'This is not a job for adult humans'

There is a moment so funny and so absurd in Anaconda, that experiencing it on the big screen with a room full of people is worth the price of a movie theater ticket and a popcorn-drink combo alone. This scene has no real bearing on the plot of the movie. I wouldn’t even really consider it a spoiler. However, if you have any interest in seeing Anaconda, please do so before you read any further, because I’m about to describe the moment in detail and then go behind-the-scenes with the director and stars of the film to talk about it.

[Ed. note: Spoilers for one specific, hilarious moment in Anaconda below.]

Image: Sony

Still here? Great! If you’ve seen Anaconda, you can probably guess that I’m talking about the spider-pee scene. If you haven’t seen the movie yet and really don’t care about spoilers, here’s a quick recap:

Anaconda follows a group of four middle-aged friends (played by Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Steve Zahn, and Thandiwe Newton) who’ve drifted apart and are all going through some sort of mid-life crisis. When they reunite for a birthday party, Rudd’s character, a struggling Hollywood actor, tells the rest of them that he’s acquired the rights to shoot an Anaconda sequel, it doesn’t take much to convince the others to drop everything and fly to Brazil for some guerrilla filmmaking. Of course, things quickly go wrong, and our protagonists spend much of the movie running through the jungle to escape from violent criminals and deadly snakes.

This brings us to the spider-pee scene. At one point in the film, while running through the jungle (it doesn’t matter why), Black’s character gets bitten by a large, venomous spider. Unsure what to do, someone suggests peeing on it. Zahn’s character steps up to the plate, but there’s a problem: he’s pee shy and hasn’t been able to urinate in public in years. After a bit of coaching, he’s ready to pee all over his friend, but there’s one more catch: he pees sitting down.

This leads to Anaconda’s wildest visual as Rudd acts as a chair for Zahn so he can pee onto Black’s leg. Newton sits next to them, holding Zahn’s hand for emotional support. It’s like a perverted game of Twister.

“Imagine being the director and explaining the blocking to these guys,” Tom Gormican, the director of Anaconda, tells Polygon. “We went through 10 different iterations of how someone could sit on another guy and then be able to pee on his leg. It became this math problem on set where, at a certain point we’re all kind of looking at each other being like, ‘This is not a job for adult humans.’”

Adds Newton: “If you look at the end of the scene, you’re like, ‘How have they orchestrated this bizarre thing?’ They’re all like this one.”

Looking back at that moment, Zahn recalls struggling through the scene almost as much as his character does.

“I could barely get through it, man,” the Emmy-nominated actor says. “The whole intimate part when I’m like, ‘Man, I would love to pee all over you.’ That was really fun.”

Zahn is no stranger to absurd comedy. His credits include films like Saving Silverman and Daddy Daycare, but pulling a similar stunt on Anaconda, a major blockbuster full of movie stars and recognizable IP, felt different.

“It’s one thing if you’re doing a scene like that in some small movie, or when we used to make these comedies in the nineties, they weren’t huge budgets,” he says. “But to have a big budget and then do that scene in it, it’s really kind of crazy.”

The fact that Gormican manages to weave moments of laugh-out-loud humor into a movie full of explosive action and genuine jump scares is all the more impressive.

“It’s really cool,” Newton says. “You do something like that and then there’s this giant massive CGI snake and you can’t believe it’s all in the same five minutes.”

And if you’re wondering whether urine actually cures venomous spider bites, the answer is sadly no — that’s jellyfish stings, which is also a myth — but once Gormican and his co-writer Kevin Etten landed on the joke, they couldn’t resist it.

“We were looking for some jungle fun,” the director says. “There’s all the traditional set pieces that you can do, like people going down mudslides and all this stuff. But what haven’t people seen before? I was like, ‘What if you get bit by something? What do you do?’ And Kevin was like, ‘I think you have to pee on it.’ And I was, ‘No man, that’s jellyfish.’ And so we’re in this Google hole of what it is, and the idea of this scene was born out of that. The idea of someone being pee shy at a time when it’s very important for them to pee just sort of tumbled from there. We were like, how do we make it more and more ridiculous?”

Well, mission accomplished.

Anaconda is currently in theaters.