Part of the Pride (29 page)

I am not exaggerating when I say that Rodney, Helga, and I followed that lion on his walk across Nash's farm for five hours. Eventually we decided it was safe for the film crew to get out of their enclosure, pack up, and move location, leaving us to get Letsatsi back to the park. Letsatsi hadn't turned wild and decided he wanted to kill people, though after five kilometers of strolling across the open plains, he caught scent of Hennie the farm manager's horses.

“Guys, this is starting to get out of control,” I said, delivering one of the great understatements of my career as a lion caregiver and filmmaker. “Get the dart gun.”

I was still walking behind Letsatsi, but now every time I closed within about four meters of him he would turn, flare his lip at me, and growl. He was giving me some very clear signals and he was a very big lion.

Alex went back and fetched the tranquilizing drugs and a dart gun that we always kept with us on shoots, just in case. He drove back to where we were, still following Letsatsi en route to Hennie's horses.

“What's going to happen?” Hennie asked me. “Is he going to eat my bloody horses?”

“It'll be fine,” I said, in my most confident voice. I neglected to tell Hennie that Letsatsi often ate horse meat at the Lion Park, although I was praying Letsatsi didn't know what a whole horse looked like!

We might have been making a movie, but darting a lion is not as easy as it seems on TV. I worked faster than I ever have before, pressurizing the air-powered gun, lubricating the barrel, assembling the dart, mixing up a double concentration of Zoletil, drawing the drug, and attaching the rubber stopper on the end of the needle so the fluid wouldn't leak out. Zoletil is a good drug to use when tranquilizing lions; it is safe and even if the dosages are not spot on it does not have adverse side effects.

I had one shot at Letsatsi. If I missed, or if the dart just pricked him and fell out, he would be off like a shot and in amongst Hennie's horses before I had time to prepare another projectile and reload. I loaded the dart in the gun and stalked as close as I dared to Letsatsi. I raised the stock of the gun to my shoulder, took aim at his pristine white rump, and fired. The dart left the barrel with a
pfft
of compressed air.

“
Rooooaaaaaaaaaar
,” bellowed Letsatsi. Man, was he pissed off.

He ran around in circles, and for a second I thought he would turn, charge me, and kill me. I stood my ground as Letsatsi calmed himself. Still angry, he walked to a patch of shade under a tree and lay down.

We humans sat down and waited for the drug to take effect, while reflecting on what had just happened to us all. The Zoletil took hold of him after about ten minutes and Letsatsi fell asleep. There were five of us there—me, Alex, Rodney Nombekana, Helga, and Hennie the worried farmer—but that wasn't enough people to lift Letsatsi. The ground at Nash's farm is seriously rocky and we had been following Letsatsi on foot. Alex had brought the vehicle back as close as he could, but there was no way we could pick Letsatsi up and carry him to the
bakkie.
It took about twenty minutes to drive the truck twenty yards over the rocks to where the lion lay.

In the meantime I gave Letsatsi a top-up of Zoletil. Finally we had the pickup parked next to him. The five of us, grunting and cursing under the strain of more than six hundred pounds of dead weight of lion, just managed to lift Letsatsi high enough to slide him into the rear carrying compartment of the vehicle.

“We're completely stuffed,” I said to Rodney Nombekana as we drove Letsatsi back to the park. Rodney nodded. We still had plenty more filming to do, but our star had quit on us, and, though we tried again in vain, he never worked on the film shoot again.

My relationship with Letsatsi had deteriorated not only because of peer pressure, but because of money pressure. I had been pushing him harder and harder in the weeks that led up to his spectacular walkout, not because I wanted to prove to the crew and other onlookers that Letsatsi would follow my every command, no matter how tired he was, but because I was working to a budget.

“You shouldn't feel responsible for things going wrong. It's not your fault,” Rodney Fuhr said to me.

But I did feel responsible. I was involved in every aspect of this film's production, from the animal wrangling to the writing, from the catering to the artistic direction. I was feeling pulled in every direction. Someone had to be responsible when things didn't go according to plan, and it was usually me.

