It wasn’t easy to find a leading actor for White God, admits director Kornél Mundruczó. The new movie’s central character, Hagen, has to make the emotional journey from gentle and lovable to violent and aggressive. “He had to be a bit like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. You had to be really comfortable with him when he was happy so that then you feel sorry for him when he goes wild. And I had to build the rest of the team under him, so he was crucial. The search took two months.”
All part of the casting process, perhaps – except that Hagen happens to be a dog. Not only that, he’s one of about 250 of them Mundruczó had to cast, and coax into giving an effective ensemble performance. White God is the story of Hagen and his teenage owner, who are forcibly separated with harrowing consequences. Cast out on the streets, Hagen is reconditioned as a fighting dog before being rounded up with other “inferior” mongrel strays. In the movie’s most memorable scenes, this canine underclass rises up and rampages through the streets of Budapest en masse – a sight that’s both exhilarating and unsettling, like an apocalyptic Pedigree Chum ad.
The canine rampage was all for real. “That was the main concept,” says Mundruczó. “No CGI and no pure-breed dogs. When I started to talk to trainers and financiers, everybody told me it was impossible to do this without CGI, but I didn’t want to because that would be against the meaning of the movie.” White God is a bit of a mongrel itself: less a straight-up creature horror than a poignant realist drama with allegorical bite.
Keeping it real was a challenge, Mundruczó acknowledges. One short scene where Hagen tries to cross a busy highway took two days to shoot, entailing closed-off streets and 30 stunt drivers. Hagen is played by two dogs: twin brothers. Beneath them was a team of 50 dogs, obtained from local pounds and individually trained, who then led the rest of the pack of 200 “extras”. It took six months to train them. It sounds like a recipe for utter chaos, or at least some decent material for You’ve Been Framed!, but actually, Mundruczó says, there was no trouble at all. He credits his two “geniuses”, Teresa Ann Miller, who cast and coached Hagen, and Árpád Halász, who trained the supporting players. “He has a very special method, to do with finding equality between humans and dogs. It’s amazing how he could socialise 250 dogs together without any domination fights, and to be happy to work together with humans.” In something of a happy epilogue, all the dogs were found owners after the shoot.
Along with the thrill of White God’s authentic dog scenes comes the realisation that seeing real creatures performing on screen like this is something of a novelty. Whenever we see exotic fauna or vast numbers of animals in a movie today, our first assumption is that it’s “all been done with computers” – and it usually has, for better or worse. The past few decades are strewn with CGI creatures that were state-of-the-art at the time but now look about as convincing as Sooty and Sweep. Possibly thanks to Steven Spielberg’s crap shark in Jaws, monster movies were an early favourite for bad animation. Movies such as Deep Blue Sea and Anaconda made a virtue of their expensive but laughably unconvincing new computer effects, unaware they were only paving the way for DVD disaster trash such as Mega Python vs Gatoroid and cult satires such as Sharknado.
Unconvincing creatures have scuppered many a higher-brow film, too (that fox in Wild looked pretty ropey to me), but CGI has also made possible animal stories that were previously considered unfilmable, such as Ang Lee’s Life of Pi. Nobody would have dreamed of putting a child actor in a boat with a live tiger, but the sophisticated CGI almost convinced us that was what we were seeing. So much so that the movie won the visual effects Oscar in 2013 (ironically just weeks after the effects house responsible, Rhythm & Hues, filed for bankruptcy). We can also thank advances in CGI for epics such as Noah – in which Russell Crowe marshalled hordes and herds of docile virtual creatures into his ark – and Exodus: Gods and Kings, in which Ridley Scott summoned CGI plagues of locusts, crocodiles and sharks. When Scott did use real creatures, he apparently regretted it. The camels kept “shitting in the [Red] Sea”, which deflated the Biblical vibe somewhat.
There are ethical as well as practical reasons for using virtual animals, too. Darren Aronofsky made the point with Noah that “it would be very questionable to start taking sentient creatures and stick them on a set where they don’t know what’s going on. Putting them into that risk is kind of against the themes of the film.”
