The image that presented itself was surreal in precisely the way that images of wild animals occupying human spaces are always surreal: the lions on the furniture, the lions in the doorways, the lions moving through rooms designed for a completely different kind of occupant. The house was a house; the lions were lions; the two facts together created a dissonance that was both alarming and, depending on your disposition, cinematic.
Hedren and Marshall had a specific disposition. Both were people who existed in a professional world in which images were the primary currency. A game warden’s abandoned house occupied by a pride of lions was not merely a remarkable sight; it was, for people with their professional habits of mind, an image that suggested a story, and a story suggested a film.
They returned to the United States with the image in mind. Marshall began working on a script. What emerged, over the following months, was a concept for a film that would use actual wild animals — not studio-trained animals with handlers just off camera, not process shots that allowed the actors to work at safe distances from the animals, but actual lions and tigers moving through actual scenes with actual actors, including the filmmaker himself and his family. The film’s working title was Lions, Lions & More Lions, and the ambition it expressed was unlike anything that had been attempted in mainstream commercial filmmaking.
The concept had a specific logic, though the logic required a number of significant assumptions about what wild animals could be made to do in front of cameras. The argument was that the presence of untrained lions in direct proximity to human performers would create a kind of authenticity that no amount of studio trickery could replicate — that the audience would feel the difference between a film in which people were genuinely surrounded by wild animals and a film in which the danger was manufactured. This argument was not wrong, exactly. The audience does feel the difference. The question is what you have to pay to produce the feeling.