The family exists across three generations, each generation an actress, each connected to the project and to the institution, each carrying forward a story that began with a game warden’s abandoned house in Africa in 1969 and that has not yet fully ended.
The photographs are still there. The lion’s name was Neil. The girl in the bed was fourteen years old. The year was 1971. And the woman who has spent the subsequent decades explaining why what the photographs show was not what it looked like is the same woman who was in those photographs, who arranged for them to be taken, who understood at the time that the arrangement they documented was part of something larger — and who arrived, eventually, at the clearest-eyed possible account of what that something larger actually was and what it cost.
## Jan de Bont and the Crew Who Stayed
Among the more striking biographical footnotes of the Roar production is the subsequent career of the man who lost a significant portion of his scalp to a lion’s jaws during filming. Jan de Bont, who received two hundred and twenty sutures after the attack by a lion named Cherries, did not leave the film industry after the experience. He returned to work on Roar, completed his role as the film’s director of photography, and then went on to become one of the most technically accomplished cinematographers working in Hollywood in the 1980s.
De Bont’s cinematography work in the decade after Roar included The Fourth Man (1983) for Paul Verhoeven, Flesh and Blood (1985) also for Verhoeven, and a succession of American studio productions that demonstrated a mastery of visual storytelling that the Roar experience — whatever its costs — had clearly not diminished. His work with director Richard Donner, Ridley Scott, and various other directors established him as a cinematographer of the first rank. His transition to directing in the mid-1990s — Speed (1994) with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, which became one of the defining action films of the decade, and Twister (1996) — represents a career trajectory that the Roar years, in retrospect, look like preparation for rather than interruption of.