ROAR MATERIAL
Big ’Dris enters the lion’s den…
They cut through all the crap, and the social games we play, and show who we are,” says Baltasar Kormákur. The Icelandic filmmaker behind Adrift and Everest is telling Teasers why survival stories continue to grip his psyche with the force of a lion’s jaw. “And if someone asks me to go to Africa and work there, I’m like, ‘Yeah, that sounds pretty good!’”
Operating in a new biome for Beast
– a film in which Idris Elba’s doctor dad and his teenage daughters are stalked across the Savanna by a rogue lion with a murderous grudge – Kormákur shot in Limpopo and the Northern Cape, where cast and crew were “surrounded by lions and elephants”, according to the daredevil filmmaker. “When the studio comes to me, they know I’m not going to shoot this in Atlanta on a soundstage.”
Pitched to Kormákur as a sci-fi monster movie featuring a genetically modified lion the size of a “small garbage truck”, the filmmaker’s first instinct was to bring the story down to earth. “I was like, ‘I’m doing the version where it physically functions like a real lion because, to me, that is dangerous,” nods Kormákur. “It’s scarier because it’s a real threat. Lions attack people more than sharks, it just doesn’t reach western media.”
The problem, of course, is that you can’t shoot with a real lion if you want your cast to emerge with their limbs still attached. After convincing the money-men to “invest in the best CGI available”, Kormákur called a filmmaker with Oscarwinning experience in digital animal attacks.
“I had a call with [director Alejandro González] Iñárritu, because I love the bear attack in The Revenant,” Kormákur says. “The one thing he said to me was: ‘If you get a lion to be onsite – to use for reference, like how the light falls onto the fur – that’s the only thing I would have loved.’ So I went to the studio and said, ‘Can I have a lion on set?’”
The answer, improbably, was ‘yes’. “I put my son, who’s the second unit DoP, in a cage [with the lion], to shoot those reference scenes. That’s the kind of father I am,” chuckles Kormákur. “I’m not sure I’m allowed to say this, but [the lion] got out at one point, and there was a little bit of panic on set!”
Thankfully, neither human nor beast was harmed, but just as important to Kormákur was that his film not harm the reputation of the king of the jungle. “Yes, we should be afraid of them. But at the same time they’re also incredibly beautiful,” Kormákur notes. “We should respect them and protect them, and not back them into a corner where they become aggressive.”
‘I went to the studio and said, “Can I have a lion on set?”’
BEAST OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 26 AUGUST.