Sorry, I keep finding all these articles about Sahara...
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Article

By Mike Szymanski

They all knew they had to become close for the big budget movie "Sahara." After all, Matthew McConaughey's character has known Steve Zahn's character since they were 6.

"These guys have been together since kindergarten, which is kind of crazy," Zahn tells Zap2it.com. "I mean that's like beyond married."

And then, Penelope Cruz's character falls in love with McConaughey's roguish Dirk Pitt, and the trio unites as a team of reluctant adventurers. What no one planned for is that the two actors would actually fall in love off-screen, too.

"I think it was unexpected for everyone, especially them," says director Breck Eisner about McConaughey and Cruz. "It wasn't 'til we were done that I learned about it. I love it. They seem so happy together."

Of course, the director points out that his stars' relationship may not help the movie at the box office. "Often it hurts," he notes. "I doesn't drive people to the movie if they're not interested."

Cruz remains careful about discussing her new relationship -- having already been through a media whirlwind after her fling with Tom Cruise just after he split with his wife Nicole Kidman. She never met McConaughey before filming, and she says she was captivated by his sense of humor.

"I think that he's the perfect person to play this character because he has a charm that the character needs to have," Cruz says. "On the set, it was the three of us together everyday for five months. We laughed a lot, but we had to be very focused."

The actors each have their favorite moments while filming in Morocco. Cruz taught the guys some Spanish, especially swear words and says, "We played a lot of charades." McConaughey recalls strumming his guitar around the campfire as desert nomads joined them. Zahn says he enjoyed the competitive nature between them as they learned tricks from a Navy SEAL instructor.

"We knew that you couldn't rely on some computerized wizardy, you had to believe these people and their friendships," says Zahn. "Sometimes you see friends do movies and they don't seem like friends. It's some weird artistic thing that happens."

Zahn didn't know his co-stars before he took the job. "I'm such a dolt, I live on a farm in Kentucky," he says. But, when he got the script, McConaughey slipped in a two-page passionate poetic letter and Zahn says, "I felt like I was drafted to the Super Bowl team a week before the Super Bowl."

"Sahara" is based on the treasure-hunting characters in Clive Cussler's series of books. The guys are looking for a Civil War battleship which they find in a West African desert, and along the way they meet a doctor, played by Cruz. Bad guys are constantly shooting at them, and they don't always know why, so they're always on the run. That caused a few scrapes for the stars.

"One time I ripped my calf muscle pretty bad, I was running across this gully to get away from a sniper," Zahn says, rubbing his leg.

"I had to learn how to ride a camel," adds Cruz, who was scared of the big nasty animals at first. "I ended up galloping next to a train at 40 kilometers per hour. I became best friends with my camel."

The director confirms: "Of the three, she was the best rider. She didn't want to stop."

Eisner is the son of former Disney chief Michael Eisner, and this is his first major film. His challenge was to make the characters connect. "They hung out in London for a week going to bars and hanging out socially which was important," he says. "Then they came to Morocco a few weeks before we began shooting to do military training, so they had that background together. They just love each other and have a shorthand with each other, and that translates to the screen."

The cast and crew faced treacherous sandstorms and sweltering heat as well as locusts (visible in the final scene) while shooting. But the cast took it in stride, and the three stars often high-fived each other after making it through another day on the set.

McConaughey likes to go off hiking on his own, and traveled through Mali and Peru where he's unrecognized.

"I just go off with a backpack, get lost, don't speak the language, they don't know me, I don't know them and stay there long enough where I feel like I could live there for the rest of my life. Then I know it's okay for me to go back home," says the actor.

In that way, he's a lot like his character Dirk Pitt, the others say. And the connections the characters have in the book seem to have translated to the stars in person.