In the early days of Hollywood, nobody much cared about that. It was no golden age for the animals, more of a massacre. Rather than carefully training animals to perform, it was far easier to trick them into it. Up until the 1940s, the easiest way to engineer the classic western shot of a horse falling over was a cruel procedure known as the “Running W”, whereby cables around the horse’s legs tripped it up unawares, often fatally injuring it. That’s nothing compared to the silent 1925 version of Ben-Hur, during which over 100 horses (and one stuntman) reportedly gave their lives to stage the chariot races. If a horse went lame, second unit director B Reeves Eason shot it rather than take it to a vet. In 1936, Errol Flynn came to blows with director Michael Curtiz (of Casablanca fame) about his mistreatment of animals while making The Charge of the Light Brigade. Curtiz used tripwires to fell more than 100 horses in the climactic battle scenes, and at least 25 of them died. Excesses such as these led to the formation of the American Humane Association in 1940, which now supervises animal handling on sets and issues the “no animals were harmed” seal of approval.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that the AHA’s participation was made mandatory, thanks to Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate. The ill-fated western reportedly killed and abused horses and staged actual cockfights. Refused access to the set, the AHA picketed the film outside theatres, and the uproar led to an agreement that no Hollywood movie would be filmed without AHA approval. Still, animals get hurt. During the production of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies, whistleblowers reported that 27 animals had died, including horses, sheep and goats. HBO’s horse-racing series Luck had to be cancelled after allegations that horses were drugged, abused and killed. Even with Life of Pi, the real-life tiger they used for some scenes nearly drowned.
It’s not just animals. Even after 20 years of development, audiences still bemoan the flimsiness of CGI and the superiority of old-school practical effects, as they’re known. As Star Wars effects maestro Dennis Muren put it recently, “special-effects aren’t special any more”. He wasn’t specifically talking about the last cycle of Star Wars movies, Episodes I to III, but everyone who visited those films’ wearying, weightless green-screen worlds knew exactly what he meant. Tellingly, JJ Abrams has pledged to return to practical effects wherever possible on his upcoming Star Wars instalments, acknowledging that the models and puppets Muren and his colleagues used in the 1970s still work better. He’s not alone. Most action auteurs use a mix of the two but prefer to do it old-school where possible, including Christopher Nolan, Jackson and Spielberg, who ushered in the CGI era with Jurassic Park, but can still get his hands dirty in the stables with the likes of War Horse.
Even CGI’s harshest critics would have to admit it has made progress, to the point where it’s often difficult to tell the difference. Is it? Kornél Mundruczó doesn’t agree. “I think everybody has a seventh sense,” he says. “When you watch my dogs, or you watch the tiger from Life of Pi, you know one is real and one is not. I think you feel it somehow.” He’s not against CGI per se, but it creates a distance, he says. “If you shoot a real animal, you get real emotion. CGI is closer to illustration: what humans think about animal emotion, which in my eyes is always false. We do not have the brains to imagine exactly what they feel.”
Perhaps it’s less a matter of being able to tell if it’s real than simply knowing it’s real, in the same way that we’ll happily enjoy a convincing horror movie but find the idea of a snuff movie or a terrorist beheading video repellent. Movies such as White God hark back to an age of intrepid movie-making where it was impossible to fake it in post-production. When we watch movies such as Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, we enjoy it all the more for knowing how absurdly intrepid the shoot was, and the lengths they had to go to corral several hundred monkeys (plus Klaus Kinski) on to a raft in the middle of the Amazon. Compare that to Shia LaBeouf swinging through the trees with CGI monkeys in the last Indiana Jones movie. You could say White God, Aguirre and their ilk are in the tradition of photography and documentary, whereas CGI effects are really in the tradition of animation. One is making a “truthful” story out of reality, the other is creating a fantastical illusion of reality. Now we’ve mixed them together and ended up with a mongrel. Let’s see how easy it is to tame.
• White God is released in the UK on 27 February
