The Show Must Go On
I always thought that Letsatsi was a super lion. After seeing the way he behaved with Ice’s cubs, we all knew that he was not the monster that we feared we had created. However, while he had let us take the cubs back, he refused to move from under the bush where he had been denning the babies, and refused, again, all our efforts to load him onto a truck.
Ultimately, we were able to lure him with food into the big enclosure’s night pen, and from there into a smaller temporary fenced yard, and eventually into a cage. We then had to lift the cage onto the truck to move him out. I didn’t want to dart him, as I felt he had been through enough already. Whereas Ice had given us a look of thanks and contentment, Letsatsi’s stare from the back of the truck said to Rodney Nombekana and me: “You guys are the ones who have given me so much grief in my life, and our relationship will never be the same.”
Nowadays when I drive through the camp I say hi to Letsatsi and he says hi back to me, through the car window, but that’s about as far as it goes between him and me. As well as losing our relationship with Letsatsi, Rodney and I from then on also had to give up any relationships we had enjoyed with Letsatsi’s future pride females, as it wasn’t worth the risk of approaching the girls that belonged to Letsatsi. He was just too protective of them around us. It was probably my confidence that had been shattered and both Letsatsi and I had responded to that realization. It was sad, but we had to move on.
But there was another problem: making White Lion was just starting to get me down. Both the people and the lions involved were not exactly behaving according to the plan. I had met a lot of fantastic people from the film industry, including Mike Swan, who started as our director of photography and ended up, after we lost out first two, our general director. Our focus-puller, Houston Haddon, was a great guy; but there are others I would be happy never to see again as long as I live. Apart from Mike and Houston, Rodney Nombekana and Rodney Fuhr are the only other people apart from me who have been with the film from its beginning to its end. Helga, as always, was brilliant, though she left to have and raise her first child during filming, otherwise I am sure she would have been with us all the way.
Usually when I have problems with people, lions take up the slack and rarely disappoint me, but this time, there was no such luck. Our star adult white lion, Letsatsi, was on permanent strike, and Graham, a promising understudy, had been killed by Sly in his murderous rampage. I had only one other biggish white male, a wonderful lion named Thor, who would eventually grow big enough to be used as a stand-in for some scenes as the adult Letsatsi, but we needed another full-sized white lion to replace the real Letsatsi, and we needed him quickly. Having Thor maturing in the wings would also relieve the pressure on the newcomer in the following season of filming.
Some of the other production people and I hit the phones and the Internet, literally scouring the world for a full-sized white male lion. We spoke to people in the States, Europe, and Australia, and it looked like we might have to bring a wrangler into South Africa as no one wanted us to work their lions by ourselves. That was a fair enough point, as I wouldn’t have a relationship with the new lion and didn’t particularly want to strike up a new one, either. However, employing both lion and handler and shipping them from overseas was going to cost us a fortune. One American-based animal handler told us that we would not find a workable white lion, but he would dye one of his brown lions white for us! I said no thanks.
Closer to home we checked up on other white lions that we had raised at the park and subsequently sold to other operators, to see how they were doing. One of these was Snowy, who was living on a farm in the Eastern Cape where he was being used for display. We went to the farm to have a look at him, but as our luck would have it he was mating at the time. As you can imagine, when Snowy was faced with the prospect of mating with his new lioness or befriending two humans he didn’t know from Adam, he took one look at Rod and me and growled. We got the message and backed away from Snowy’s enclosure. I don’t need to be told twice when a lion is in no mood to become a film star.
People e-mailed us pictures of their white lions but we couldn’t find one that was even worth following up. Some were young males with little Mohawks, but we needed a fully grown lion with a luxuriant mane. We thought we had exhausted all our leads. We went back through our old records at the park one more time and found one we had missed—Sphinx.
Sphinx had been sold by the Lion Park to another tourist operation near the giant Sun City casino and hotel complex northwest of Johannesburg. We worked out that by now he would be the right age to act as a possible replacement for Letsatsi. Ian got on the phone to them.
