Animal magnetism - Errol Morris' documentary animal stories - Interview

Interview, Nov, 1997

JH: I remember when you were editing The Thin Blue Line ten years ago, you told me that you were filming Dave Hoover, the last of the fighting lion tamers.

EM: You know who shot that footage? Barry Sonnenfeld [director, most recently, of Men in Black]. That footage is so old.

JH: Was he inside the cage?

EM: No. He told me that if I wanted him to go inside the cage, it was time to get a different cameraman.

JH: The lions seemed a little haggard.

EM: These were lions with problems - mange, gout, joint diseases, periodontal problems. Several looked like they were nearly blind.

JH: HOW had Dave changed when you began filming him again?

EM: He had aged and he was depressed - he had lost his circus animals. It's like the Yeats poem "The Circus Animals' Desertion." You know, "Now that my ladder's gone, I must lay down where all the ladders start, in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart."

JH: Dave seems very interested in theorizing about his technique.

EM: There's the touchy-feely school of lion training; the I'm-OK-you're-OK school, where you develop a rapport with the animal - shared values, mutual interests; and then of course there's the old-fashioned school, which is the whip, the chair, and the pistol.

JH: I always thought the chair was there to put some space between you and the lion - or, if need be, to have something to throw into his mouth. I was struck by Dave's explanation that the chair baffles the lion because it has four legs and the animal doesn't know where to focus.

EM: Whether that's some kind of projection and transference, or something that reflects what actually goes on in the mind of a big cat, who's to say? I don't know.

JH: All the guys you interview in the film seem to be projecting some unknowable essence onto their creatures.

EM: Ray Mendez, the mole rat guy, really considers his work a form of self-knowledge. Self-knowledge! Wait a second - shit-eating cold-blooded mammals who live in underground burrows? That's a way of uncovering ourselves?

JH: When he describes people's fascination with the mole rats, he suggests that they're looking for some point of contact.

EM: They're looking for something that has nothing whatsoever to do with anything. I like that idea. Rodney tells us that it took three or four billion years to produce animals that could chase each other around. How did they achieve that? All of what we take to be higher-level functioning, including intelligence, was produced in an instant. The hard part is not creating intelligence; the hard part is creating this connection with the world. I like to think of my movies as about that obsession with world-connectedness as well.

JH: Why did you include those excerpts from the 1930s serials starring the lion tamer Clyde Beatty?

EM: That was an attempt, given the limitations of budget, to evoke a mental landscape. I think we all live in strange landscapes that are littered with various kinds of bric-a-brac, pieces of magazine articles, movies - various conglomerations of nonsense picked up over time. And for Dave Hoover, it was this romantic fantasy. I think of Dave as being in a fantasy twice removed from reality. After all, he admires this legendary lion tamer of the '30s, who himself was a kind of throwback to some Victorian dream of the white explorer in darkest Africa.