IT SHOULDN’T HAPPEN TO A FILM JOURNALIST
Editor-at-Large JAMIE GRAHAM lifts the lid on film journalism.
Jamie on film-set animals (no, not the ones swarming the catering truck).
Never work with children or animals’ the adage goes, and the history of movies is littered with examples attesting to its wisdom.
On Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath Of God, 400 monkeys were brought in for the scene where the raft is overrun by primates, only for them to leap overboard, swim for the shore and disappear into the Peruvian rainforest. For the final segment of Creepshow, 20,000 cockroaches were imported from Trinidad to infest the germaphobe’s hermetically sealed New York flat, and many of them disappeared into props, furniture and any wall crack they could find to escape the lights (“Roaches don’t take direction,” sighed George A. Romero). And on Inferno, Dario Argento introduced cat-sized Chinese fighting rats to New York for a bonkers kill scene in Central Park. Naturally, some escaped and bred with Manhattan’s rodents.
I mention this because just last week, I was chatting to a friend of mine who oversees animal welfare on film productions. She said that the three ravens she was currently working with were “intelligent but stubborn, with short attention spans”. It got me thinking of some of the amazing animal antics I’ve seen on movie sets. Well, that and just how similar those ravens sounded to TF’s News Editor Jordan Farley.
GOING NUTS
The first animal magic I witnessed was on Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, as a row of squirrels perched on stools each picked up a nut, held it aloft to an ear, shook it, and then either tossed the bad ones or stashed the good ones to go into the confectionery delights. Never mind meeting Johnny Depp and Tim Burton – that, for me, was the highlight of the day.
Next it was proof that a dog really is a (wo)man’s best friend, as I met Rhona Mitra’s French bulldog Oscar in her trailer on Doomsday, and Susan Sarandon’s Pomeranian Penny on set of Blackbird (“The first thing I do is set up my teapot and my dog’s bed,” Sarandon said of making her trailer homely). Neither pooch was in the movie, but had the important job of keeping the star happy.
Meanwhile, my colleagues were meeting the animal stars of the silver screen. One met the goose in War Horse, who was later cast in the opening ceremony of the Olympics – not bad, being directed by Steven Spielberg and Danny Boyle. Another colleague met the 50 spiders that Harry Melling pours onto his face in The Devil All The Time. “We’ll go, ‘We’re ready to shoot,’ and then the spider wrangler will be like, ‘The spiders are tired, we need 20 minutes,’” explained director Antonio Campos. “So we’re just waiting for the spiders to come out of their trailer.”
PURR-FECT TAKE
The biggest pro I’ve ever met, though, was the cat in Hostel: Part II. Five times Eli Roth shot the scene where the feline wanders into the kitchen to find its owner sitting decapitated at the table, and five times it hit each of its marks: wander in, pause, hop on the table, pause, walk up the corpse’s arm onto its shoulder, pause, and then lap at the blood pooled in the severed neck. “It’s a better actor than Bijou [Phillips],” gasped Roth in awe. Later that night, as cast and crew went to a restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner and then on to a nightclub, the kitty’s charisma was the main topic of conversation.
I told a German journo about the cat, and he replied that he once saw Nicolas Cage working with a wolf. “It’s an animal that never can be fully tamed, so there’s a chance of a bloodbath,” the journo explained he was told by the trainer. “But Cage was in a chipper mood that day and he didn’t bite the wolf once.” Now that’s what you call animal tragic.
Jamie will return next issue… For more misadventures, follow: @jamie_graham9 on Twitter.
‘THE BIGGEST PRO I’VE EVER MET WAS THE CAT IN HOSTEL: PART II’