Part of the Pride (31 page)

We unloaded Sphinx into a small pen which fed into the big fifteen-hectare filming enclosure. He seemed pretty relaxed and was responding to the sound of our voices, but even if Sphinx remembered me, we had nothing like the relationship that I shared with Tau and Napoleon, or Meg and Ami.

“You don't have to go in with him,” Rodney Fuhr said to me. “You can film him from outside the fence.”

It sounded good in theory, and even though I had suggested that
approach, I didn't really think it would be possible to get everything we needed from outside an enclosure. Rodney Nombekana, Helga, and I were standing outside the enclosure. I called to Sphinx.

He trotted up to the fence and started greeting us: “
Wuh-ooow, wuh-ooow
.”

“Come,” I said to the other two. “Let's go in.”

“Kev, I'm not sure,” Helga said.

I looked at Rodney Nombekana. He just shrugged.

I knew we had to cross the barrier, and even though my two friends might not have been convinced, I was sure that with three of us, we would be safe. None of us carried sticks, as I didn't want Sphinx to think of us in that way, though we each had a pepper spray canister on our belts.

“Come,” I said to the others again, trying to sound more confident than perhaps I really was. I unlocked and slid open the gate and we walked in.

Sphinx was like a teddy bear. It was if we had never been apart. He rubbed his head against me and I did the same back to him. We gave him water and scratched and groomed him, and spent, all in all, about an hour with him. It had been two years since we had seen him and he had been quite small then, but even as a maturing adult he remembered the three of us.

We now knew we had a lion who was tame, but would he work on a film set? Letsatsi had been fine on other jobs prior to the disastrous day of filming the promo. In the months we had before filming was due to begin again in earnest, we went through the process of loading and unloading Sphinx from trucks, getting him used to following us around, and responding to offers of meat from the hand. He seemed to enjoy the theatrics of getting on and off the vehicle and he also enjoyed going for rides and exploring progressively larger areas. He was fantastic, and our relationship just got stronger and stronger. Sphinx played the part of Letsatsi like a pro in a couple of sequences until we could work with our own older white
lion, Thor, who eventually came of age. Though he was only really a stand-in, it was hard to say good-bye to Sphinx when I eventually had to take him back to his owners.

Though at times I felt that filming
White Lion
was one disaster after another, I must admit that we had some fun moments, some really great times, and overcame a few challenging situations that told us we were doing ground-breaking stuff for a motion picture.

We had a scene in mind where the young Letsatsi is snapped at by a crocodile, falls into a river, and has to swim across to the other side. During the filming of
Dangerous Companions
I had shown Meg, and later Ami, how to swim with me, and they had loved it, but I didn't know if I could get Gandalf, one of five lions who played the teenage Letsatsi, to do the same thing.

Over time, Rodney, Helga and I were able to teach Gandalf to swim with us, first in a river and later in the dam we wanted to use for filming. Gandy was reluctant to swim unaccompanied; he preferred it when we were in the water with him and he had someone to chase and play with. The problem with this was that unless we humans ducked underwater—which none of us could do for long—then one of us would end up in the shot. Also, Gandy, unlike Meg and Ami, couldn't learn to keep his claws in while he swam, so I was getting nicely sliced every time we went for a dip.

We solved both of these problems in an ingenious way. We rigged a cable from poles on either side of the dam and fitted me into a very thick wetsuit and a harness with a line and pulley attaching me to the cable. I also had a long rope tied to me, which was held on the far side of the dam by a couple of guys. I would run into the water, holding a piece of meat in my hand to entice Gandalf into the shallows. Once we were both in and swimming, the guys on the far side of the dam would pull on the rope, dragging me through the water, in front of Gandalf but out of the camera's view. As a result
we got this fantastic footage of Gandalf furiously paddling through the water trying to keep up with me while I was sliding safely out of reach and out of frame. I was the human bait for the swimming lion, but Gandalf proved to be such a good swimmer that every now and then he would move faster than the guys on shore could pull, and Gandy would catch me and drag me under. Fortunately, the thick wetsuit protected me from the worst of Gandalf's claws. Even though I got a little sliced and diced by Gandy's claws and people will say I'm crazy, I still had a lot of fun getting Gandy from one shore to the other.

