Oldenburg Film Festival

 

Tomer Almagor: Well, as I mentioned the idea was brought to my attention by the producer. I didn't know it still existed. I'm a bit naive sometimes and I didn't realize that hunting existed in such an industrialized way with many, many hunters from all over the world. Except 70% of trophy hunters who go after lions are from the US. They go out there and shoot their lion trophy every year. So I was blown away by that as someone who cares about the environment and animals. I also have to say as a cinephile and a filmmaker I grew up on Tarzan movies and Westerns, you know tough men with guns. That appealed to me and I love Africa so I knew right away that there is something that is very cinematic but it's a tough subject. So now the situation was like, "What kind of movie do we want to make?" We were thinking about lions becoming extinct and so forth, so the first thing that came to mind was okay, we're making a cause movie. If we have to make similarities we could say "Blackfish" or "The Cove" and stuff like that. So we were thinking of bringing both sides to the table, you know the animal rights people and hunters and see how that goes. I want to mention here that Gabrielle is not here (at the interview) but she was an instrumental part of getting this to happen. She actually brought the project to me. She's carried this project through the years, when it was in remission through and through. Financing and all the other stuff. She is a major animal lover so for her it was very important that the film actually touches on the real problems and hopefully allows everyone to come to the table and create some kind of a solution. We always knew that there would be a lion hunter at the center of the film.

 

Yeah, you mean Aaron Neilson. 

 

TA: Yeah, exactly. We didn't know it was going to be him. We knew it was going to be a lion hunter so we knew that would be the hardest thing to achieve. Because we come from...politically speaking I'm a liberal so we didn't know how that's going to go. The first thing we had in mind was okay, we're going to go to the conferences. They have these huge conferences. This head of the organization, they have SCI (Safari Club International). They hold these conferences, once or twice a year in Vegas and Reno (Nevada) and later I discovered there's a thing called Dallas Safari Club, DSC, which is separate from the Safari Club International. It's pretty big as well; Dallas can have ten thousand, twenty thousand hunters or hunting-lovers at one time. Safari Club International can have forty, fifty, sixty thousand. And they can have representation there from US Fish and Wildlife (Service) and scientists come. They also have auctions for hunting. It's all around hunting. But it's also all around hunting as conservation. It's important to mention in North America, in The (United) States, we do have the North American hunting model, which essentially supports all of the fishing and wildlife activities in the national parks. We have amazing national parks in America.They are being supported by hunting so people pay for licenses for hunting for deer and stuff like that. The money goes back. And obviously this head organization comes across as the NRA and they're evil. But they are trying to instate the North American hunting model in Africa. They also have a lot of other things that I personally dislike. You know, like they have to hunt the biggest, or they have these competitions where they compare sizes when it comes to lions, which means the head. When you hunt the biggest in the gene pool you are hurting the gene pool. But anyway going back to the subject, you know we started going to these hunting conventions, first of all, undercover kind of like "The Cove". We thought, "yeah, we're gonna catch them." Then we realized that they are very open to speak to you if you come in a certain way. Specifically, for me and my co-director partner (Nadav Harel) we've been to the (Israeli) army and we've both shot guns. And they (the hunting convention attendees) all like Israel very much, maybe it's like an evangelical thing. So it was easy for us to get close to them. And we found quite a few hunters over the years and quite a few of them also backed out. 

 

What reasons did they give for backing out? 

 

TA: For various reasons. I mean if I have to mention one person. He was really into it. But it was his first lion hunt and then he was like, "Well, I want it to be very intimate. I want it to be mine. I don't want you guys tagging along." Plus, hunting is complicated and when you don't feel comfortable about your hunting skills a film crew gets in the way. Well, they always have their own film crew as you see in the movie. They always have that because they wanna immortalize their achievement. So, finally we got to Aaron and that was a fairly quick process even though to make sure he sent us to meet a scientist. Her name is Dr. Paula White. She is a woman that he really trusts. He actually developed The Code of Ethics of Hunting a Lion, which is mentioned in the movie. It has to be at least six years old. He developed that with her and some other scientists. There were a few people on the other side of the fence who were brought into the table like Dereck Joubert who is a major animal rights activist. So that's an interesting initiative. We spoke to Paula and that was a strange experience as well. As a scientist, she gets a lot of hate mail and threats. 

