Part of the Pride (28 page)

We auditioned potential scriptwriters, asking them for ideas about how they would write a script based on Rodney's basic idea for the story. The writers we subsequently worked with were under a lot of stress, because although the idea for the story sounded simple, they were under very stringent direction from Rodney about what could and couldn't be in the script. Some of the writers wanted to overcomplicate the story and work in some mythical elements. For example, the Shangaan people believe that a white lion is born when a shooting star falls from the heavens, but Rodney didn't want the audience to think the film was a fable. He wanted to show the real Africa, not a mythological one. In many respects the writers weren't given much creative freedom because Rodney wanted to be true to the real Africa; however, he became more flexible over time as he realized the ins and outs of compelling storytelling.

We wanted to shoot the movie in much the same way as we would a documentary, such as
Dangerous Companions
, getting the lions to do things as naturally as possible, rather than trying to stage-manage them. I had to make it clear to the people who worked on the film that we couldn't plan on making the lions and other animals do exactly what they wanted at exactly the right time. It wasn't like shooting a commercial where all the lion had to do was walk from left to right, look at the camera, shake its head, and walk off. I needed to find people who had experience working with animals.

One of the questions I was constantly asked by people who knew the film industry was this: “Will your lions be able to continue working for the long periods required for a feature film?” I needed to start thinking about how many lions I would need for the various scenes. In the end, we used thirty different white lions to play the lead character, Letsatsi, throughout the various ages of his life, and over the course of what stretched from months into years of filming. Lions grow very quickly so I needed to preplan in advance to make sure we had enough lions of the right age to play Letsatsi at the right times of his life. This on its own presented a huge challenge.

Letsatsi, which means “the sun,” was the first white lion born at the Lion Park and we used his name as that of the lead character. Our plan was that Letsatsi would do most of the filming as his adult self in the movie, but you can only really learn how a lion is going to behave during filming by putting him in front of a large group of people.

Rodney wanted the film to be set against the backdrop of the wilds of Africa, and by that he meant that we wanted wide-open vista shots of lions set in endless expanses of Africa. That wasn't so much of a problem for me, I thought, as my methods were already very different from those of other lion wranglers who worked on television and films. All the lion wranglers I know of want their lions to be fenced—they won't take a chance of letting them roam
free. That means if you want to set up a wide shot, then somewhere out there in the not-too-distant distance there needs to be a fence. I was happy, however, to work my lions in large expanses, on huge farms. I was confident that they would not feel the need to go wandering off to the other side of the farm. The film crew, however, would be behind fences, while the lions walked free, with me. It's far quicker, cheaper, and easier to cage the people in a five-meter by five-meter cage, than setting up a huge perimeter fence for the lions.

I was aware of the risks, such as a lion running off and chasing some game on whatever farm we were using, but I was confident in my animals' abilities, and the relationship I had with my lions.

One of the other strict criteria Rodney had for his film was that it would show Africa like it had never been shown before.

“What do you mean by that, Rod?” I asked him early on.

“I don't want to show Africa in the winter, I want to show Africa in the summer, when the grass is green and the bush is thick and lush.”

There is, as I had learned during the making of the French film,
The Lion
, a good reason why nearly every documentary or film you see made in Africa shows the grass long and dry and golden, and the bush in shades of dull khaki and brown. It is because most filming is done in the long, dry, relatively cool African winter, which is ideal for filming, as opposed to the hot, wet summer months. In the winter dry season, the ground is firm and you are virtually assured of clear blue skies every day for months on end. Sunrises and sunsets are spectacular and the golden hours, just after dawn and just before dusk, are perfect for filming. The sun is lower in the sky and you get more hours of light to film in. Also, the cool temperatures are ideal for working animals

By contrast, in summer it rains nearly every day. It is hot and humid, and the dust and dirt turn to thick, cloying mud. Sunrises and sunsets are often obscured by towering cloud banks, and you can have three or four dark, dingy days at a time when the cloud
and mist and even fog take hold. You can have thundershowers in the morning and you're virtually guaranteed to have them every afternoon. To make a feature film in the South African Highveld in summer, you have to be crazy. You guessed it. We were.

