiar figure of Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. “We have a dock on the left and dock on the right,” he cries. “It’s confusing – that’s why we call it a paradox.” Ahem. Roll up, roll up ladies and gentlemen… and welcome to Jungle Cruise.
It’s June 2018 (yes, that long ago) and Total Film has relocated to Kauai, the verdant Hawaiian island famed for hosting numerous Jurassic Park movies. Today, the land around a giant reservoir is doubling for Brazil, circa 1916. A twofloor wooden tavern, bedecked with oil lamps, a chandelier and grand piano, stands close by the dock. On the opposite side of the river is a marketplace, filled with birdcages, plants and baskets of vegetables, and a bar, with wicker chairs, an old brass coffee machine and a blue-and-white tea set.
Johnson, sporting a waistcoat, natty red neckerchief and a cap that gives him the look of Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, is realising what can only be described as a lifelong dream. Or at least one that stretches back to 2003, when he was kicking back in his local multiplex. “The first Pirates Of The Caribbean trailer came out and I was blown away,” he explains later, joining TF in the tavern between scenes. “And it created this feeling inside me that I’ll never forget… I remember thinking I would love to have that opportunity to make a movie based off an iconic ride.”
One of the original Disneyland attractions, ‘Jungle Cruise’ was designed as a river cruise adventure, as passengers were spirited on a 1930s steamboat along some of the world’s major waterways. Walt Disney himself was the first skipper when the park opened in 1955. Live animals were even initially planned to be used, an idea later dropped, but it was the captain’s
spiel, characterised by some groanworthy puns (“There are a couple of toucans, if we had another we would have a six pack!”), that was truly memorable.
As rides go, it’s apple-pie wholesome. “It has this vintage quality from 1955 to today,” remarks Johnson, who first experienced its gentle pleasures on his honeymoon to former wife Dany Garcia in his mid-twenties. “You could bring a baby, you could bring your grandparents, everybody could enjoy it together,” adds Jaume Collet-Serra, the Spanish director entrusted with adapting it for the big screen. “It was so beloved. It was clear that we wanted to make a movie that was like that.”
Before Pirates Of The Caribbean, adapting a theme park ride into a movie was never high on the list of most studio agendas. But when The Curse Of The Black Pearl grossed $654m (ultimately spawning four sequels), Hollywood took notice. In 2004, the idea of adapting the Jungle Cruise ride was first floated; seven years after that Tim Allen and Tom Hanks were mooted as potential stars. Then, in 2015, Disney announced that a script by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa
(Bad Santa) was being developed for Johnson, much to his glee.
While the story fluctuated as it fell into the hands of screenwriter Michael Green (Logan, Blade Runner 2049), Johnson’s role as Frank Wolff remained carved in stone. Running his ‘Jungle Navigation Company’ out of Porto Velho, Wolff ferries tourists along the Amazon on his ramshackle tramp steamer, fending off the slick Italian businessman Nilo who is aiming for a monopoly on all the port’s boats. Wolff gets his chance to clear his debts when he picks up Dr. Lily Houghton and her brother McGregor, taking them on a lifechanging journey.
Blending archaeology, actionadventure and a splash of supernatural fantasy, Jungle Cruise wears its influences on its sleeve – notably Romancing The Stone, the 1984 adventure classic starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, and the Indiana Jones series. “Dwayne’s such a huge fan of cinema,” says producer Hiram Garcia, “and he has these visions of things he wants to be able to achieve, especially looking up to the Harrison Fords and those movies like that. There was a kind of character and a kind of space he wanted to play in.”
Although Johnson once mooted Wonder Woman’s Patty Jenkins as a
‘I THOUGHT IMMEDIATELY… HERE IS A PHENOMENAL OPPORTUNITY TO REALLY DIG INTO ROMANCE’
potential candidate to direct, ColletSerra was always in the mix following a trio of Liam Neeson thrillers (Unknown, Non-Stop, Run All Night) and hit shark actioner The Shallows. “He was on the cusp. There were big movies going after him,” notes Garcia, referring to the sequel to Suicide Squad which was also rivalling for his attentions. Collet-Serra was ready to make the step up. “As a director, you want to play in that sandbox and see what it’s like.”