 

It's so bizarre that some of these groups fighting against harming wild animals don't see the wrong in threatening the lives of humans. I really wonder how they can justify that. 

 

TA: Absolutely. In her case we had to go to Northern California. She wouldn't give us the exact location. We met her somewhere in secret, in a national park, not in her home.

 

Wow, that sounds like a super top secret, undercover Deep Throat kind of rendezvous. 

 

TA: Yeah, we came out of our car and she came out of her car. We spoke a little bit, and she realized very quickly that we had done our research. And we come from a scientific standpoint. I guess that it's important to mention that one of the things that we started with was numbers. The first thing that we heard was that less than 20,000 lions are still in existence in comparison to 1970 when they had like 500,000. Then we started hearing, especially from the hunters, that it's 40,000 but the discrepancy is huge, almost 100% or more, 40 to 20. But the bottom line is that it's very low. So once we proved to her that we were prescribing to the idea that the numbers were not clear, we are not necessarily bashing hunters, we're trying to understand and stuff like that, then she was open for an interview. And we got that and once that happened Aaron subscribed to making the movie and we got him. 

 

 

(Still of Aaron Neilson from "King of Beasts")

 

How long was that entire process, before you got Aaron fully on board? 

 

TA: I think about a few months, maybe almost a year because there was a moment when the movie was kind of dead. We had another hunter that was in 100% and he has hunted many, many lions. But he backed out. I'm not sure why. With him it probably would have been a very extreme experience of a movie because he teases the animals to charge him and then he shoots them. 

 

Dangerous.

 

TA: And unethical. He was actually kicked out of the organization and he was one of the founders. 

 

It makes me wonder how he morphed into that extreme of a hunter. 

 

TA: I suppose that he was always like that. That's his personality. Aaron is in your face as you can tell, but he's also sort of well spoken and self-righteous and right in some things. 

 

We are all right in some things, wrong in some things. Nobody is 100% correct. 

 

TA: Exactly, there is no black or white. It's somewhere in between. 

 

That's why I suppose trophy hunting is very controversial. Many people only see black or white. These people will likely go into this film, or avoid this film, expecting to hate it or love it. It'd be nice if audiences would go watch your film, open to taking in all that is up on the screen, judgments aside. It seems a difficult request though, especially after having see the worldwide outrage to Cecil the Lion. Can you talk a little more about Walter Palmer, the dentist who hunted Cecil the Lion? You said last night that the public's reaction to Cecil and Walter Palmer somehow stalled or affected your production.      

 

TA:  Well, not necessarily but it was a strange moment. So we went into the bush (in Tanzania) and we were filming Aaron when this was happening somewhere else in Zimbabwe. And when we came out we didn't have any reception to the media or anything. We came out, it happened. We landed in the US and all of a sudden it came very quickly to us. Back then we were working with high profile celebrities so that's how it kind of came to us. So we started getting requests from Good Morning America and all these crazy shows to comment but we didn't have a movie. We weren't very clear what we just achieved in terms of footage. And we heard so much wrong information in the news, which was sensational. 

 

The media is often completely one-sided on controversial topics such as this, painting someone as evil just for the sake of headlines. 

