Twister’s Director Once Ended Up On The Wrong End Of A Lion Attack

Making a motion picture is hard work under the best of circumstances. It’s a collaborative process that requires careful, hopefully cordial coordination between an incredibly diverse array of craftspeople: directors, actors, writers, camera operators, designers, stunt people, electricians, carpenters, animal wranglers, and occasionally muppets. The degree of difficulty gets ratcheted up when you dare to shoot in less-than-welcoming elements like the water, the jungle, or the desert.

Advertisement

“Jaws,” “Apocalypse Now,” and “Lawrence of Arabia” are three of the greatest films ever made, but they were brutally difficult to pull together. Mother Nature’s fury knocked all three of these well behind schedule. Sets were wrecked, equipment was damaged beyond repair and a mechanical shark refused to operate properly. Was it worth it? For the viewer, absolutely. You watch these movies and, in between breathtaking sequences, lament that they really couldn’t be made in this risk-taking fashion nowadays. But one viewing of George Hickenlooper, Fax Bahr, and Eleanor Coppola’s “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse” should leave you thanking the maker of your choosing that you were subjected to Francis Ford Coppola’s controversial approach to “Apocalypse Now” while he turned the Philippines into a war zone.

Advertisement

And then there is Noel Marshall’s “Roar.”

The passion project of Marshall and his movie star wife Tippi Hedren, “Roar” is, on the surface, a family film about a naturalist (Marshall) who runs a nature preserve in Tanzania populated by big cats. When he brings his family (the actual Marshall-Hedren clan, including a young Melanie Griffith) out to join him while he continues his study, all hell breaks loose. They arrive while he is off dealing with a threat to the preserve, which leads to a harrowing encounter with these giant creatures (who will play with you until you’re dead like a housecat would a mouse). It’s all terrifyingly real, and the peril is unrelenting until the credits roll 90 minutes later, at which point you’re wondering how no one got killed shooting this wild thing.

Amazingly, no one perished while filming “Roar,” but Jan de Bont — the legendary Dutch filmmaker and cinematographer who lensed “Die Hard” and “The Hunt for Red October,” and directed “Speed” and “Twister” — flirted with the big exit when he got full-on scalped by a playful lion.