French director Jean-Jacques Annaud is a born mimic. He`s got the agile face and body for it. With his gray, curly locks and his alert bird`s eyes, Annaud, 46, suggests a high-IQ Harpo Marx character as he shambles around a glass-walled hotel suite in Toronto 18 stories above Lake Ontario, imitates a bear taking a swipe at a trout in a stream, then collapses into a seated position against a wall, hands sprawled in his lap.
Annaud is illustrating bear behavior while discussing the making of ”The Bear,” his fictional film about an orphan cub, a huge solitary grizzly, two hunters and other animals in British Columbia in 1885. ”The Bear,” which had its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival and opened in Chicago Friday, has been a huge hit in France, outgrossing ”Roger Rabbit.”
It might never have happened, Annaud says, except for what he thought was a spelling error in a Toronto bookstore he visited in 1982 while promoting
”Quest for Fire,” his cave-dweller epic. ”I saw a little sign that said
`ethology.` I thought it was a mistake, that it should have been
`ethnology,` about the study of races. But when I started looking at the books, I realized there was indeed a science called ethology and it had to do with animal behavior.” He bought and read Konrad Lorenz`s ”On Aggression,” and he was hooked. He didn`t want to be typecast as a maker of films about primitive subject matter. So he first filmed Umberto Eco`s labyrinthine medieval mystery, ”The Name of the Rose.”
It also took him a while to settle on bears once he decided he wanted to film a drama played by an animal, Annaud says. ”I first looked at apes, but thought it would be a big mistake because apes are perceived as caricatures of humans. Then I became fascinated by tigers. Those eyes! But the cubs look like pet cats, and the eyes of the adults make them look like aliens. Then I realized why bears are such mythological creatures. On two feet they look like a fatso in a fur coat. Then without transition, it goes back on four feet and it`s a menacing, fierce animal. But our body structures are so similar, we can identify easily with them. If I wanted to make the same film with insects or turtles, it would be much more complex because the body language is so different. ”
Once Annaud had the script he wanted from hunter-turned-naturalist James Curwood`s novel, it took four years to train the bears. Two brothers, Bart and Doc, each 9 feet tall and weighing 1,900 pounds, play the adult grizzly who becomes the orphaned cub`s protector. They had to be taught to tolerate cubs, walk with a limp and, since they were used to eating supermarket fish, to swipe trout from streams.
An effeminate male, Annaud says, played the female with whom the adult bear mates. The cub, he adds, was known as Douze, the French word for dozen, since it was No. 12 among the cubs they tested. ”My star was very quiet, very secure. His brother was two years older, much wilder. We used them 90 percent of the time. At first, we thought to use animatronics. We had discussions with Jim Henson, who did the Muppets. In the end, we used a few, in the violent scenes. No animal was injured. After two months, those bears knew they were stars, too.”
Recalling his mostly animal cast, guided primarily by American bear trainers in the Austrian and Italian Alps during the shoot, Annaud says,
”Sometimes I would see my whole unit running up the mountain. Douze would make them chase him and play tag. He wanted to be the center of attention. It became a problem. In the scene with the puma, the little bear was so confident that he could dominate the puma. He could have been killed. He had not experienced the violence of nature. In nature, of course, a little bear without protection is a dead bear. In the wide shots, the bears would be put in the right situation, and, instinctively, they`d behave the right way.
”The nightmare was the close-up. This was where I`d use Method acting. Every morning I would get a box full of gadgets to astonish and impress the bears to get the right expression.
”In the scene where the little bear is looking at the big bear who has just refused him protection, I went `Oo-oo-ooh!` and the bear looked astonished. I said, `Roll, roll, roll!` I needed it for only a second and a half. What is complex is to get the actor to be good again in the close-up, after he`s done the master shot. When the girl has to look not at Harrison Ford but at the assistant director and say, `I love you forever.` Even zoologists make the mistake of thinking an animal is a mechanism. Five years ago, it would have been impossible to me to think they have any relation to us. Now it is obvious to me that we are similar beings. They can learn and remember. They had a vocabulary of about 40 words they could understand. They`re as quirky as people. Yet, even people in the field don`t want to admit that animals can have a personality.
”My main fear was that one day my patience, my stubbornness, would vanish,” says Annaud, who scouted locations in British Columbia, Utah, Alaska, Norway, Hungary, Yugoslavia, New Zealand and Australia before finding the terrain and lighting he wanted in the Dolomites. ”Sometimes,” he says,
”I had to wait several days for the light to match, or for the right close-up. I would have 200 people waiting 9,000 feet up in the rain, with a camera crew lying in the mud so I could capture the right twinkle in the bear`s eye.” One thing Annaud did not do was sentimentalize the bears into cute Disney cartoon characters, including the cub, whose fangs are sharp and whose jaw strength matches that of a bulldog.
Security on the set was stringent-hot wires ringing scenes, no eating or unnecessary movements in the presence of the animals, all crew members freeze during takes and until the animals are back in their cages. The only accident that happened during the shoot, Annaud says, occurred when he violated his own rules, suddenly entering the big bear`s space with a view-finder to pose for newspaper photographers. Bart, spooked, jumped Annaud, tore a thigh-to-ankle gash in his leg. Annaud acknowledges he was scared. But he stayed cool enough to play dead until the bear backed off, then rolled to safety, had the leg stitched up in an Austrian hospital and resumed shooting the same day.
Although he doesn`t want to become typecast, Annaud says he`s drawn to primitive worlds. Laughing, he says he`s strictly a product of the Parisian suburbs. His mother worked as a secretary in a chemical company, his father was employed by the state railways. After several years of being taken to the movies each Sunday, he got his first camera. This, and his immersion in prehistoric adventure comic strips, led to youthful film making. After being graduated from film school, Annaud served his compulsory military service in the Cameroons. ”Africa and the movies are my only true passions,” he says.
”In Africa, I discovered the universe of emotion and instinct and understood the value of behavior over speech.” That perhaps accounts for his comfort with scripts having little or no dialogue, including his genuflection to Africa, ”Black and White in Color,” which won an Academy Award in 1977. Annaud, his wife and their two daughters mostly divide their time between a Paris apartment and a farm a few hours away. ”It`s always been my dream to live in a monastery in the woods,” he says. ”I feel well there on my farm, in old jeans, in an old shirt, surrounded by books. But I spend three months each year in the Third World. I can get closer to my instincts on these trips. ”I`m a nonviolent person, but I understand why there is aggression and other impulses not so pleasant. This, of course, is the privilege of someone who can afford the trip, as a substitute for psychoanalysis.
”Right now, I`m starting work on a project based on a complex Marguerite Duras novel, `The Lover,` in which this very intellectual woman describes what she felt in her guts when she was 15. As for my experience making `The Bear,` I was absolutely transformed by it. My wife, who was pregnant at the time, would come down to the set. When I was directing my bear, I felt I was directing my child. Now I see my child trying to walk, and I think it`s my bear.”