I had helped raise Sphinx and remembered him as a very good lion, but I had no way of knowing if we would be able to work with him. His new owners agreed to hire Sphinx to us and I asked Rodney to go and pick him up. As Rodney was leaving to go and get Sphinx, I said to him, “Look, Rod, if he shows the right signs—coming up to you through the fence and talking to you—then at least see if you can load him. If you can get him onto the truck, maybe we’ll just bring him here, put him in the big enclosure, and try and film him through the fence.” I was so desperate to keep the project rolling I didn’t want to push my luck with a lion I hadn’t seen in years.
When Rodney returned with Sphinx he was excited, and his enthusiasm was contagious. I wanted to get a good close look at Sphinx myself by now.
“He was fine, Kev,” Rodney said, when I met him at the enclosure. “He recognized my voice as soon as I talked to him and he loaded with no problem.”
I didn’t want to get my hopes up. Sphinx was about three-and-a-half years old, but he was a little smaller than I had expected. This, however, wasn’t a major problem as it was wintertime and the grass was still dry and yellow. It would be four or five months before the rains came again and Mother Nature allowed us to pick up where we had left off filming with Letsatsi, against the lush green backdrop of an African summer. I was sure that in that time Sphinx would grow to the right size, but the important question lingered—could I even go into the enclosure with a lion I hadn’t seen for many years, let alone work him?
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.
Napoleon, as I’ve mentioned, is one of the few male lions I have encountered who will allow me to hang with him and carry on as normal while he is in the company of a lioness in estrus. This not only makes him easy to work with, but also a pleasure to be around all the time. Making what is possibly the biggest understatement of the year, I can definitely say it’s best to stay away from a male lion while he’s mating. Otherwise, he’ll most likely rip your head off.
For the film we wanted a shot of Napoleon walking towards the camera with an intent look on his face. I knew he would be “intense” if he thought his current girlfriend, Tabby, was being taken away from him. Napoleon didn’t mind me being in the enclosure with him and Tabby, but when I loaded her into a truck while she was in estrus, he followed her with a very intent look in his eye. By using Tabby as the lure, instead of the giant pink chicken, we were able to film Napoleon with a different expression on his face. We would drive Tabby to the far end of the airstrip and Napoleon would then come bounding down to meet her—and sometimes get his reward, though she would stay in the vehicle.
It worked a treat the first time we tried it. As Napoleon got closer to his girlfriend he would look around and sniff the air, catching her scent and giving us some more magic footage to work with in the film.
The second time we tried this technique, several months later, we loaded Tabby and Napoleon and drove them to the property we were working on. “This is going to work like a charm,” I said out loud.
We unloaded Napoleon then drove off with Tabby. When Napoleon set off after Tabby, he didn’t really walk the route we had planned for the cameras, so we decided to load him again and drive back to the start point to repeat the whole process.
On this particular day Rodney Fuhr had come out to the set, along with his brother and some other people, to see the filming. I walked Napoleon over to the truck, and as I opened the cage door at the rear to let him in, Tabby elbowed past us and bounded out into the grass.
With everyone looking on, I now had two lions out roaming free and, even worse, one of them was in estrus. It was the story of my life and a lesson I had clearly not learned yet: lions act up in front of visitors. Tabby walked off in the direction of the farm’s perimeter fence. Napoleon followed her.
“Quick, let’s load Napoleon before we lose them both,” I said to Rodney as we drove down the track in pursuit of the lions. Fortunately, Napoleon was more interested in the offer of a handful of meat that day than he was in his girlfriend. I was able to load him, but Tabby refused to come when called, or even to change direction with the promise of meat. All I could do was follow Tabby patiently as she walked towards the distant fence. To make matters worse, and even more embarrassing, she would sit down every two hundred meters and have a little rest. She would gobble up a chunk of meat if I set it down in front of her, but she would not be persuaded to walk in any direction other than the one she had set for herself.