The Spaniard first met Johnson, Garcia and producing partner Beau Flynn in Atlanta, when they were shooting 2018’s ape thriller Rampage.
At the end of the meeting, Johnson fired one more question in his direction. “I said, ‘What do you think the movie is about?’ He didn’t even think about it, he didn’t hang on it. He just said, ‘The movie is about love, two people falling in love.’ It was really beautiful when he said that. And when he said it, I saw it. And that’s what you’ll find in a lot of this.”
FAIRGROUND ATTRACTION
In the original script the romance between Frank and Lily was barely hinted at, says Collet-Serra, with Lily arriving to the Amazon with her boyfriend. “So it made Frank the third wheel.” The director wanted to lean in the opposite direction, not least because major influence Romancing The Stone was powered by a potent love story between the Douglas and Turner characters. “Let’s not be afraid,” he says. “If you want to have the tone of Romancing The Stone, let’s include the romantic aspect.”
Intriguingly, Johnson has never had a romantic role in his career. “Oftentimes, the characters I was playing in the past, if there was a family element, there was a little bit of fracturing that I had to overcome,” he says.
At one point, adds Flynn, there was talk of creating a fizz between Johnson and Naomie Harris’ scientist in Rampage, but “kissing while saving the world” was a no-go. “You have to be careful in terms of forcing a love story into screenplays. So here’s a chance for it to be really organic and earned.”
When Johnson had that meeting with Collet-Serra, he realised this was his chance to show his softer side.
“It was almost like the heavens opened up,” he says. “And I thought immediately… here is just a phenomenal opportunity to really dig into romance. Something that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, but I certainly never wanted to force it. It all happened so… serendipitously.” He grins. “I think that’s the word.”
McGregor was refashioned as the brother and romance was born, although at that point, there was no female lead attached. “So it was a bit of a bold move on my part,” laughs Collet-Serra. Fortunately, Johnson had a strong idea. “I told Sean Bailey who’s the president of Disney… I said that there’s one woman who we have to go get. And it was Emily Blunt.” The studio had just worked with her on Mary
Poppins Returns, which immediately gave them an ‘in’ with the British star.
Before Blunt read the script, she wasn’t convinced. “It sounded like maybe it would be the girlfriend part or something,” she chuckles. “I just imagined… I’m like the damsel tied to a tree.” Then she read Lily’s introductory scene, as she sneaks around a private library in Piccadilly Circus, looking for some vital clues to lead her to the Amazon and the so-called “legend of the tears of the moon”, where she hopes to find the Tree of Life, said to have the potential to cure all ailments.
It quickly became apparent that Dr. Lily Houghton is anything but a damsel in distress. “She’s really free-spirited and tenacious and funny and heedless,” says Blunt. “She’s the worst person possible for the rather cynical, jaded Frank.” Calling her “recklessly brave”, she adds, “She’s the kind of character who thinks she knows everything.” Wearing rust-coloured slacks, brown boots and a mint-green blouse, Blunt’s blonde hair is piled under headwear that immediately screams ‘Indiana Jones’. “Why do you think I picked this hat?!” she smirks.
From vine swinging to ziplining and running over rooftops, there’s been plenty of action for Blunt, though this morning she’s been shooting a more leisurely hop onto Frank’s boat from the jetty with the help of her brother McGregor – played by British actor/ comedian Jack Whitehall. Dressed in a cream three-piece suit and tie, the Fresh Meat star looks deliciously out-of-place. “He’s absolutely hilarious,” Blunt remarks (it was she who chemistry-read in New York with all of her potential ‘siblings’ before clicking with Whitehall). “We all find ourselves rather too funny on this film. We’ll see if everyone else does!”
When Whitehall saunters over for a chat, it’s clear he’s having the time of his life. A Lion King super-fan (“it is Shakespeare with fur, sister!” he rants in one of his stand-up routines), Whitehall says, “I’m sort of obsessed with Disney. And I think Disney are aware of how obsessed I am with them. Someone certainly showed someone quite high up at Disney my ode to The Lion King, which didn’t get me a part in [Jon Favreau’s 2019 live action/CG remake of] The Lion King, which I’m kind of devastated about. But this will definitely make up for that.”
