Melanie Griffith was attacked by a lioness. The attack required approximately fifty sutures to her face, and there was a period during which it was feared she might lose the use of an eye. She did not; the wound healed without lasting disfigurement, though the attack is visible in the finished film.
John Marshall — Noel’s son — had his head trapped in the jaws of a male lion named Tongaru. He later described six men taking twenty-five minutes to get the lion off of him, and he received fifty-six sutures from the injuries. He subsequently left the production for a period.
Doron Kauper, the assistant director, was bitten by a lion named Togar in an attack that required four and a half hours of surgery.
These injuries occurred across multiple years of production and involved different animals and different circumstances. They are not a single event but a pattern that accumulated across the production’s extended timeline. The pattern reflects the fundamental reality that the production had made its central bet on: that people could work in direct physical contact with wild large cats over an extended period without those cats exercising the capabilities that made them dangerous. The bet was partially wrong from the beginning and became demonstrably and documented wrong over the production’s five years of filming.
The production also survived setbacks of a different kind. In February 1978, a dam failure flooded the set. The water caused more than three million dollars in damage. Fifteen lions and tigers escaped the property during the flood, requiring search and recovery efforts. Equipment was destroyed. The production was halted for approximately a year. When it resumed, it did so with a depleted crew — many of the original staff had left during the hiatus — and with a budget that had been significantly exceeded.