Billy Zane is channeling Marlon Brando for his latest film.
The first trailer for Zane’s new film Waltzing with Brando, a biopic that follows Brando during the 1970s and shows glimpses of his time transforming an uninhabited island in Tahiti into his new home, premiered on Tuesday, Nov. 5.
The trailer offers glimpses of Zane, 58, starring as Brando in some of his most infamous films including Last Tango in Paris and The Godfather, and it also takes viewers behind-the-scenes of his life as a Hollywood star. The trailer juxtaposes Brando’s hectic Hollywood life with the tranquility of relaxing at his island home.
“I won an island nearby. It’s more beautiful than words can describe and cinematography can capture, and I want to move there,” Zane’s Brando says in the trailer.
The next several clips show Brando’s efforts — some of which seemingly fail — to make the island hospitable. In one clip, the actor says he’s working on a “process to bring clean, drinkable water to the island” using his “own urine.”
“To live out there with even a moderate amount of convenience would be a monumental undertaking,” Jon Heder’s architect character says at one point.
The trailer shows the pair’s various attempts to revamp Brando’s island home, including showing Zane using a bulldozer as workers dig up areas around the island. Another scene depicts an incident in which an airplane landed close to Heder’s character’s head during the renovation process.
The film — which is an adaptation of Bernard Judge’s 2011 memoir of the same name — and tells the story “of a young Los Angeles architect who found himself, quite unexpectedly, living on an unpopulated atoll in the South Pacific with his client, Marlon Brando.”
Judge was an award-winning architect whose innovations in building focused on environmental sustainability. Brando hired him to construct a home on the 12-island atoll of Tetiaroa, Tahiti. He died in 2021, nearly two decades after Brando died in 2004.
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The film is directed and co-written by Bill Fishman and is set to have its world premiere at the Torino Film Festival later this month. A portion of the movie’s proceeds will go to the residents of Tetiaroa, Zane and fellow producers Fishman and Dean Bloxom announced in May, per Deadline.
Zane described the new movie to the outlet as “a love letter to Tahiti, and [Brando] and his passion.”
In addition to the Titanic actor, Waltzing with Brando costars Tia Carrere, Richard Dreyfuss, Heder, Alaina Huffman, Rob Corddry and more.
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