Undoubtedly, McGregor’s comic stylings – as the slightly cowardly, slightly pompous Englishman abroad – seems perfectly suited to Whitehall. “I kind of like playing characters that are in this ballpark,” he admits. “It’s a kind of British comic tradition of playing… these types of men that are very highly strung and always on the edge. You’re putting
‘WE ALL FIND OURSELVES RATHER TOO FUNNY ON THIS FILM. WE’LL SEE IF EVERYONE ELSE DOES!’
him into a world that is so alien, and the stakes are so high, and it feels so real.” UP THE CREEK ‘Real’ is exactly what Jungle Cruise has been aiming for. Construction on the sets by Jean-Vincent Puzos, the production designer who brought James Gray’s Amazonian adventure The Lost City Of Z to life, began six months earlier in January. Workers had to endure torrential rains, though thankfully the
builds withstood the flooding. “They set a record for rainfall, 50 inches in one day here,” notes Flynn. “A lot of the island was wiped out.” The production helped with Hawaiian flood relief, donating portions of the set to the non-profit Habitat for Humanity.
Despite the expense and weather issues of shooting in Hawaii, ColletSerra felt it vital they build as many sets as possible rather than use green screen. “Especially in the first 30 minutes of the movie, to kind of really immerse the audience into the world. And then, as the journey starts, and other visual effects take over, at least it feels like the movie’s more grounded.” Blunt – despite sloshing her way through the mud and rain this morning – agrees. “I think that really kicked us off in the right way. We really knew what film we were trying to make.”
The verisimilitude extends to Frank’s boat, which will bring Frank and Lily closer together as they journey along the Amazon. “The boat is a relic and how it’s put together… it’s very similar to Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon,” smiles Johnson. This “hunk of junk” is as big a character as anything else in the film. “She’s sort of cobbled together from pieces of wood or iron… and she looks kind of like a Frankenstein boat,” says Blunt, noting that Bogart’s own vessel in The African Queen was an inspiration. “It’s Frank’s baby. The boat is his family.”
As the film’s trailer reveals, Frank has been looking for the Tree of Life for years and doesn’t believe it exists. But he would seem to be in the minority, with Lily and her brother in a race against time with Prince Joachim (played by Jesse Plemons, complete with Teutonic accent and his own submarine). Collet-Serra calls him “a delicious character that is not your traditional villain”, with Plemons bringing this larger-than-life figure to screen. “He had to out-stage the visual effects of the movie, and he did that wonderfully.”
There are further mysteries in
Jungle Cruise, not least involving a Conquistador played by Édgar Ramírez (who worked with Blunt on
The Girl On The Train) who has seemingly been trapped in the Amazon for centuries. Drawn to the idea of working in the VFX realm, Ramirez got to visit famed visual effects house Industrial Light & Magic. “It was like entering the Stranger Things facility,” he marvels. “You know, it’s like I saw the real E.T. and I took a picture next to it. I was like a kid. I mean, E.T. was
the first movie I ever saw. I wanted to experience that magic as well.”
The complex VFX work led by visual effects supervisor Jim Berney (Aquaman) includes a ferocious-looking jaguar named Proxima that Frank is forced to tackle. Yet real animals were very much a part of the shoot too, adding to the film’s sense of adventure. On set, a cockatoo sits on the shoulder of Paul Giamatti, the Billions actor cast as Frank’s garrulous nemesis Nilo. The feathery squawker was all Giamatti’s idea. “I like when actors come in and they bring ideas like this, because it really makes the movie that much richer,” says Collet-Serra.
The director wasn’t even bothered about working with a real bird on set. “On The Shallows… I had a fantastic experience with a seagull,” he laughs. “So I was not afraid of birds at all.” He immediately took the idea to the Disney Imagineers, the brains behind the theme parks. “[They] reminded me that there was a bird called Rosita in the mythology of Jungle Cruise. So that made it perfect, because it ties in with some of the Easter eggs that they wanted to have in the movie.”
The cockatoo wasn’t the only live animal that came in handy. Once the production moved to Atlanta to complete work over the summer, a herd of goats were brought in to prep a sequence shot at the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, a huge 300-acre site in the Georgia countryside where some of the Amazonian jungle was recreated. For two weeks, these hungry goats were used to clear the thick brush – the star of the show being Larry, a creature capable of walking on its hind legs and clearing up higher-up, hard-to-remove plants.