It would have been different if I had just been involved in one part of the film. In the past, when I was working as an animal wrangler on commercial shoots, I had pulled lions when I sensed they were in danger of being overworked. I would happily say to other film crews, “Guys, look, you've got one more take and then this lion is going to bed,” and they would always respect that. My job had been not only to ensure that the lions delivered, but to look after their welfare, as well. If I had been simply the wrangler on the set of
White Lion
, I probably wouldn't have unloaded Letsatsi from the truck in the first place, as I would have been able to sense—and obey that feeling—that everything was not right with this lion. In fact, I would have sensed all was not right much sooner and pulled the plug months before the shoot, as the signs of Letsatsi not working were there for all to see.

As the animal wrangler
and
producer, I was wearing two hats. If a lion performed the same action five times, I might still want him to do it again for a sixth, to ensure we got the best possible shot. As a wrangler I would have called a halt after four or five—more than a crew would experience on most film or television shoots—but as producer I would go to bed at night worrying that we had ended up with a second-rate shot.

I was pushing the lions—all the white lions that played Letsatsi at various ages, and his brown lion companions. In the first two seasons of filming, summer 2005–2006, and again in the wet season of 2006–2007, I learned a lot more than I ever had about lions and their limits. Poor Letsatsi had cracked before he even got started on
White Lion.

It's important for me to point out that I would never allow any
animal cruelty during the filming of
White Lion
, no matter how far behind schedule we were. In South Africa, as happens around the world, animal welfare experts are always present on film shoots to ensure no improper or cruel practices are employed when working with animals, and that no animal is harmed during the course of the production. I have had a very good relationship with the Animal Anti Cruelty League (AACL) over a number of years. I have really come to respect their welfare officers. They have a tricky and difficult job, ensuring the rights of animals are protected in the high-pressure environment of a film set. Film people always want to get the best possible shot and they're being paid a lot of money to be there.

One very experienced guy from AACL, Rulof Jackson, had a way about him that engendered respect. I see the anti-cruelty people as friends and a backup on set, not as adversaries. When things are not going right with an animal and the pressure is increasing to make the shoot go according to plan, it's the AACL person who will step in and say things are becoming dangerous. As a producer on
White Lion
, it was sometimes difficult for me to walk the line between getting the job done and watching out for the animals' interests. It was at times like that that I really appreciated Rulof being there. He did a great job, and I think it's fair to say we came out of the project with a great deal of respect for each other.

We never broke the rules, but I don't think that it is necessarily a bad thing to put an animal under a little bit of stress when working with it. Animals need to be challenged and kept active and interested in what is going on around them—it breaks the monotony of captivity—but in my heart of hearts I knew that I was sometimes pushing too much. When Letsatsi walked out on me at Nash's farm it wasn't because I had hurt him, it was because he was sick of me and the lead-up work we had been doing together.

The pressure to make a perfect film did not lessen, particularly as shooting stretched over the following two years. In all, we filmed
over three summer seasons, from 2005 through 2008. However, I knew that sometimes, from that point onwards, I would have to settle for a “good enough” shot of a lion rather than the best that money could buy.

As it turned out, people in the know who have seen parts of the film were amazed at some of the shots we did get. We were pioneering techniques, working animals in wide-open, unfenced spaces. Other filmmakers might have used locked-off cameras, keeping the frame still so that footage of a lion walking could be cut and pasted in later. We were doing it live, often in one take, so shots that I thought could have been done better were wowing people. Our philosophy was to get as much that was “real” action on film as we could, in order to save time and money on post production. Of course, for some scenes we still had to use blue screens and split screens, where different people or animals are filmed on the same set, but at different times, especially when safety was an issue.

Rodney Nombekana helped keep me true to the principles that I had applied when working with lions before the film, and that I had tried to instill in him. He became my conscience, and he was very good at it.

“Kev, I think we maybe need to give this lion a rest now if we want to work him tomorrow,” Rodney would say to me gently, on occasions after Letsatsi freaked out. In essence, he was doing for me what I had done for directors and producers on shoots in the past.