December 2005, when we began filming, was particularly bad. It rained, and it rained, and it rained. We changed from day shoots to night shoots to try and escape the rain, but then it started pouring at night. We changed from night back to day, but the rain stayed ahead of our plans and played havoc with crew turnaround times, as people needed appropriate breaks between shoots.

Everything around us was luscious and green, but that was the only thing going according to plan. Every week we were delayed added another week to the age of the lions we were using, which created problems with continuity. We couldn't stop our white lion cubs from growing. We simply weren't getting the footage we needed and we battled to make progress during that first summer season of filming.

We had vehicles stuck in the mud, and spent money we hadn't budgeted to hire special eight-wheel recovery vehicles to tow our other trucks out of the thick, cloying muck. Eventually, even the tow vehicles and the Lion Park's trusty tractor got stuck in the mud. I remember spending a whole night pulling and digging vehicle after vehicle out of the mud for the end result of not a second's worth of filming. I wanted to cry that night.

Many of the sets and locations we chose were ruined by vehicles and people churning the grass into mud, and even when we could film, the lions quickly got wet and dirty. The white lions, in particular, had to be cleaned on a regular basis. Twice a day I would have to phone Rodney and give him an update. He would be sitting at home, in his living room in Johannesburg, watching the rain patter his windowpanes, and I would have to call him and confirm his worst nightmares, that for the cost of between 40,000 and 120,000 Rand per day we were achieving absolutely nothing. To make things
worse, the rain always seemed to come on the days we had hired the most expensive equipment.

Thinking back on it now, as the final edits of
White Lion
are locked away, I realize our earlier schedules were too ambitious. We were trying to cram too much into a short time, during the worst season of the year to be filming. The whole thing was a learning process, partly because this was the first time anyone had tried to film a full-length feature film using lions as the stars, in as natural a setting as possible, in the African summer.

I promise you, I now know why Disney's
The Lion King
was animated. During that first season of shooting I was starting to think that it was just not possible to make a movie about lions using real lions without spending hundreds of millions of dollars. Rodney was also probably starting to wonder what he had got himself into. There was, though, a ray of light: when we were able to film, and later sit down and go through the rushes, the footage we were getting was absolutely amazing. It was, as Rodney had desired, Africa like we had never seen it on film before. Here we had these beautiful snow white lions set against the lush emerald greens of the grass and bush in full bloom. It really was striking and Rodney's wish was coming true. This was something different, something special.

Early on, before shooting even began, I started getting Letsatsi, our only adult male lion, used to the idea of playing himself in a movie.

To start with I had to get him accustomed to being loaded into a vehicle and unloaded, so that we could transport him easily around the park and to the various farms and other locations we would be using in the film. Half of the job of getting a lion to work on a film is just getting him to the set safely, and unstressed. A stressed lion is dangerous to both himself and humans. I've seen lions bash their heads until they bleed and break teeth off when they're upset.

To make it easy on ourselves, we built a new fifteen-hectare
enclosure off the back of the Lion Park where we would be able to film some of our story. We also used our current property, the Kingdom of the White Lion, which Rodney had bought in 2000. For the shots that required truly wide-open spaces and panoramic vistas, we used a place called Nash's Farm that totals about 22,000 hectares. It is, I believe, the single largest freehold game farm in the province of Gauteng. The farm held wildebeest, giraffe, impala, and other species of game.

“Hey,
boet
, you're taking big chances with these lions,” said a guy called Hennie, who managed the farm, when I told him about our plans for filming.

“Don't you worry,” I told him confidently. “It'll be fine.”

