Waltzing With Brando Trailer Brings the Hollywood Legend Back to Life
Billy Zane is about to make moviegoers an offer they can’t refuse. The actor, who starred in Titanic, Tombstone, Sniper, and a whole lot of direct-to-video movies (but he’ll always be the Phantom to me), plays Hollywood legend Marlon Brando in Waltzing With Brando, a new film about the actor’s plan to build a sustainable community on Tetiʻaroa, and island in Tahiti where he filmed Mutiny on the Bounty, in the early ‘70s. Brando wanted to build a place far removed from the Hollywood community, and he contracted architect Bernard Judge to build it for him, coming up with zanier (and more expensive) ideas as the project went along. Jon Heder plays Judge, with Richard Dreyfuss, Tia Carrere, Camille Razat, Alaina Huffman, and James Jagger also starring alongside Zane. Written and directed by Bill Fishman (of the Car 54 Where Are You? adaptation from 1994) and adapted from Judge’s book of the same name, Waltzing With Brando is still awaiting a domestic distributor as it makes the film festival rounds, but VMI Worldwide has acquired the film’s foreign distribution rights. VMI Worldwide released a trailer for Waltzing With Brando, which you can see below:
Waltzing With Brando is one of the movies you have to see for the main performance alone. Pictures of Billy Zane as Marlon Brando surfaced several months ago, and the resemblance was uncanny. A lot of it is the makeup, of course, and based on the trailer, the production team put painstaking effort into making Zane look like Brando. But part of it is Zane’s eyes and the shape of his face, even without the makeup, which surprisingly look a lot like Brando. I say “surprisingly” because I doubt anyone would have thought of Billy Zane to portray Brando in a not-quite-biopic, and yet here he is, and he looks fantastic. Based on the trailer, he seems to have captured Brando’s speech cadence, playfulness, and oddball personality. I have no idea what Bernard Judge was like in real life, and I don’t imagine many others do, either, so Jon Heder should be just fine in a role that is essentially open to interpretation. Richard Dreyfuss appears to be one of the moneymen backing Brando’s experiment, and one who gets frustrated as the costs skyrocket. (This is begging for a scene where Brando channels Don Corleone and deals with Dreyfuss; I have no idea if that really happened, but that hardly matters in movies like these.) I assume Tia Carrere is playing Tarita Teriʻipaia, who was Brando’s wife in the earlier years during which the film is set, and Alaina Huffman could be Jill Banner, whom he started up with shortly after his marriage ended. But those are guesses.
As for the film, I’m looking forward to Waltzing With Brando. When I saw the pictures of Billy Zane, I assumed it would be a biopic about Brando’s acting career, but I like this idea as well. It has the opportunity to explore Brando’s eccentricities by taking this one very strange part of his life and examining it. There are plenty of Hollywood stories about Brando being an oddball; some are good, and some are not so good. But keeping the movie focused on this endeavor can paint him in a more playful light. The reaction from Jon Heder’s Bernard Judge when Brando tells him the drinking water is distilled from his urine is hilarious, as is Brando’s explanation for the hotel he wants to build on Tetiʻaroa (which still exists, by the way, as Brando bought a 99-year lease for the property; it’s called The Brando). Waltzing With Brando looks like a lot of fun, and I’m sure it’ll eventually get a domestic distributor so we can all see it next year.
Let us know what you think of the Waltzing With Brando trailer in the comments!
***
Get Your Geeks + Gamers merch here!
