FILM: Thierry Le Portier is the world's foremost trainer of wild animals. Ruadhán Mac Cormaic visits him and his menagerie in France
When Thierry Le Portier had finished poring over the first draft of the script for the film Two Brothers, he put a call through to the director Jean-Jacques Annaud. "It's fabulous and completely undoable," he said, "so we're going to do it." That tentative draft sketched the shape of a fable set in the jungles of south-east Asia around the turn of the last century. The sideshow: a round tale of fraternal kinship, human barbarity and native Cambodians with BBC English. The main act: the majestic brothers Kumal and Sangha, two leads played by a pair of Bengal tigers. For Le Portier, specialist in wild animals and acclaimed trainer of big cats, the lure lay in the challenge.
"I told Jean-Jacques to describe whatever was in his imagination," he says. Many things look impossible on paper, but with time, multi-takes and good training, you can do almost anything."
For the roles of Sangha and Kumal, 30 tigers - a mix of Bengal, Sumatran and Siberian - were transported from Europe to Cambodia, where most of the shooting took place over 12 months. Apart from a small number of dangerous sequences, all scenes were "acted" by these tigers, who were allowed roam freely within large perimeter nets, working with Le Portier, while the crew filmed from within secure cages.
For security, scenes involving animals and people were shot in double pass - first the tigers, then the actors, in the same set. The shots were then composited during post-production.
Le Portier reclines under the Vendée sun, between projects, peppering his talk with nods to "my babies" on the other side of a flimsy net "more symbolic than safe".
Temis, his truculent 450lb seven-year-old, skulks within. Their take on "fetch" involves the pitching of a small stuffed tiger cub for Temis to retrieve.
She usually obliges, after first taking care to crush its lower back, tear some deep incisions in the neck and relieve it of its eyeballs. "She is good tiger, Temis."
"With the film," he says, "our biggest problem was to always have tiger cubs at the ready. We followed all the births, all over the world. Zoos were notified of our search and kept us up to date. We found most of our cubs in France, and a few more in Thailand."
Inverting the pattern of most animal films, Two Brothers' human characters act here as light appendages, deliberately cast with two-dimensional, caricature-like non-personalities, as counterpoints to the more substantive and compelling characters of the tigers.
Le Portier, whose film credits include Gladiator and The Bear, uses a combination of voice, sounds and hand signals to direct the tigers. His method, he says, relies on his ability to read the animals' mood and anticipate their moves.
"When you work with dangerous animals - cats, bears, elephants, whatever - your real security is your knowledge of what's going on in the mind of the animal. The only time fear comes into it is when something happens that you don't understand. But usually, I can tell by the way a cat walks, stands, hesitates or looks around her, what she's going to do next."
"One day I was with a guy who trains elephants, and he was bringing this new one into an enclosure. The elephant was a bad one - he had already killed one or two people - and just before we could secure the place, the elephant charged toward us. This big male was running straight at us from 20 or 30 metres. 'Freeze, don't move,' the guy says to me. And the elephant stopped two feet in front of us. The trainer knew he'd stop. If we had run, we'd be crushed. I am like that with my cats."
This almost divinatory sense of an animal's thinking has made Le Portier the world's foremost trainer of wild animals. He keeps 65 of them - lions, tigers, pumas, black panthers and leopards - at home, and works mainly for screen. The years forge bonds, he says.
"It's not like having a household pet. I work with these animals every day, and we depend on each other - me for my living and them for their life. Not only are we colleagues, we are friends. You cannot change their personalities, you can only add training. You create a language common to you and the animal."
"Accidents" (read, his own mauling) have been rare, says Le Portier. One lion, struggling to get his teeth into a role, settled for the trainer's leg instead. "These captive animals are in some ways more dangerous than wild ones, because they are around people every day and they are not frightened of them."
The film takes every opportunity to emphasise man's brutal disregard for these creatures. Before the credits roll, the audience is reminded that, whereas a century ago there were 100,000 tigers living in the wild, now (pending a Monaghan sub-species) only 5,000 remain.
But is the rightful place for these animals not in the wild?
"I don't think so. It is true that in India, in the 1950s, they could kill 2,000 tigers a year without the total diminishing too much. But there were only about 300 million Indians then. Now there are a billion. That means millions of acres transformed into villages and roads. Tigers have 10 per cent of the space they once had. The same is happening in Africa.
"If you want to make people aware of the plight of these animals, you cannot put them in front of a blackboard and explain to them that they must protect the tiger. Nobody will care. It's people in Western industrial countries that care about animals, and it's because they have seen them in zoos and in films like this. The Bear did more for the protection of bears than 20 years of talking on TV and radio. The reason it's so hard to get people interested in the whale is that you can't see the whale directly.
"And how do we know that tigers would be better off in the jungle? Without the ability to hunt, they'd be dead in a month. With the film, people are going to be talking about tigers. Show people directly, and they start to care." u
Two Brothers goes on release in cinemas on July 23rd