 

TA: Yeah, completely misinformed and we heard experts. Oh, this lion expert that works at a zoo in Canada he's gonna come on CNN and speak. And then he talks and he has no idea what he's talking about. Plus, talking about Africa as a continent is wrong, especially in terms of lions. Because each country is very different. This film takes place in Tanzania. Tanzania has the largest population of lions. I believe it's about 18,000. Again the numbers, there is no reason to quote them. The bottom line is 18,000 in comparison to say maybe 2,000 or less in Kenya or maybe 5,000 in Zimbabwe. So they have their own issues. On the other hand, they have huge national parks like the Selous and the Serengeti. So a huge portion of this population is protected, to a degree. So with Cecil they can lure the lions out of the park. But that's the thing when they say lure a lion I don't know exactly what happened there. This happened in Zimbabwe, with Cecil. It could be that the lion was very, very hungry. The put bait on the trees. I have to be honest, based on even what you saw in the movie, they do sort of lure the lion to them because lions are always hungry. And when there is free meat on a tree somewhere the lion will go there and will find it as we see in the first encounter in the movie. All of a sudden, when they see the lion, the lion was there because the lion smelled the meat. And they may do a little bit of a dog-and-pony show, for their camera and our camera. But I don't think that they were surprised that the lion showed up all of a sudden.

 

Even though I'm not a fan of hunting, I somehow appreciated it more that Aaron was using a bow and arrow for the hunt, not a gun. It somehow felt more fair to me, going closer to the tradition of arrow and spear hunting. Does Aaron often choose to hunt lions with bow and arrow?   

TA: I think that was his first time with bow and arrow. At that point of the film he's taken his 14th lion. I believe that he has the second largest collection as a lion trophy hunter in the world. There is another person named Steven Chancellor. He sits on Trump's Fish and Wildlife Committee right now, which is packed with trophy hunters. Which you know obviously in this case it's leaning more towards...You have to create bonds. It's kind of like we mentioned at the end of the movie, everyone has to come to the table together. There are much bigger problems than trophy hunting. I don't support trophy hunting. I'm totally against it, and I don't see the point in it. But it's on a moral and ethical level, as far as I see it. There are huge problems such as commercial organized crime, poaching, human encroachment. The people just come in and in and in and they take away the habitats of the lions. You know, lions need areas to live and even food in those areas. So there is a clash. The lions will go to the people's areas and eat their cows. If you ever met the Masai people and eat their cows they will retaliate. And the way they do it, they'll poison the source of water. So now you don't lose one lion, you lose a pride of lions and all the animals that touched these lions as well, birds and every animal that drinks from that source of water. So poisoning, human encroachment, poaching these are huge problems. Trophy hunting, if it's done ethically under this code, it works. Again, on my end I'm not sure whether it's always done ethically. And I have no idea whether the lion we tracked with Aaron and they killed in the movie is six years or younger. I don't know. They show us the teeth on purpose. Oh, look. Which is supposed to tell the audience that this lion has been in the wild for seven, eight years because of the bones. They told us something interesting that I didn't know. That lions in the wild only live on average seven to eight years. So lions in captivity in the zoo can live up to twenty years old, but in the wild they have so much competition. Hyenas alone.That's another thing we learned. Hyenas and lions are eternal enemies. Hyenas would come in packs, they will take the prey and fight the lion. They will chase a lion. A lion will essentially, instead of being the king of the jungle or king of the savannah, is now fighting for his place in the food chain. Becoming a scavenger in a way, especially a lonely lion like the one we saw in the film. When it's not in a pride, no lioness is helping him getting food. Because the males are more lazy. They like to hang out for twenty hours. 

 

Can you speak a little more about the lion that Aaron killed in the film? How did you track him?

 

TA: We were tracking three lions in three different areas and trees. And this by the way, I don't know if it shows in the movie, but it's a huge area. You would drive from one bait to another and it would take a couple of hours. So you would spend 18 hours in the back of the truck. Aaron and the driver were the only ones comfortable in those conditions. You keep going to those different trees and keep seeing the photos. You see what lion is feeding there. And then they choose. So they made a choice and kind of let us in on that. They may have looked at the photos and said, this one looks younger. I think that they have. We haven't seen it physically until they have made a decision. It did feel that this lion kind of gave up. 

