During the early stages of making the 1981 movie Roar, which almost no one has seen, a lion bites the cinematographer in the head. Not even a nibble. A full bite that required 220 stitches and, in medical terms, took off a big chunk of his scalp. The movie was still being worked on by Jan de Bont, who would later direct Speed. For five more years. You can learn almost everything you need to know about how this movie was made from that one fact.
No, Roar didn’t start on a studio lot. It was in someone’s living room in Sherman Oaks, California. Tippi Hedren, who was in Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” and her producer husband Noel Marshall came back from a trip to Africa very upset by what they saw: a house taken over by a pride of lions, which was both peaceful and strange. They planned to make a movie about it. They also wanted to bring attention to the fact that wild cat populations are dropping. It was full of hope. It was strongly felt. And looking back, it was probably one of the riskiest moves ever made in Hollywood.
What began as an idea turned into a private zoo over time. Because Noel and Tippi couldn’t find trained lions on the scale they wanted, they started to buy big cats themselves. These were strays from zoos, circuses, and private owners who didn’t realize how much work they would be putting into them. Bears, lions, tigers, jaguars, leopards, and cougars. In the end, more than 100 of them lived on a ranch in Soledad Canyon, which is forty miles north of Los Angeles. The family didn’t just watch over these animals from afar. They lived with them. Their children grew up with them. There is something incredibly strange about that that should have caused a lot more concern than it seems to have.
The filming itself began in 1977 and wouldn’t end for five years. The performance was based mostly on the animals’ moods; there was no training, no marking, and no behavior that could be repeated. Noel chose to shoot in a documentary style, with multiple cameras rolling at the same time, so that he could catch something real. He caught a lot. He just didn’t always think about how much it would cost.
During production, more than seventy cast and crew members were hurt. His daughter, Melanie Griffith, was scratched in the face by a lion; the video of this was used in the final movie. After being thrown from an elephant, Tippi broke her leg. Later, a lion bit her in the neck and she needed 38 stitches to fix it. Noel had to go to the hospital because a very bad bite turned into gangrene. While he was getting better, monsoon rains flooded the set. The fencing was broken by mudslides. Lions got away. One of them was shot and killed by a deputy sheriff. Then there was a disease that spread through the cats. Next came wildfires.
Variety later said that it was the most troubled movie production in Hollywood history. It’s not going to work.
The damage to the economy was just as bad. Two years in, the investors left, and Noel and Tippi had to sell off much of their property to keep the cameras rolling. The money that Noel made as an executive producer on The Exorcist was used to make the movie. As the crew watched the chaos compound year after year, they started to joke that Roar might have gotten the legendary curse from that other project. The movie cost $17 million to make and made about $2 million around the world when it was all said and done.
It’s really strange that the movie exists at all, and you should think about that. There’s no CGI. Don’t play tricks. It looks exactly like every scene where a lion pins a person to the ground and every moment of improvised chaos between the animal and the actor. The video is amazing in a way that seems almost impossible right now. It also has proof of something that may not have been allowed to happen in the first place and will never be allowed to happen again.
You can admire the goal while still being worried about how much it will cost. When I watch Roar today, I feel a strange tension between brave filmmaking and choices that, from a reasonable distance, look like big mistakes in judgment. Not many people remember the movie. It was added as a footnote. But it’s important to read this footnote carefully because someone was either bleeding or scared behind every frame of it.
