## What the Production Looked Like, Day to Day
The accounts of the Roar production that have reached the public record tend to emphasize the injuries and the extraordinary circumstances — the flood, the gangrene, the animal attacks — and this emphasis is understandable, because those are the most dramatic elements of a production that was, by any measure, extraordinary. But the production also had ordinary days, days when the cameras were running and the animals were where they were supposed to be and the scene being filmed was the scene that had been planned. The completed film demonstrates this: there are sequences in Roar that are exactly what the filmmakers intended, sequences in which the lions are magnificent and the humans are genuinely in proximity to them and the effect is unlike anything in conventional Hollywood filmmaking.
The actors in the film — the family members, the additional cast — developed relationships with specific animals over the years of production. Noel Marshall’s son John, who eventually received fifty-six sutures from a lion attack to his head, had also been present through years of day-to-day interaction with the animals that didn’t result in injury. The relationship between a person and a specific large cat that has been part of their daily environment for years is a real relationship — not a domestic relationship, not the relationship between a person and a dog or a cat, but something genuine, with its own history and its own understanding.
The cinematographer Jan de Bont, whose work on the production preceded his directing career, has described the experience of filming with the animals as genuinely extraordinary — a visual experience that could not be replicated by any studio technique he knew. The film’s imagery, in the sequences that work, supports this account: the shots of large cats in full movement, the extraordinary physical presence of lions in the frame with human performers, the specific texture of what it looks like when an animal who is not performing, who is simply being itself, occupies the same space as a camera and the people operating it.