How Cocaine Bear got uncaged
JIMMY WARDEN, the writer of the year’s grizzliest thriller, on how he found ursine inspiration
THERE’S A PHRASE famous among screenwriters, “Save the cat” — referring to a moment early on in a movie when a character is kind to an animal, to signal to the audience that they’re a nice person. “‘Drug the bear’ is its crazy-fun, very violent cousin,” laughs Jimmy Warden, the writer behind buzzy upcoming comedy-thriller Cocaine Bear. Directed by Elizabeth Banks, the film was inspired by a post Warden spotted on Twitter in 2019: a screengrab of an article about a real-life bear who, in the mid-1980s, consumed a package of drugs, discarded in the woods during a botched drug heist. “The caption was something like: ‘This bear must have been the most dangerous apex predator on Earth,’” Warden recalls. “And I just thought, ‘How do you not make that a movie?!’”
Producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller agreed, Banks came on board to direct, and the finished film promises furry, violent, entirely fictional hijinks aplenty. At first glance, the story of a bear higher than Scarface and even more murderous might seem like a unique cinematic proposition. Warden, though, says the film in fact harks back to one of the earliest and most iconic creature-features. “There’s a King Kong sort of framework to it,” the writer explains. “I wanted to create an empathy for the bear like Kong. He’s not the bad guy in this story. He’s just doing what a bear does — it’s the drugs that have made him insane.”
It was important to approach the bear as a character, Warden says, with a distinct personality beyond his sharp claws and blood-lusty roar. “I put a lot of my trust in the people doing the CG to make it realistic, knowing that if they achieved a photo-realism that grounded the animal in reality, I could go crazy with what the bear does in the script.” How crazy did he go? “Oh, I did not hold back,” grins the writer. “The script was very bloody and crazy from day one. You don’t make a movie called Cocaine Bear then limp to an R-rating. You give the audience what they deserve.”
Good news for us — but bad news for the not-so-happy campers about to encounter the creature in this movie. When those characters go down to the woods next month, they’re in for a very big surprise.
COCAINE BEAR IS IN CINEMAS FROM 24 FEBRUARY