The truth about the life of a lion is that it can be pretty boring. A lion can sleep for twenty hours of the day, hunt the other four, and then start all over again. The main character in our film had to have some adventures and some drama during his life. Otherwise
White Lion
would have become one of those arthouse favorites of a lion doing nothing but sleeping for two hours. In the story, Letsatsi's brother, who is a brown lion, is killed as a cub, leaving little Letsatsi on his own. We decided that the brother would meet his tragic end at the point of a snake's fangs. The evil snake would be a snouted, or Egyptian, cobra, a reptile with a reputation for extreme aggressiveness.

We could hardly stage the death of a lion cub to make a movie, so we decided to use a stuffed one. We were using a camera that was locked off at a fixed focal length so that after the snake had hissed and reared and attacked the stuffed cub, we would remove it and the stunt cub and then film the real cubs—little Letsatsi and his brother—on the same set under the same lighting and then put it all together during post-production.

The snake wrangler arrived with his snouted cobra—four of them in fact—and I deposited the stuffed brown lion cub and moved a healthy distance back from where the action was going to take
place. Like everyone else on the set, I had a healthy respect for this particular creature. We stood back and waited expectantly as the first of the cobras slithered out of its bag. It lay there like a grayish brown slug. This thing didn't want to rise; it didn't want to strike; and it sure as nuts didn't want to kill anything. The snake guy prodded it a bit with his snake hook, a golf club with the club end replaced with a hook, but this famously aggressive snake wasn't interested at all in a stuffed lion cub.

I moved closer. “Come on, kill!” I said to it. It just lay there.

The reptile wrangler eventually gave up on that particular snake and tried another. The same thing happened—snake two showed no aggression or signs of action. It would have been comical if it wasn't so frustrating, but the same thing happened—or didn't happen—again with cobra number three. Finally, cobra number four became annoyed enough to make one half-hearted peck at the long-dead lion cub. Great.

The real cubs proved almost as problematic as the sluggish snakes. The problem with the cubs was that they were acting like real cubs, which was also a pain in the butt. That is, they walked around going “
wa-OWWW
” and searching for the milk bottle. We would give one a drink and then start filming, only to have to stop again to wipe the milk off its mouth. They would then want to roll around and play, or fall asleep instead of dying dramatically. Now, I love cubs as much as anyone and it was all very cute, but we were getting nowhere. In the final film, thanks to hours of effort over an entire night's filming and lots of trickery, we ended up with a dramatic, realistic scene in which Letsatsi's brown brother dies a heart-wrenching death. In reality, it was a one-take shot of a very bored snake and some clever editing of cubs at play. Luckily it was good enough—just.

Over four summer seasons we probably filmed for about a hundred and fifty days to make
White Lion
. It wasn't unusual for us to spend three days to get five seconds of film for the final cut. The
continuity issues were a nightmare, as well, as the sets we used changed from year to year. In some years there had been fires before the rains arrived so the grass was short in some scenes and longer in others. Because of the number of lions we used, we also had to be careful to make sure the various Letsatsis at different ages looked the same throughout the final film. The dry winter months were spent on hundreds of hours of post-production and editing.

As well has having encounters with a warthog, a porcupine, cheetahs, hyenas, and even chickens in the film, Letsatsi gets into a fight with a fully grown brown male lion. I couldn't put Thor or Sphinx into an enclosure with Tau or Napoleon and have them fight—possibly to the death—so we had to get an animatronic lion made. It was an expensive process, so we only had one robot lion made.

