The Most Dangerous Movie Ever Made
Fourteen years after enduring Alfred Hitchcock pelting her with birds for a week, Tippi Hedren starred in the most dangerous movie ever made.
Tippi Hedren spent five full days having Alfred Hitchcock throw live birds at her on the set of The Birds. In her memoir, she referred to it as the worst week of her life. Odd then, that she would go on to produce what famously became one of the most dangerous, injury-prone films of all time. A film that must be seen to be believed. A film called Roar.
In 1962, Alfred Hitchcock signed Tippi Hedren to a seven-year contract. At the time of the signing, she was unaware of the level of the director’s obsession with her. After the completion of their second film together, 1964’s Marnie, Hedren informed Hitchcock that she wanted out of her contract. The director refused. Hedren said that, contract or no, she would not work with him again. She didn’t.
But she couldn’t work with anyone else either. Not without Hitchcock’s permission. And he was not about to give it. Frustrated, Hitchcock finally sold Hedren’s contract to Universal. Universal, frustrated with Hedren’s habit of turning down projects she did not like, finally released her. Her first film after Marnie was 1967’s A Countess From Hong Kong starring Marlon Brando and directed by Charlie Chaplin.
In 1967, Hedren found herself filming a movie called Satan’s Harvest in Africa. While there, she and her husband Noel Marshall witnessed a bizarre sight. A local game warden moved out of his house, and a pride of lions moved in. Enthralled with how quickly the lions adapted to their new environment, Marshall wrote a script about a family forced to share their home with a pride of lions called, accurately, Lions, Lions & More Lions. Hedren would star in and co-produce the film.
The script was at the same time simple and preposterous. An American naturalist lives on a nature preserve in Tanzania with a large group of big cats to study their behavior. While awaiting the arrival of a grant-approval committee, the naturalist’s wife and children come to stay, only to discover that their house has been overrun by wild cats.
Sounds nice, huh? Couple problems. All the lions and tigers and cougars and cheetahs and panthers are played by real lions and tigers and cougars and cheetahs and panthers. Because these cats were real, it was very difficult to find actors willing to work with them. So Noel and Tippi cast themselves as the couple and their real life children as the children. These included Tippi’s daughter Melanie Griffith (yes, that Melanie Griffith, then a kid) and Marshall’s sons Jerry and John.
Tippi Hedren, Melanie Griffith, and some of their co-stars.
The locations was changed to California due to that fact that the lions, tigers, et al., needed to be tame and tame big cats aren’t readily available in Africa. Nor are they really a thing. Big cats are wild animals and can be somewhat trained but never domesticated. According to Oliver Skinner, writing about Roar in an article called Beautiful Disasters that I found on mubi.com, Hedren and Marshall began acquiring lions from zoos and circuses. Initially they kept them at their home in Sherman Oaks but they were soon ordered by the authorities to remove them.
Hedren and Marshall purchased a plot of land in Soledad Canyon and turned it into a what they hoped would look on film like a Tanzanian nature preserve. It’s a good thing they moved to the bigger space. Writing about the film in the Los Angeles Times, writer Tia Gindick noted that, by the end of production, Marshall and Hedren had accumulated 71 lions, 26 tigers, 10 cougars, 9 black panthers, 4 leopards, 2 jaguars, 1 tigon, 2 elephants, 6 black swans, 4 Canadian geese, 7 flamingos, 4 cranes, 2 peacocks and a stork.
Principle photography began in late 1976 on what they hoped would be a six-month schedule and $3 million budget. Uh-huh. The film wrapped five years later with a total estimated budget of $ 17 million.
But THAT’S not why Roar is so famous. It’s the cats. These cats may not be wild, but they are certainly not tame, and within a few minutes of screentime you see them draw blood, real blood, from Marshall himself, in a scene where he is wrestling with a lion over his coat. In all, according to Richard Brody, writing about Roar in The New Yorker, Hedren’s daughter Melanie Griffith got mauled by a cat near her eye and required reconstructive surgery. Hedren was injured and, since the mouth and teeth of big cats are foaming with bacteria, contracted gangrene and needed skin grafts. Noel Marshall was injured so many times he contracted blood poisoning and the cinematographer Jan DeBont (who would go on to direct Speed and Twister), had his scalp torn off by a lion requiring 120 stitches. In all. It has been estimated that Roar racked up a total of approximately 70 serious on set injuries (Hedren disputes the number).
Roar has to be seen to be believed and is often, deservedly, referred to as, “the most dangerous movie ever made.”