It was around this time, in August 2018, that stories began to appear in the tabloids that Whitehall’s character was “hugely effete, very camp and very funny” – and would be, at the time, the first major gay character in a Disney movie (since eclipsed by John McCrea’s fashionista Artie in Cruella). Immediately, some quarters of social media began bemoaning the fact that a straight actor was playing a gay role and pointing to the fact that Scarlett Johansson had pulled out of playing a transgender male in the never-made Rub & Tug.
What did Collet-Serra make of all this? “First, people should see the movie before commenting,” he replies, testily. “Second, as a director, by law, I cannot ask if an actor is gay or not. So how am I even supposed to cast somebody and ask, ‘Are you gay?’ You know?” He points out that the character changed “two or three times” during development. “We were trying different things.” So is McGregor gay? “People should watch the movie and then comment. There is no point in me saying something that should be revealed by the movie.”
Of course, even the plans for release were soon to be left in tatters. By March 2020, TF was enjoying another sit down with Blunt and her co-star in Atlanta’s Tyler Perry Studios, where Johnson was filming forthcoming thriller Red Notice. Shooting had wrapped on Jungle Cruise 18 months earlier, in September 2018, only for Disney to delay the release from its original October 2019 berth to a more blockbuster-friendly July 2020. Little did they – or anyone else – realise that a pandemic was about to turn Hollywood upside down.
Prior to this, the atmosphere in the room is jubilant, with Flynn and Garcia filming their stars on mini camcorders. It’s the first time TF has had a chance to see Johnson and Blunt chat together. She’s in a floaty blouse, white trousers and heels; he’s wearing a brown shirt, gold chain and light denim jeans. Batting zingers back and forth, their off-screen chemistry is a delight – like Bogart and Hepburn reborn. Take the moment when TF asks Johnson if Frank is his take on Bogart’s crotchety Charlie Allnutt from The African Queen.
“He’s exactly that!” says Johnson, looking a little bemused.
“Crotchety means grumpy,” chips in Blunt, acting as the perfect transatlantic translator. “It doesn’t mean crotch heavy!”
“That’s what I thought!” he fires back. “I was like, ‘What? Crutchy?!’”
“When you said ‘Crotchety’,
I was like, ‘He doesn’t know what that means!’”
It’s these playful bants that are set to make Jungle Cruise a hugely enjoyable summer romp. “One of the special things about the movie is that relationship, and I wish I could take credit for it, but this is one of the things that just happened when you put two very talented people [together],” says Collet-Serra, who points out that with so much action on the boat, the spotlight is frequently on these two mismatched adventurers. “So the chemistry is the movie… we are watching them and their relationship.”
Within days of this second encounter, the COVID-19 pandemic saw cinemas shut and blockbusters scatter like nine pins. The lockdown didn’t affect the postproduction (“We were one week off from being done,” informs ColletSerra), but a film that was tied so closely to the Disney theme park attractions (which were also closed) had no choice but to be postponed. Even now, the film
‘THE CHEMISTRY IS THE MOVIE… WE ARE WATCHING THEM AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP’
is being given a hybrid release in July, in cinemas and on the Premier Access strand of Disney+, following the likes of Cruella and Black Widow.
Despite all the difficulties, Johnson and Collet-Serra are clearly tight, with the pair reuniting on the delayed (and now finally shooting) DC Comics tale Black Adam. “He is the perfect director for Black Adam,” notes Johnson, “being a genre director with his past and everything that he’s delivered to audiences.” Collet-Serra, who has finally landed his comic-book tale after turning down the Suicide Squad sequel, is raring to go. “We’re trying to do something very, very special with it. I think fans are gonna like it.”
While he’ll be hard-at-work world-building this Shazam! spin-off, he’s hoping audiences will engage with Jungle Cruise on the biggest screens possible. “I think this is a perfect movie for the summer – if things are a little bit safer and people are going to the theatres.” It might even be exactly the tonic we all need; our very own Tree of Life. “[It’s] a light movie that will help people relieve mentally of some of the pressures of the last few month,” he says. “I think it’s definitely going to be a good antidote to what’s going on.”
JUNGLE CRUISE IS IN CINEMAS AND ON DISNEY+ WITH PREMIER ACCESS ON 30 JULY.