A DIFFERENT BEAST
THE LION KING, WITH JON FAVREAU IS DARING TO MAKE CHANGES TO AN ANIMATED MASTERPIECE. BUT HAKUNA MATATA, SIMBA FANS — THE NEW VERSION AIMS TO PACK JUST AS MUCH OF A ROAR. HERE’S HOW...
THE ‘SET’ OF JON FAVREAU’S Lion King couldn’t be less impressive. It’s a big, black room in a dull building in Playa Vista, California. It looks like somewhere more likely to host a zumba class than a zebra herd. Yet within this room exist acres of African land: lush jungles, scorching desert, a big rock from which a baboon dangles a baby. We just can’t see it yet.
It’s December 2017. Favreau is remaking one of the most famous animated movies ever and using mad technology to do so. In this room exists a ‘virtual world’ in which Favreau is directing his movie. He pops on VR specs and he’s inside a computer-generated world where he can set up any shot he can imagine. He’ll use no on-screen actors nor motion capture, no real animals, not even a single blade of grass, but the finished result should look so lifelike that David Attenborough could wander on screen and start telling you about the majesty of warthogs without anyone batting an eyelid.
“I honestly don’t even know what to call it,” says Favreau. “[Early on] the term ‘live action’ had been bandied about to differentiate it from the expectations one might have if you had heard it’s animated. It’s not going to feel like you are watching an animated film.” From the footage he shows us, which looks like a prestige BBC nature documentary but with chattier animals, his aim has been achieved.
Favreau is aiming for more than just visual difference in his second Disney remake, following 2016’s The Jungle Book. The Lion King is Disney’s biggest-ever traditionally animated movie, scoring $968 million at the box office. It spawned a stage musical that has grossed over $8 billion. Audiences of all ages know Simba’s story by heart. To change anything risks causing fan uproar. Favreau hasn’t just made the old Lion King with better fur. He’s reinventing a classic. Be prepared. In transforming The Lion King from cute animation to photo-real film, Favreau saw he would need to change large parts of the story that were too ‘cartoony’. “We had to deviate quite a bit from the [1994] film,” he says, catching up with Empire in May 2019. “If you look at the plot points, it tracks pretty accurately to the old one… but if you watched the films side by side you’d realise they actually deviate a great deal.”
Some of those changes have meant revising entire characters that don’t make sense when you remove their cartoon look. “The hyenas had to change a lot,” says Favreau, meaning the comedy sidekicks of the villain Scar. “They didn’t feel like they matched up well with the photorealism. A lot of the stuff around them
was very stylised.” In the original, the hyenas’ patch was an elephant graveyard filled with absurdly oversized skeletons, and their boss’ lair was a cavern so huge he could hold rallies in it. All that has changed.
He’s also expanded the cast in certain parts of the story. There are no new main characters, but there are supplementary ones. “There are characters that populate the area of the forest where Timon and Pumbaa live,” says Favreau. “An elephant shrew, a bush baby… a big menagerie.” If the following counts as a spoiler to you, then you’ve managed to avoid one of the biggest plot points in cinema history: Mufasa is not going to make it to the end credits. The moment that changes Simba’s life comes when his dear dad is trampled by a herd of rampaging wildebeest while trying to protect his son. In the 1994 film, the scene was so upsetting that it reduced grown-ups to tears and caused sensitive children to have full screaming meltdowns. Rendered photo-real, that scene could be not just upsetting but harrowing, with an animal the audience has come to care about turned into furry pulp.
“That was a discussion we had over and over,” says visual-effects supervisor Rob Legato. “How do you play this moment that is the emotional fulcrum of the movie? It would be easy to play it really bloody and horrific and shocking.” Given the targeted PG rating, nobody wanted to do that.
Favreau scheduled the shot very early in production, so that “if we [got it] wrong, we could adjust it.” After a lot of attempts, Favreau settled on trying to make the audience think they’d seen more than they had. “It’s why I hired [cinematographer] Caleb Deschanel. If you look at his work, whether it’s in The Black Stallion or The Right Stuff, his images and lighting, you’re making a painting. If you compose something right and light it right, you can get the impact without seeing the detail.”
It was also an instance where Favreau felt his realistic imagery was a gift, sensing that Planet Earth-like documentaries had conditioned an audience to cope with the brutal realities of the animal world. “Once you see the animals fully rendered, it feels akin to something you’d see in a documentary,” he says. “It has a lot of emotion but there’s a distance.” For the most part, the 1994 movie’s characters were roughly true to their real-life counterparts. Simba had a few more facial muscles and a mane that looked heavily back-combed, but he was basically lion-shaped. Timon could dress up and was remarkably dexterous, but he looked like a meerkat. The only lead character who took major stylistic liberties was Scar. With a black mane, elongated face and emerald eyes with drag queen eyebrows, he would look absurd if the animators had tried to make him photo real: part-rasputin, part-joan Collins, part throw-rug. He was completely redesigned. “You have to make him feel like he fits in the animal kingdom,” says Favreau. “Mufasa is the alpha of the pride and Scar is a weaker lion, but he’s very intimidating.” The look the designers developed for Scar bears no comparison with the animated version. A scrawny jungle cat with ragged ears, a gash over one eye and a receding mane, he looks not camp but creepy — like a desperate, half-starved creature who’d kill you as quickly as possible, not try to floor you with a withering putdown.