The downside of the way I work with lions is that when a relationship breaks down, as mine did with Letsatsi, there is sometimes no going back if you pass that point of no return.

A lion tamer or wrangler who works with a shock stick, or a stick, or a whip, will probably always be able to get his lion to jump up on a chair or through a hoop whether the animal hates him or tolerates him. For me, I couldn't change methods in midstream.

Following the debacle at Nash's Farm, the other production team members started to convince themselves that perhaps Letsatsi's walkout was a one-off. “Maybe he was just wowed by the wide open spaces, or put off by the number of people on the set that day,” one of the guys said to me during a production meeting. “Maybe we should give him another chance. What do you think, Kev?”

I could hardly say to them that no, our one big white male lion would never work again, even though that was what I believed in my heart of hearts. “Okay, let's give it a try,” I said, bowing to the pressure again.

We thought that if we put Letsatsi in the fifteen-hectare enclosure at the back of the Lion Park, we might be able to get some footage of him doing things at his own pace. There was another pride living in the big enclosure, two males named Jamu and Mogli, and their four lionesses, one of whom, Ice, was heavily pregnant. We relocated them without difficulty, but it was a different matter altogether when it came to moving our temperamental star white lion to his new home. Letsatsi was onto our game and did not want to play. It was a mission just to load him into the truck to move him to the bigger enclosure, but eventually we managed to get him there.

Letsatsi became progressively more aggressive and he started to learn, like a disobedient child, that we were intimidated by his behavior, and that we would back off from him when he showed his anger. It was a case of stimulus and response, and he kept upping the ante. He would see me and growl, and I had to say to the other executives on the film, “This has gone beyond a lion refusing to work—this is about a lion becoming dangerous.”

We had moved Jamu and Mogli and their girls out on a Friday, and Letsatsi into the big enclosure on the same day. On that Saturday morning the film crew arrived and we tried to work with Letsatsi. He was impossible. He refused to respond to food or any other stimulus and just sat around doing absolutely nothing. His urge to explore, which had been so strong on Nash's farm, was nowhere to
be seen. It was a complete waste of time, so we finished work at lunchtime.

“Should we move him back to his small enclosure, Kev?” Rodney Nombekana asked me.

I shook my head. “It was so bloody difficult getting him here I doubt he'd load again. Look at him,” I said, gesturing over to Letsatsi, who was sitting under a tree glaring at me. “He's not going to get in a truck or do anything we want him to do. Let's give him some time and space, Rod, and see how he's doing on Monday.” With that, Rodney and I went home for the rest of the weekend, and the film crew left with diddly squat.

I was tired and depressed and frustrated and, as usual, Mandy had to bear the brunt of me unloading my woes when I got home. She, more than anyone, knows what I went through during the filming of
White Lion
. She saw the relationships with lions and people erode, and was always there to let me vent when I needed to.

On Monday morning Rodney and I turned up to the big enclosure to check on Letsatsi. I called him, but couldn't see him. We began walking along the fence line, but there was no sign of him. He's a very big, very white lion, and the bush was very green at that time of the year, so he normally stood out a mile off.

“Letsatsi!” I called.

Rodney looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. Neither of us could see him, so we decided we would go in and look for him. Fifteen hectares is a sizeable area, and this enclosure contained a good deal of natural vegetation, which we had hoped would look good in the film.

We started working a search grid, moving slowly from left to right through the long grass and bush of the enclosure, calling his name as we went, and keeping each other in sight for safety. We couldn't find him. “This is crazy. He can't have disappeared,” I said.

“Escaped?”

I shook my head, not even wanting to consider the possibility of
this cranky male lion being somewhere on the loose. It had been bad enough when Bonny and Chucky the Houdini hyenas had got out and chewed up the guy's lounge suite. In the mood he was in, Letsatsi might prefer people to furniture. To be sure, I checked the fencing and searched for spoor, but there were no gaps in the wire and no tracks or other signs that Letsatsi had got through, under, or over either one of the two fences that surrounded the big enclosure.