Principal photography began in October 1976, at the ranch in Acton that the family had purchased for the production. The location had been developed to resemble an African preserve — the visual environment of the thing the filmmakers had seen in Mozambique or Zimbabwe, reconstructed in the Antelope Valley. The planned schedule was six months. The planned budget was approximately three million dollars.
What happened instead would consume eleven years and seventeen million dollars and leave virtually everyone involved, human and animal alike, with marks of various permanence.
## The Production of Roar
There are films about which the most interesting stories are the stories of how they were made. Roar (1981) is one of the most extreme examples of this category in the history of commercial filmmaking. The film itself — a conservation-themed adventure-comedy about a naturalist and his family navigating a property full of wild cats — is less remarkable than its own production, and its own production is remarkable to a degree that strains credibility even when it is documented in detail.
The fundamental problem was the one that should have been predictable from the beginning: the animals in the film were not domesticated. They were large wild cats who had become accustomed to human proximity through years of contact with the specific humans in their environment, but they had not lost the capabilities and the behavioral repertoire that make large cats dangerous to other living things. They were stronger than the humans around them. They moved faster than the humans around them. And they were capable, in specific circumstances and for reasons that the humans around them could not always predict, of doing significant damage to those humans.