We walked like that, stopping and starting, for more than three hours, until it was after dark. At some point late in the afternoon, Tabby changed her course and took the long route back to her enclosure, over the rocky spur that runs through Rodney’s property. She wasn’t aggressive or angry, just determined to do her own thing, and as she looked at me from time to time, I swear she was sniggering at me. It was the unspoken language again, and this time she was telling me she would go home in her own sweet time.
“Shit, we lost a whole afternoon of filming, right in front of the boss. What a disaster,” I said to Rodney Nombekana when I finally locked the gate on Tabby’s enclosure. I wondered aloud if Tabby had acted as she did because she was mad at me.
“No,” Rodney Nombekana said to me. “I think Tabby picked up on the stress you’ve been under and wanted to give you a break from filming. I think she saw you needed to chill and spend an afternoon doing nothing.”
Maybe he was right.
In one scene in the film, Letsatsi is harassed by a pack of hyenas. One of the hyenas I chose to star in the film was Chucky, the same one who, with Bonnie, had once escaped from the park. He had mellowed in his maturity.
We were filming at the Kingdom of the White Lion, where I now live with Mandy and my animals, but Chucky lived at the Lion Park at Muldersdrift, about half an hour’s drive away, down the R512, a notoriously busy stretch of road that leads from Johannesburg out past Lanseria Airport to the Hartbeespoort Dam. Increasing numbers of people have moved to estates near the dam to escape Johannesburg’s crime, so what was once a fairly quiet rural road has now become a popular commuter route. When people used to ask me if I was ever worried about working with so-called “dangerous” animals at the park, I used to tell them that the biggest risk I faced in life was driving to work each day on the R512.
Normally we would transport animals in a special caged truck, but that was being used elsewhere on the day Helga and I needed to fetch Chucky, so we took a normal bakkie, a pickup with a fiberglass canopy covering the load area in the rear. Chucky, despite his earlier escapades with his partner in crime, Bonnie, had become a well-behaved tame hyena, and like others of his kind I have known, he enjoyed riding in cars.
“You drive, Helga,” I said, after we had loaded the obedient Chucky effortlessly into the vehicle. I closed the rear hatch of the canopy, locking Chucky securely inside. “I’ll keep an eye on our passenger.”
About three minutes after leaving the park, Chucky decided the rubber surround on one of the canopy’s windows looked like a tasty treat. He began gnawing on the seal.
“Chucky! Stop that, boy. You’ll ruin the bakkie.” To make matters worse, it was a hired vehicle.
He kept chewing on the rubber strips like there was no tomorrow. Then, boom! The whole window fell out of the canopy and shattered on the road as Helga was driving.
“Helga, stop!”
She slowed and looked back over her shoulder, but even though the vehicle was still moving, Chucky leapt out of the gaping hole in the canopy onto the R512, just after the turn-off to the N14 Motorway, a major arterial traffic route.
“Slam on the brakes, Helga!”
Helga pulled off the road, but I jumped out before she had fully stopped. I was already having visions of headlines about a hyena on the loose near Lanseria Airport or, worse for me, a squashed hyena.
Chucky was on the road, bounding away, and I chased after him, arms and legs pumping as I ran down the broken white line that divided the two lanes of traffic.
“Chucky!”
A car swerved, narrowly missing me, while two others screeched to a halt, their tires squealing on the tar road. I gained on Chucky and leapt at him, bringing him down in the middle of the road with a flying rugby tackle. We rolled on the hot tar surface while more cars swerved and skidded around us.
Helga drove the bakkie up to where I was and I stood, picking Chucky up in my arms and admonishing him as I staggered to the side of the road. Horns blared behind me and other drivers and their passengers just gawped, open-mouthed, not believing what had just taken place in front of their eyes.
“Shit, we can’t put him back in the canopy,” I said to Helga, breathing heavily while I recovered from the chase.
The only place we could put Chucky, to make sure he didn’t make another run for it, was between us on the front seat of the pickup. Chucky was grinning from ear to ear as he peered out of the windscreen from his prime perch between Helga and me. God knows what people in the oncoming cars thought, but Chucky looked and acted like he rode to work on the R512 like that every day.
