IT SHOULDN’T HAPPEN TO A FILM JOURNALIST
THIS MONTH ANIMALS ON MOVIE SETS.
Never work with children or animals’ the adage goes, and the history of movies is littered with examples attesting to its wisdom.
On Werner Herzog’s 400 monkeys were brought in for the scene where the raft is overrun by primates, only for them to leap overboard, swim for the shore and disappear into the Peruvian rainforest. For the final segment 20,000 cockroaches were imported from Trinidad to infest the germaphobe’s hermetically sealed New York flat, and many of them disappeared into props, furniture and any wall crack they could find to escape the lights (“Roaches don’t take direction,” sighed George A. Romero). And on Dario Argento introduced cat-sized Chinese fighting rats to New York for a bonkers kill scene in Central Park. Naturally, some escaped and bred with Manhattan’s rodents.
