The first payment came before principal photography began. If the film was going to feature lions as its primary performers, the filmmakers needed to understand lions — how they moved, how they behaved, what they required, what they would and would not tolerate. An animal trainer named Ron Oxley, who had worked with big cats professionally, gave them a piece of advice that they appear to have taken with complete literalness: to get to know anything about lions, he told them, you have to live with them.
The Hedren-Marshall household in Sherman Oaks, California, began acquiring large cats.
## Neil Comes Home
Neil was a full-grown male lion. He arrived at the Sherman Oaks home around 1971, and he arrived with the understanding — on the human side of the arrangement — that his presence was part of a systematic preparation for a film project that was then several years from production. He weighed approximately four hundred pounds. He was not a cub; he was an adult animal in full possession of the capabilities that adult male lions possess, which include the ability to kill large prey animals with efficiency.
The Sherman Oaks home was a residential property in a residential neighborhood in Los Angeles. It was not a ranch, not a compound, not a facility designed to house wild animals. It was a house with rooms, and Neil had the run of those rooms. He was in the kitchen. He was in the living room. He had access to the swimming pool. He slept in the bedrooms.