The rest of Chucky’s day was relatively uneventful, but Mandy was studying marketing at night school at the time, and when she came home that evening she related a story one of her fellow students had told her.
“This guy in class says, ‘Mandy, you won’t believe what happened to me today. I was driving down the R512 behind this bakkie and the next thing this hyena jumps out, followed by this guy who runs after him, wrestles him to the ground, and loads him in the front seat.’ ”
“What did you say to him?” I asked Mandy.
“That’s my boyfriend.”
My cell phone rang. “Kev, the production vehicle’s been hijacked and stolen.”
I swore and braced myself for the news. No one had been injured in the attack, which was a blessing, but there were tapes from the filming of White Lion on board the car, and they were missing. Ironically, the footage was being taken to the production house for safe keeping. The driver had stopped outside the building where he was dropping the tapes, and hooted his horn to get the security people inside to let him in the gate. When no one appeared, he decided to leave the vehicle and go inside to find someone. He was gone for two minutes, and when he emerged the production car was being driven away. The driver tried to jump in front of the criminals and stop them, but they were too fast for him.
Crime is an unfortunate fact of life everywhere in the world, but it’s particularly bad in Johannesburg. People are killed for their cars in this city, so our driver was lucky. “How many tapes are missing?” I asked. Perhaps it wasn’t as bad as I feared.
“Thirty-two.”
Now I started to panic. I’m a glass-half-full kind of person, so I organized production to go through the tape register so we could work out what was missing. It was bad.
Missing were hours of footage of the fight between our white and brown lions with the skin-clad animatronic lion; helicopter shots of wide-open expanses of Nash’s farm, which had cost a fortune to shoot; and hours and hours of behavioral footage we had filmed with a camera inside an enclosure with a pride of lions. It was all gone.
We went through the usual channels, dealing with the police, and we went on air on the local radio stations and contacted the newspapers, offering a reward for the return of the stolen tapes. We didn’t care about the vehicle, just the video. We received one call that led us to two of the missing tapes. It appeared the perpetrators had dumped the cargo as it was the vehicle they were interested in, but there was no trace of the remaining thirty tapes.
To make matters worse, there happened to be no useable footage on the two tapes we did recover. We had actually finished shooting by that point, but now I was faced with the task of organizing yet another season of filming. We were coming out of the rainy summer months at the time of the theft and the grass on the Highveld was drying to yellow, so we couldn’t simply go out and start the cameras rolling again immediately. We had to wait until the summer of 2007–2008 to start again, and there was no way I could guarantee that we could recreate the amazing behavior we had captured on the missing tapes.
The extent of what we had lost was there for all of us to see, as all of the master tapes which had been stolen had been copied onto a lower resolution DV cam format. We did our first edit on DV cam, with the idea that we would later go back to the high-definition master tapes to do the final conform, but we couldn’t use the DV cam dubs in the film as the quality wasn’t good enough. It was heart-wrenching to lose all that film and the work we did, but in many ways the worst thing was that I was spending more time working on the film and dealing with all the problems than I was with the animals.
We had to reshoot the scenes with the animatronic lion, dressed in either its white or brown skin. It wasn’t easy the first time around, and the second try took a lot of planning and preparation, as well.
The robot lion’s paws, legs, jaw, neck, and body were hydraulically operated and electrically powered, with the juice coming from a generator. There was a lot of cable which had to be buried and the whole contraption had to be staked firmly into the ground so that when the fight began the real lion didn’t totally destroy the fake one. Safety was a big issue, as well, as the real lion hopefully would be fighting the animatronic beast for real. We wanted to see real aggression on the set, so the crew was safely ensconced in a cage of wire and steel plate. I, of course, would be out with the lion, doing my best to keep things under control.
The plan was to have the brown lion fight the animatronic lion wearing the white skin, and then the reverse. After that we would edit the images together so that we had the best bits of the real and robotic action on film. The trick is to use less of the animatronic lion—whatever the color—and more of the real animals in action.
