No Real Animals Aboard Hollywood Noah's Ark
Are we at a tipping point in the use of wildlife in the movies?
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY PARAMOUNT PICTURES
Published March 28, 2014
One of the requisite qualities for any director undertaking
the epic Old Testament tale of Noah's ark—and burning through $120
million of studio money in the process—is a God complex. In Noah, which opens nationwide March 28, director Darren Aronofsky actually revises God's creations.
According to the Book of Genesis, the God of Abraham
commanded that Noah's ark be filled with "two of every kind" of animal,
bird, and creature that moves along the ground. But Aronofsky had a
different idea about how the animals boarding the ark two by two should
look. He created his own computer-generated imagery (CGI) of the animal
kingdom, featuring creatures "slightly tweaked" so they don't resemble
anything alive in the jungle today.
To be fair, there is nothing in the Ten Commandments—either
Moses' or Cecil B. DeMille's—that says: Thou shalt not tweak. But
Aronofsky's decision to create a wild kingdom all his own, then destroy
it, may represent a tipping point in the way animals are used in movies
and television. For reasons both political and practical, there are no
live lions or tigers or bears in this Hollywood version of Noah's ark.
Great and small, every animal in this picture—with the exception of some
doves, a raven, and Russell Crowe, who plays the 600-year-old skipper
of the ark—is the creation of a CGI artist at Industrial Light & Magic, a visual effects company.
PHOTOGRAPH BY VINCENT J. MUSI, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
The Pitfalls of Using Live Animals
"Politically it's not a great thing to work with live
animals and that's becoming more apparent to people as time goes by,"
Aronofsky explained in an interview with the quarterly journal of the Directors Guild of America. The politics of using animal actors grew much more complicated following an expose in the Hollywood Reporter last November, in which an intercepted e-mail from the American Humane Association monitor assigned to the Life of Pi
set gave the impression that one of the Bengal tigers appearing in the
film nearly drowned while shooting a scene in a huge water tank. The
article quoted the AHA representative's admission that, instead of
protecting the tiger, she attempted to cover up the incident.
But the AHA denied the Hollywood Reporter's charges
and awarded Pi its coveted seal of approval. "The animal did not nearly
drown," says Karen Rosa, senior adviser for the American Humane
Association film and TV unit in Los Angeles. "There were safety
precautions in place, and the animal was pulled out of the water
unharmed."
The incident was the second recent blow to the credibility
of the Humane Association, which was appointed guardian of animal actors
by the Screen Actors Guild after two horses were pushed over a cliff to
their deaths on the 1939 western Jesse James.
The organization was also criticized last year for allegedly employing
an on-set monitor who had no primate experience to oversee Leonardo
DiCaprio's dance scene with a chimpanzee in The Wolf of Wall Street.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) rebuked DiCaprio for
his movie monkey business and mobilized members to produce 40,000
signatures on a petition taking the actor to task for working with
Chance, a 4-year-old chimpanzee. Chance was prepared for his star turn
by the Rosaire family of Sarasota, Florida, which has trained circus
animals for generations. (A photograph of Chance is featured in National Geographic's April cover story about exotic pets.)
"What's the line where use becomes abuse?" asks author Peter Laufer, whose book No Animals Were Harmed borrows
the AHA's sought-after certification slogan. "And what's a wild animal?
Here's a chimpanzee that's captive bred for sale. Is that a wild
animal, or something else?"
Another reason film directors may choose to avoid working
with live animals is that protecting the welfare of the wild animals on a
film or TV set can be a time-consuming, and expensive, undertaking.
"Technically, it would have been extremely difficult," Aronofsky told
the Directors Guild. Animal actors cannot be counted on to perform the
same scene over and over again, so an entire menagerie of look-alikes
frequently is needed for a single movie.
To make Life of Pi, the filmmakers brought in four
Bengal tigers, and finally settled on a 7-year-old tiger named King as
the "reference" animal for his computerized counterpart. "They're very
moody," says director Carroll Ballard, who has worked extensively with
wild animals in his films, including four cheetahs for his 2005 film, Duma. "They get tired doing the same thing after a while, so you bring out another one."
PHOTOGRAPH BY JAKE NETTER, 20TH CENTURY FOX VIA AP
When CGI Rivals the Real Thing
Computer-generated animals have come a long way from the
low-res petting zoos of early computer programs to the pixel-perfect
renderings allowed by massive server farms. Upon seeing the
computer-created tiger in Life of Pi, New York Times critic A. O. Scott purred at its vividness.
"His eyes, his fur, the rippling of his muscles and the skeleton
beneath his skin," Scott wrote, "all of it is so perfectly rendered that
you will swear that Richard Parker is real."
Although creating computer-generated imagery sounds like a highly automated process, some of the tiger shots in Life of Pi
took up to six months to create, according to director Ang Lee. That
was necessary because having a boy in a lifeboat with a live tiger—even a
well-trained one—wasn't an option.
Despite the move toward CGI wildlife, few people in
Hollywood expect live animals to be completely replaced by digital ones,
except in special circumstances, such as the cavalcade needed for
Paramount's potential biblical blockbuster, Noah.
"Real animals have an emotional impact that absolutely
cannot be replaced," says the AHA's Rosa. "We advocate the use of CGI
because it's very good at mitigating jeopardy to animals. But it's
costly, and filmmakers are still using it selectively. I don't think
it's going to replace the Lassies or the Benjis of the world."
It certainly didn't replace the very real tiger that startled Zach Galifianakis's character—and the audience—in the 2009 comedy The Hangover.
The big cat in the bathroom was such a ridiculous visual non sequitur
that it made audiences laugh. "We lust after the real factor. We want to
know that it could be dangerous," says Laufer. "It's an ego point:
'This film was made with a real tiger,' and that will be on the
billboard."
Of course, as actors, some animals stink. "Highly trained
animals tend to look a bit phony. They're usually trained with buzzers
and bells, and they're always looking for the little goody," says
director Ballard, who fired the trained wolves he initially hired for
the Disney adventure film Never Cry Wolf.
"I ended up replacing all the trained wolves with wild wolves, which we
found in animal shelters after they had been hit by cars. Their acting
was so much more natural. If you wanted them to howl, you just started
howling."
That's why Ballard doesn't expect CGI to make wild animals
extinct on movie sets anytime soon. "I think the new technology is
great," he says, "but I also think whenever you want to have personality
in an animal, you're going to want to have the real animal."
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