 

In some ways it feels hypocritical, unless all of these animal rights activists are vegetarians or vegans, that they categorize animals on a certain LEVEL. I mean why should one animal's life be put above another's just because it's cute and has a name? It seems like some protesters really enjoy looking down at others, judging them so harshly when we, as a global society, do consume lots of meat, a lot of which is slaughtered in really unethical (somewhat secret) ways in our home countries.   

 

TA: It's actually important to mention if you remember by the end of the film, there are strings of meat hanging. That's lion meat. 

 

Right, I assumed that's what it was.

 

TA: They say, like in the beginning, that they make beef jerky out of it. There was lion and leopard that they shot earlier. We just didn't want to put the leopard in the film because that scene was competing with the lion. And too much killing is just a turn-off. Nobody wants to, it's just more important that the film shows and takes you on it.

 

Yeah, so the lion meat was actually being used as a source of food, what many outsiders might not even consider. 

 

TA: There's another important thing to mention, people just look at it as Africa and not specific countries. They look at it as the killing of lions, the hunting of lions, the murdering of lions as an umbrella term. You have camp hunting, which is a very unethical sport if you can call it that, which is basically when they breed lions to be shot, in close quarters you know 6000 sq meters or whatever. They release the lion maybe one or two days before the hunter shows up. The lion is half-drugged, very easy to kill. It's murder, it's nothing else. And I guess it's similar to the industrialization of meat in the West. That should be illegal. What we see in the movie is a wild animal hunt. This is a wild lion who lives in the wild. No one knew, either us or them, if there was going to be a lion in that area. They knew that there are wild lions in the area but they didn't know whether they will track one. Again, as an outsider and having spoken to some hunters that actually changed their mind. We had a strong South African consultant on who we started with us. He's hunted and still hunts. He believes that the way to save a hunt, he was talking about a leopard hunt, for 3-4 weeks by foot, the old-fashioned way kind of like seeing at the beginning (of the film). 

 

Yeah, that old footage was a bold start to the film. 

 

TA: But even then we see the white man's camera. They (the native hunters) were still doing it for the camera although they were doing it their way, which was very interesting. Mourning the lion. They were actually respecting the beast, mourning the loss of the animal unlike he (the cameraman) was doing. So there's all these discrepancies in everyone's theories. 

It was interesting to see the scene when Aaron was video chatting with his girlfriend, and he talks about his dog Godzilla being the love of his life, which is juxtaposed in front of his three trophy lions. Did Aaron just say that out of the blue?

 

TA: Yeah, mostly yeah. He initiated most of the situations. To me, I wanted to show a little bit of his private, intimate life before we go to Africa. And it was important for me to make sure that he comes across as very human and normal and real. Whether you take the (video) conversation as being something demeaning for women or not that's your take. But you know going on a trip for a long time, he's speaking to his girlfriend and he's being loving in his own way. In terms of the setting, that's the guy's natural habitat. You've seen it here (points to his bicep where Aaron has a lion tattoo) and if you watch those few scenes it's just lions all around. It's almost to the point of being a character.

 

And now you have on this lion hoodie. 

 

TA: Yes, I am a lion. I came prepared. 

 

I actually didn't find his comment demeaning to women because I have married female friends who they tell me that their dogs come before their husbands, so it's just some dog-owner or pet-owner thing. 

 

TA: I love your approach. I think that I believe Aaron, that he loves animals. In my life it's a twisted way too. I don't want to kill anything for any reason. I don't want to be a hypocrite, if you attack me with a knife right now I'm gonna defend myself. 

 

And you're army trained so I better watch out.

 

(Gabrielle Almagor, JVA prison warden Thomas Gerdes and Tomer Almagor before their second screening of "King of Beasts" at the Oldenburg JVA prison. Photo courtesy of Renate Schulze.)