Different lions react in different ways, but generally they become possessive and defensive when it comes to food, so the idea was to show the real lion some food and then, just as it got interested in its meal, we would pull a cover off the animatronic lion and start it up.
With the crew safely locked in their cage, I walked Napoleon onto the set and showed him his meat, which caught his attention. When I uncovered the animatronic foe, he growled and lunged at it, sinking his fangs into the machine’s neck. Unfortunately, at that point Napoleon, smart lion that he is, realized the thing was fake. He let go of it, sat down, and finished his meat.
The animatronics people had told me that they were concerned about their mechanical lion injuring one of my real lions. I think they wanted to make their worries known in advance, in case there were questions of liability.
“This thing is hydraulically powered and very strong. If it gets into a grip with your lion it could really hurt it—even break its back,” one of the guys warned me.
“Dude, do you realize how strong a real lion is?” I countered. “These things are built to take down buffalo and giraffe.”
We got into a debate about which would be stronger—real lion or animatronic lion, and despite my bravado the designer’s words were starting to sink in. Maybe I was wrong.
I think we were all a bit relieved by Napoleon’s first go at the animatronic lion, but more action was required, so we decided to unleash Thunder, the lion that had nailed the wildebeest during our ill-fated walk in the Lion Park with Rain.
I had high hopes for Thunder. He’s not the biggest male lion I’ve ever seen, but he often became aggressive at feeding time. Well, when we let him loose and turned on the animatronic lion, he went for that thing like a lion possessed. Unlike Napoleon he didn’t want to realize it was a mechanical dummy. He leapt on it and started clawing it to pieces.
“Lift it up, lift it up,” I shouted at the animatronics guy.
“I’m trying, but it can’t get up,” the guy replied, flicking all his switches.
Thunder had pinned the pretend lion down, and the distribution of his weight and his sheer brute strength were preventing the hydraulics from working. Thunder was so enraged he broke the animatronics metal spine in three places and smashed its jaw and its arm. He snapped through welded metal and it took them a day and a half to fix their lion.
“I don’t believe it,” one of the animatronics guys said to me after the attack. “These lions are like gentle giants with you.”
I nodded. “And now you understand how powerful they are compared to us puny humans.”
We got some fantastic footage of Thunder annihilating the animatronic lion. He was a star, incredibly agile and blindingly quick, and he really seemed to enjoy hammering his opponent. The bar had been raised, and when it came to the white lions we had a similar mix of reactions. I tried Bravo and a couple of the younger white lions and they were pretty good, but what we really needed next was our big white male, Thor, one of the replacements for Letsatsi, to have a go.
I went through the by now usual sequence and Thor leapt across to the brown-coated mechanical king of beasts and grabbed it by the throat in his jaws. Thor stood there, holding on to the machine, but that was all he did. He seemed to see no need to fight it or rear up or jump on it. He simply took hold of the skin in his mouth and stood there. I really needed Thor to perform and I felt the pressure building on me to somehow make the animal do what we wanted him to do.
“Let’s try again,” I said to the crew. We switched the machine off and tried again.
Thor did exactly the same thing, again and again. Each time we set up the shot, he would take hold of the animatronic lion in his jaws and hang on to it.
“I’ll try making the meat move while he’s got hold of the animatronic lion,” I said to the crew. “Maybe that’ll make him angrier.”
What I was doing, in effect, was trying to get my lion to do something he didn’t want to do, and I should have known that it would end badly. I picked up a stick and while Thor was biting down on the robot I jiggled the meat about, teasing Thor into a reaction.
Thor let go of the machine and turned on me. He took my arm in his mouth and pushed me up against the filming cage. I held my ground against him as best as I could, staring at him. Thor glared back at me, flicked his tail, and released my arm. He turned and went back to his meat, which was definitely not jiggling anymore.
“I’m fine,” I assured the breathless camera crew. When I checked my arm I saw there was not a single puncture mark, yet Thor had pinned me solidly against the wall of the cage.
