The accounts of the Roar production’s injuries — the ones that have been widely cited and that this article has drawn on — come primarily from the production’s own promotional materials and from the retrospective accounts of the people involved, including the family members who were both the filmmakers and the injured parties. The figure of more than seventy injuries is not an independent medical tally; it is a figure derived from the production’s own descriptions of itself. The specific injury accounts — de Bont’s stitches, Griffith’s sutures, Marshall’s gangrene — come from interviews and from promotional contexts that are not the same as clinical records. They are plausible; they are consistent with what the production’s circumstances would predict; but they are not independently verified against hospital records or insurance claims.
Hedren’s retrospective account of the Hitchcock years is hers. It is consistent across decades of interviews, which is one kind of evidence of its authenticity. It is also an account given by a person with specific interests in the characterization of events, which is a feature of all first-person historical accounts. The absence of Hitchcock’s account is not equivalent to a confirmation of Hedren’s account; it simply means the dispute is unresolvable on the existing evidence.
What can be said with confidence is what the documentary record supports: the photographs were taken in 1971 and show a lion in a domestic setting with the family. The film was made over approximately five years of principal photography and was completed in 1981. Multiple people were injured during the production. Hedren built a sanctuary for the animals. She advocated for legislation restricting private big cat ownership. The legislation was eventually enacted.