For some scenes we had a real brown lion fighting a white animatronic lion, and in others the situation was reversed. We had two skins—one brown and one white—which we would slip over the robotic head, arms, and body. An obstacle we had to overcome was the lack of white lion skins in South Africa. There was no shortage of brown lion skins available, but not one single white lion skin that we could find because these animals are so rare. Our solution was to dye a brown lion skin white. What we found, however, was that treating a brown lion skin with peroxide actually turned it yellow rather than white. We continually had to go back to the puppeteers and tell them to keep on dyeing until they got our white lion white.

The only thing more ridiculous than a yellowish animatronic white lion on the film set was the day a giant pink chicken made an appearance.

As a precursor to the fight scene between the white and the brown lions, we needed to get footage of the brown lion—Napoleon in this case—stalking and then charging his unsuspecting prey
through the bush. If I crawled through the grass in front of Napoleon he wouldn't hunt me, but would instead think we were playing a game. He would just look at me and think, ‘Oh, there goes Kev, my buddy, what are you doing crawling,
bru?
' I needed to get him excited and curious about something.

In order to get the desired reaction we hired a pink chicken suit from a fancy dress place. The production runner picked up the costume, but he didn't tell the people in the shop what it was for—if he had, I doubt they would have let it off the premises. I put on the chicken suit and, ignoring the smirks and remarks from the rest of the crew, prepared to meet my fate.

We had the film crew set up in a modular cage with three-meter-tall sides that all slotted together. Inside there was Mike Swan, our director of photography, a focus-puller and a couple of assistants—black African guys who made no secret of the fact that they were terrified every time they had to work around lions, no matter how tame the animals were. Napoleon was released from his truck about a hundred meters away.

“Okay, we're rolling,” said Mike.

I had been keeping myself low and out of sight, but as soon as I heard the signal I opened a gate in the cage, leapt out, and started jumping up and down and flapping my pink wings.

“
Cluck, cluck, cluck
!” I screamed at the top of my voice, leaping and flapping away like I was trying to take off.

All Napoleon saw was a giant pink chicken—he couldn't recognize me—and he swung into action immediately. He stalked forwards a few paces then charged at full speed, every primal instinct in his body telling him to attack and bring down the first giant pink chicken he had seen in his life.

As Napoleon closed in on me, I scooted back inside the cage and slammed the gate shut, leaving the confused cat pacing up and down outside our filming enclosure.

“Brilliant,” Mike said.

It had worked well and we got some great footage of Napoleon charging across the veld. To be safe, we did two more takes, and each time Napoleon rose to the bait of the giant pink chicken and I was able to duck safely back inside with the now slightly more relaxed assistants and camera crew.

“One more take, Kev, just to be sure?” Mike asked.

It was tiring work. Between takes I had to undress and then walk Napoleon back to the truck and load him, then return to the cage and put on my chicken suit again. However, like Mike I wanted to make sure we got the best possible shot.

“Sure, why not?” I was also having fun, and so was Napoleon.

When we were ready to roll again, Napoleon was released from the truck. I opened the gate of the filming cage. As I started to emerge I knew I didn't need to do the clucking act as Napoleon was already running, determined to catch the giant fowl this time for sure.

However, as I emerged my feathers caught on something. Instead of the gate swinging over, the whole three-meter front side of the cage toppled forward into the grass, exposing me, Mike, the focus-puller, and their two assistants to a lion in full flight. Before I could even find the words to tell everyone to stay still and remain calm, Napoleon had covered the gap between us and him. He paused at the open front of the cage while I furiously tore as much of the pink chicken suit from my body as quickly as I could. All of us humans were potentially in trouble now as our safety cage had become a three-sided pink chicken trap.

“Napoleon! It's me, boy. It's Kev, relax!” Napoleon looked disappointed.

I turned and searched for the rest of the crew. Mike and the focus-puller were sitting there, wide-mouthed and goggle-eyed in shock, but their two African assistants were perched at the very top of the swaying cage fence behind us.