Ben Stiller's 2001 supermodel film Zoolander is arguably one of the most beloved comedies of the millennium so far — its 2016 sequel not so much — and now the film's director/star has shed light on the "awful" original cut of the film's famous gasoline fight scene.
The scene in question is a hysterical moment when a group of himbo supermodels have a gasoline fight at a gas station before lighting a cigarette and dying in the ensuing explosion. But that scene originally had a far more gruesome ending, Stiller revealed during an appearance on the podcast Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend last week (January 27).
"I was looking through some of this old behind-the-scenes footage from Zoolander that I have and — this was literally last week — I found an old cut of the gasoline fight," Stiller said. In the original version of the scene, "He drops the match on the floor, and you see the flame track under the car, and then it goes up and it starts engulfing each one of the models. And it literally goes on for, I'm not kidding, for like two minutes, where they're just dancing in pain."
He admitted, "It's awful. And also, this is the year 2000, before real CG effects, where we had three stunt men doused in the jelly, where they put the jelly on. So they're on fire for real, doing this. And then the explosion was a real explosion that knocked the windows out of the buildings across the street, because it was bigger than our guy thought it was gonna be."
Revisit the very funny (and far less gruesome) version of the scene that made it into Zoolander below.