“Enough is enough, Kev,” Thor had said to me with that one lightning-fast reaction.
It taught me again, as if I needed to be reminded once more, that a lion is not like a light. They do not have an on-off switch in their brains that turns them from tame animal to frenzied killer in an instant. Thor, like Tsavo, had the ability to send me a message. He had probably been giving me other signs that I had either missed or ignored, but by grabbing me by the arm, he was able to tell me in no uncertain terms that he did not want to do what I wanted under any circumstance, and that he resented the way I was behaving.
I called an end to filming Thor with the animatronic lion, as he had set his boundaries and I did not want to push them. I could not afford to lose Thor’s friendship, for the film’s sake or for mine, and I didn’t want a casualty on the set—especially not me. The footage was brilliant by most people’s standards, but it was the push for perfection that had led me into trouble again. Perfection seems to be a vice of mine.
Fortunately, lions forgive faster than people do and I was able to start filming other scenes with Thor within a day or two. Like a lot of human actors, he had blown up when pushed, but the difference was, he didn’t storm off the set.
On the set of the movie I broke both my rules. I often overruled my sixth sense to get a shot and I also succumbed to peer pressure. I just thank the good Lord that the animals were understanding. I was lucky that Thor sent me a warning as one friend to another, rather than killing me.
We were filming Thor again on Nash’s farm, where everything that could go wrong with Letsatsi had gone wrong.
Once more, we wanted to get shots of an adult male white lion striding across a vast open area, this time from the air. We hired a helicopter for this day’s filming and my idea was that I would leave Rodney Nombekana on the ground with Thor and I would keep an eye on things from the air. We wanted as few people on the ground as possible, as each of them would have to be “painted” out of the film. Rodney was wearing a camouflage poncho which he would use to cover himself and blend in with the grass whenever he paused. I had complete faith in Rodney; besides, I wanted a ride in the helicopter. However, once we started Rod radioed and asked if I would come down with them. Perhaps, like me, he still had the nightmares about Letsatsi on the day of the promo shoot.
As much as I was enjoying the helicopter ride I tapped the pilot on the arm and asked him to set me down. I chatted to Rodney and Thor, and the lion seemed fine. We set him on his way and he strode obediently, and calmly, across the veld. I also donned a poncho so I could hide from the camera. When Mike Swan, who was filming from the helicopter, radioed that he had shot enough footage, the aircraft took him away. I had decided to stay with Rodney Nombekana and help him load Thor onto the truck and ride back with them.
The driver had moved the vehicle about three kilometers—nearly two miles—away so that it would be out of the wide shots being filmed from the helicopter. As always, filming against the lush green background of summer grasses meant that mud was our constant companion.
“Kev,” I heard the driver’s voice say over the radio, “I’m afraid the truck’s stuck.”
I ran a hand through my hair in annoyance. “We can’t walk this bloody lion three kilometers. He’s been walking backwards and forwards all day and he’s tired. We’ll wait for you to get unstuck.”
We had been shooting in the golden rays of the afternoon sun and now the light was fading. There was nothing else to do so Thor, Rodney, and I stopped and took in the view. As I looked out over the changing colors of the glorious African landscape, my mood calmed.
I shook my head. Who else in the world gets to walk freely through the most beautiful countryside in the world with an adult male lion and a glorious sunset on the horizon? It was a postcard picture laid out in front of us, rolling hills leading to mountains, and not another single human in sight. Thor made himself comfortable on the grass and Rodney sat on a rock beside him. I plonked myself down on Thor, which he loves, sitting on the lion’s rump.
With all the stress and the crap I’d been through, I’d started to forget that I have a very good life. I was living a story anyone would be proud to tell their kids and grandkids later in life.
“All we need is a nice drink for sundowners, Rod,” I said. He laughed, and we sat there in silence, happy for the truck to take its time finding us.
For a while we were alone in this incredible African landscape, three friends sharing a moment. A black guy, a white guy, and a lion. It was perfect.