For Scar’s voice, Favreau cast Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor. Where Jeremy Irons’ memorable take on Scar was arch and just a touch panto villain, Ejiofor’s is no-nonsense and definitely no joke.
“I tried to find that psychological heart of Scar,” says Ejiofor. “To show that damage; the level of manipulation and suppressed rage, and that intellect.” He had no fears about comparisons to one of the most memorable of animation performances. “Great stories stand up to different interpretations,” he says, pointing out that The Lion King itself is an animal version of Hamlet. “Me [doing Scar] is like someone doing Claudius or Hamlet… It can be approached in different ways.” When Billy Eichner first set foot on Favreau’s set, he was terrified. He was playing The Lion King’s smallest character, the wise-ass meerkat Timon, but he had some large shoes to fill. “Nathan Lane was my hero ever since I was a child,” he says. “Playing a role he’d played was thrilling, but terrifying.” Lane’s performance of Timon in the original movie was a comic masterpiece and his double-act with Ernie Sabella as Pumbaa one of the film’s greatest selling points. Trying to recapture that, with Seth Rogen as Pumbaa, had Eichner quaking. “Seth and I would look at each other like, ‘Thank God you’re here and I don’t have to do it alone.’”
Favreau didn’t want an imitation or even a faithful reinterpretation. “The way [the 1994 film treated] comedic characters is too broad for photo-real,” he says. “The humour [in our film] is much more grounded and conversational, but there’s the same relationship. You’re not going to get anthropomorphic performances. You’re not going to get Timon dressed up as a hula girl. That stuff just wouldn’t work.”
“Both Seth and I come from the comedy world and we like to improvise,” says Eichner. “At first we’d read with the script in our hands, but that made us stiff. Then Jon said, ‘Throw down your script, start from the beginning and just go through it. Try to remember the beats, but the actual words aren’t important.” Most of the final dialogue came from that improvised session, Eichner says. He hopes he and Rogen will capture the affectionate bickering of Lane and Sabella, but with
a flavour that reflects their different comedy backgrounds. “[Lane and Sabella] were more vaudeville-inspired, whereas we’re more improv-inspired.”
THE MUSIC
The music’s one of the easiest elements of the new Lion King. Favreau has Beyoncé and Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino, voicing and singing his lead roles, Simba and Nala. He already knows his songs, written by Tim Rice and Elton John, are hits (Rice, John and Beyoncé will work on a new song for the end credits). And Han Zimmer returns to re-record his Oscar-winning score. Still, there was one area that caused Favreau big headaches.
Some of The Lion King’s biggest songs — ‘Circle Of Life’, ‘Can You Feel The Love Tonight?’ — are not sung by characters on screen. Three, however — ‘I Just Can’t Wait To Be King’, ‘Be Prepared’ and ‘Hakuna Matata’ — are big production numbers in the original movie. ‘I Just Can’t Wait To Be King’, in particular, is a highly stylised performance with abstract animals and other sundry wildlife dancing in formation. Your ‘realistic’ presentation really falls apart if your photo-real rhinos suddenly start twerking across the savannah.
“We learned a lot from The Jungle Book on that,” says Favreau. In that film, he only kept two numbers, ‘I Wanna Be Like You’ and ‘Bare Necessities’, and didn’t push too far in the animals’ performance. Singing was fine; dancing was not. “‘Just Can’t Wait To Be King’ was a challenge,” he says. “You don’t want to do the whole Busby Berkeley thing with the crazy colours.”
The solution was to think about what the song and its mood were conveying. Performed by the young Simba, it’s all about the excitement he feels knowing that ‘everything the light touches will one day be his’. “We thought, you’re seeing this song through the eyes of cubs,” says Favreau, “so you use the animals as sets. Running past giraffe legs you can get a really cool, graphic stylised look… And then you have colourful animals like zebra and flamingos.” In other words, you let nature provide the spectacle for you.
THE ONE THING YOU DON’T CHANGE
When it came to casting, Favreau chose predominantly black actors for the lead roles. That choice was informed in part by watching the stage production, which “much more authentically embraced the African influences on the story,” says Favreau. “Also, the time we live in, this felt like the right way to go and the more appropriate cast for this particular project.”
As well as Glover, Beyoncé and Ejiofor, the film has JD Mccrary (Little) as young Simba, Shahadi Wright Joseph (Us) as young Nala and Alfre Woodard (Luke Cage) as Simba’s mother, Sarabi. “It was a joy to be part of,” says Woodard. “You feel like you’re with family with these characters.”
There was one role Favreau did not — would not — recast. When it came to Mufasa, Favreau could not imagine anyone but the original Mufasa: James Earl Jones. “I see it as carrying the legacy across,” says Favreau. “Just hearing him say the lines is really moving and surreal.”
The 25 years since the original, in their way, mean that Earl Jones is playing a subtly different version of Mufasa. “The timbre of his voice has changed,” says Favreau. “That served the role well because he sounds like a king who’s ruled for a long time.” The vocal contrast also acts as a way of representing the relationship between the old and new films, both equally proud, sharing the telling of a tale that will no doubt be told in new ways in years to come.
“He sounds,” says Favreau, “like someone passing the torch from one generation to the next.”