By the end of our first rainy season of filming in early 2006, we had enough of an idea of what our story would be, and almost enough good footage, to go to the Cannes Film Festival in France to promote our project. What we needed, though, was a promotional clip—a promo—including some footage of our big adult white lion, the majestic Letsatsi, our star, striding through a wide-open expanse of lush, green Africa in her summer finery. I had worked with Letsatsi on other shoots, although he had yet to play himself in the filming of the motion picture in which he would star. His first appearance before the camera, and his future public, for
White Lion
would be the filming of the promo.

We drove Letsatsi out to Nash's farm to shoot the scenes for the promo, which would also be used in the film. We also decided to use the day to promote the film to the local media, so we had an assortment of press people, photographers, TV, and even the big boss, Rodney Fuhr, penned in a temporary cage in the middle of the veld, along with our own film crew. We had been setting up since three-thirty in the morning and there was an air of excited expectancy as the truck carrying the star lion rolled to a stop in the thick green grass.

As soon as we let Letsatsi out of the truck and I looked into his
eyes, I started getting that sinking feeling. In a vain attempt to get Letsatsi back on the truck, I started shouting, “Load him, load him,” to Rodney Nombekana, Alex, and Helga, who had all come from the Lion Park to help wrangle Letsatsi. But we were out of luck. Letsatsi looked out over those twenty-two thousand hectares of Africa and didn't look back at the truck. Despite my assurances to Hennie that everything would be all right, Letsatsi decided that he had had enough of the film world, and of captivity. He started walking.

“Load him!”

Rodney Nombekana shook his head. “He's going, Kev.”

I started walking with Letsatsi, as though this was all part of the plan, and the cameras started rolling. “Get what you can,” I hissed.

“Kev, Kev, get out of the shot,” the cameraman was calling back to me. I was walking beside Letsatsi, although my confident stride was an illusion as by now I had no control over what he was doing or where he was going. I had to continually lie down in the grass or duck behind a mound so the crew could get something—anything—of Letsatsi in action before he disappeared into the wilds of Nash's farm. If it hadn't been such a disaster it might have been comical. I would drop out of sight for a few seconds, then get up and frantically run to catch up with Letsatsi, appear to wrangle him, then duck for cover once more. The same thing was happening to Rodney and Helga, who were also having to run and dive.

Initially, Letsatsi wasn't aggressive. He just didn't want to do what anyone told him; not me, not Rodney, not Helga, and not Alex. Letsatsi usually lived for treats—pieces of meat given as a reward—but on that day, in front of all those cameras, not even the morsels I was pulling out of my pocket were enough to make him behave. Also, he started to tire of us running in front of him and trying to corral him and began growling all the time.

I think Letsatsi had been overawed by the sight of all the people waiting to see him and I believe he suffered stage fright. He was just not interested in performing in front of that crowd of people. As
with Tsavo in front of my family, and Ricksey the cheetah in front of my wife-to-be Mandy, here was an animal that had sensed a different vibe and decided to behave differently around strangers.

In the park, Letsatsi was a fat, lazy lump of lard. He lived in a medium-sized camp and was always happy in it. He never needed a lot of space, and in true adult male lion fashion all he ever wanted to do was eat, sleep, and make love. I loved him to bits, but our relationship took a big strain that day, when all of a sudden he decided he wanted to roam free. In fact, my five-year relationship with him went down the toilet at that point. He sensed our anxiety the first time he stepped out of that truck. I had lost his respect, and he was telling me, simply and without aggression, that it was over between us. My relationships with Helga, Rodney Nombekana, and Alex were also strained that day, because I was accountable for Letsatsi's lack of behavior.

It wasn't just that day that caused the relationship to go sour with Letsatsi. Some lions are brilliant filming lions; some are more relaxed than others around tourists, or with me when I go in with them. Letsatsi wasn't a filming lion, and I think despite trying to convince ourselves that everything would be all right on the big day, Rodney Nombekana and I had already seen the writing on the wall. We'd already had many discussions about Letsatsi prior to the filming day. Letsatsi had never enjoyed being loaded and driven around on the trucks, unlike Tau and Napoleon, who love that sort of thing. However, he was our only adult white lion at the time and we just had to hope that it would work out. It didn't.