The legendary filmmaker hadn’t read Peter Heller’s ‘The Dog Stars’ when the screenplay landed on his desk. But 30 pages in, he was hooked
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NEED TO KNOW
- Ridley Scott was drawn to The Dog Stars screenplay for its grounded, emotional take on a post-apocalyptic world
- The story explores survival, memory and companionship through a pilot navigating life after a devastating pandemic
- Scott says his experience during COVID-19 shaped how he connected with the story’s themes of societal collapse
Ridley Scott has spent decades imagining worlds on the brink of collapse.
From Alien to Blade Runner, the filmmaker, 88, has returned again and again to stories in which survival isn’t just about confronting an external threat, but reckoning with what people are capable of when the world as they know it falls apart.
So when The Dog Stars came across his desk, Scott wasn’t familiar with Peter Heller’s novel. In fact, he hadn’t read it. What Scott did have was the screenplay, adapted by Mark L. Smith. And it didn’t take long for the script to convince him he was onto something.
“I didn’t know the book and Peter Heller,” Scott tells PEOPLE. “And I knew of Mark Smith.”
Credit: Fabio Lovino / 20th Century Studios
The project came to Scott from Fox, where he has maintained a first-look deal for roughly 20 years. It’s an unusual way for one of his films to begin: Rather than developing the project himself, the filmmaker was simply handed the screenplay and asked what he thought.
He started reading.
About 30 pages in, Scott had a problem — just not the one a reader might expect. He wasn’t worried the script would lose steam. He was worried the writer would.
“I read and I think about 30 pages, I started to get anxious in case he would drop the ball,” Scott says.
He didn’t.
“I just like to read by surprise. I never read a reader’s report, I just read it. And I was blown away,” Scott says.
That reaction gets at what Scott considers the most important part of making a movie: getting the story right on the page before anything else begins.
Credit: Penguin Random House
Published in 2012, Heller’s The Dog Stars is a post-apocalyptic novel that is as interested in loneliness, memory and companionship as it is in survival. The story follows Hig, a pilot living in the aftermath of a devastating pandemic that has wiped out most of the population. He has retreated to an abandoned Colorado airport with his loyal dog, Jasper, and Bangley, a heavily armed and volatile man who helps protect their small patch of the new world.
Hig spends his days doing what he has to do to stay alive — flying his plane, fishing, hunting and keeping watch for other survivors. But the routines of survival can’t completely drown out his memories of the life he had before.
There are guns and danger, but there is also an almost meditative quality to Hig’s days: the mountains and open sky, the quiet of an emptied landscape, the companionship of his dog and the persistent ache of remembering the people and world he has lost.
Scott says that quieter side of the story was part of what made the screenplay stand out. After reading it, he met with Smith and his producing partner and began seeing the story’s possibilities on screen.
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Heller’s novel was published long before COVID-19 turned pandemic anxiety into a shared reality. But Scott came to The Dog Stars after living through an actual global pandemic — and that experience inevitably changed the way the story landed. He remembers the moment during COVID when the crisis stopped feeling abstract and began to feel like something much larger and more frightening.
“No pandemic’s a good idea,” Scott says. “But I remember there was a moment in the pandemic, because I do this for a living, I felt the actual drama suddenly kick in.”
What struck him was how quickly one crisis could compound another. A pandemic, he says, could collide with a financial collapse, political instability or conflict — each one feeding the next until the systems people rely on begin to break down.
“You have a pandemic of that kind, well, we haven’t got a hold of it yet,” he says. “At the same time, you have a financial disaster like 2008. You’re staring at the global abyss in the financial market. Then you have something else, warring groups, and suddenly you have chaos. And once you have chaos, you have panic. And that’s how in a flash it can happen.”
Credit: Fabio Lovino/20th Century Studios
That, for Scott, is what makes The Dog Stars unsettling. The apocalypse isn’t frightening because of zombies or some fantastical creature. It’s frightening because Heller’s world feels like a version of our own pushed just a few steps further.
“God bless those who make zombie movies, but I avoided the zombies,” Scott says. “I’m zombied out.”
That grounded quality is central to The Dog Stars. Heller isn’t simply imagining what happens after the world ends; he’s interested in what remains of a person when the structures, relationships and routines that once gave life meaning are gone.
Hig’s bond with his dog becomes especially important in that world. Jasper isn’t just a companion or a piece of the survival equation. He is a connection to tenderness and loyalty in a landscape where almost everything else has disappeared.
And then there’s Bangley, whose paranoia and willingness to do whatever it takes to survive provide a stark contrast to Hig’s more reflective nature. Their uneasy partnership becomes one of the novel’s central relationships, forcing Hig to confront how much of himself he is willing to sacrifice simply to stay alive.
The Dog Stars is in theaters Friday, Aug. 28. Heller’s The Dog Stars novel is also available for purchase, wherever books are sold.
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