[I don’t post much about
movies—mostly because I don’t really know much about them as an art form—but since
performing in film is somewhat analogous to performing on stage, the anecdotes
sometimes cross paths. Amanda Hess’s New York Times article about performing animals in film is one of those because . . .
well, animals sometimes also appear in plays, too. (See my report on Will Eno’s The Open House, posted on Rick On Theater on 16 March 2014. More recently, I reported on Jez Butterworth’s
The Ferryman, 16 November 2018, which
featured a live rabbit and a live goose on stage.)
[I’ve posted one other article
on performing animals: “Stage Rat & Doll Baby,” 15 January 2017, includes “White
Rodent Finds Fame on the Great White Way”
by Corey Kilgannon of the New York Times. “Cats Who Take Direction” was
originally published in the “Arts” section of the New York Times on 3 January 2019.]
Animals are turning in more naturalistic performances
in films like ‘Can You Ever Forgive Me?,’ making Toto look like a hack.
The movie had a dead
cat problem.
As the director
Marielle Heller prepared to shoot “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” a biopic about
the literary forger Lee Israel, she knew that she would need a highly realistic
prop to pull off the pivotal scene where Israel finds her beloved pet cat,
Jersey, dead. Heller wanted a dead cat with heft. She wanted an inanimate
object that her star, Melissa McCarthy, could act against. “I was really
intense about it,” Heller said over the phone recently. “We discussed strategy
a number of times.”
So important was the
dead cat that Heller sought to secure it even before casting the film’s real
live Jersey. She’d just find a feline that looked like her wonderful prop. How
much difference could the real one make, anyway? On her first film, “The Diary
of a Teenage Girl,” she had saved money by tossing her own cat, Willie, in
front of the camera. So when the movie’s animal trainer promised to bring in
what she called her highest-performing cat, Heller wasn’t sure what that could
mean. That it wasn’t going to pee everywhere?
The cat’s name was
Towne. He was a lanky black and white guy with green eyes and a petal pink
nose, and to everyone’s surprise, he was amazing. Yes, he followed directions —
hitting his marks with the help of a trainer equipped with a clicker and a
laser pointer — but he also seemed to do something more. “Towne had a very
expressive face,” Heller said.
There is a moment in
the film where he gazes toward McCarthy “sort of sympathetically, and also
judgmentally, and you feel all of that,” she added. Heller ended up
commissioning a prop modeled after Towne that cost thousands of dollars — the
most expensive one for the production.
Towne’s efforts did
not go unnoticed. “This cat is out-acting me,” McCarthy thought as they worked.
“The Marlon Brando of cats,” Deadline raved upon the film’s release. Declared
Jezebel: “This Cat Deserves an Oscar!”
Towne’s turn in “Can
You Ever Forgive Me?” is emblematic of a new class of animal performances, ones
that are recognized as much for what the animal does not do as for what it
does. These animals are not filmed talking like humans or fetching things. They
don’t shake hands or roll over. Instead they are captured somewhat
naturalistically. Towne spends much of “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” gazing
languidly from the couch. At the emotional core of “Roma” sits a family dog,
its incessant barking, and its accumulating waste; Borras is a professional dog
behaving as if woefully untrained. And in “Widows,” a fluffy white terrier
named Olivia pants calmly, the image of unsuspecting innocence, as violent
criminals creep around her. Olivia is “paving new ground for the canine acting
community,” Alyssa Bereznak wrote at The Ringer, and she has ambled into her
own grass roots Oscar campaign.
By these modern
standards, Toto is an amateur. Mister Ed? A hack. A year of buzzy pet
performances raises the question: Are animals getting better at acting?
Before we get to
that, some sad news: After a decade-long career, Towne himself died last year.
In a phone interview, his trainers described him as a really nice cat who
loved people. He is survived by his look-alike brother, with whom he often
acted.
Towne was
never really acting, at least, not in the human sense. If
animals have any “motivation” for their performances, it lies largely in
delicious treats. Towne loved jars of baby food, while Olivia dined on hot
dogs on the “Widows” set. Our sense of a “good” animal actor is a combination
of its behavioral training and our own emotional projection.
But are they getting better?
They are, kind of.
Animals were among the first silent film stars, and they’ve
been hailed as natural performers ever since. “A certain critical tradition has
taken animals as the standard by which to judge all acting, animal or human,”
said James Leo Cahill, a professor of cinema studies at the University of
Toronto. The appeal lies in their “lack of self-consciousness before the
camera.”
But while animals have often been coded as naturals, they
have not always been filmed that way. It was once common to use physical
restraints, shock collars and trip wires to produce unnatural animal behaviors
on film. Consider the “Dogville” comic shorts that played before features in
the 1930s, in which dogs appeared to play instruments, walk on two legs, and
kiss each other, effects that could be achieved by attaching piano wire to the
dogs’ limbs and manipulating their bodies like puppets.
Those practices drew protests from animal rights groups, and
by the 1940s, animal welfare regulations had arrived in Hollywood. “One of the
biggest shifts in how animals are filmed” arose from “cultural re-evaluations
of what constitutes cruelty toward animals,” said Courtney E. White, an
instructor at Columbia College Hollywood who studies the intersection of cinema
and animal welfare. As Jonathan Burt noted in his 2002 book “Animals in Film,”
the focus of filmmaking flipped from serving what the director wanted to what
the animal needed.
The shift helped fuel a swiftly professionalizing animal
training industry. A highly skilled and thoroughly prepared animal became much
more important to a production’s success. Burt writes that while it was once
typical for trainers to show up on set cold, they now received exacting
instructions in advance. At the same time, training methods were growing more
sophisticated: applying B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning theories allowed
trainers to reward more precise behaviors in animals and delay their
gratification, too — helping animals to “act” in a scene without always looking
to a trainer for instructions or treats.
As the treatment of animals changed, so did viewer
expectations. Film became a powerful tool for animal rights activists, a trend
that’s culminated in PETA’s sophisticated viral video operation. Modern
audiences are now hypersensitive to images of animal harm. Just a whiff of
force can make them uneasy, even when the animal on set is perfectly safe. Part
of what was so unusual about Olivia in “Widows” was her apparent Zen calm even
while in the clutches of a villain.
These changing norms can appear almost like a stylistic
shift. Cahill calls the effect “not unlike pre- and post-Method acting, which
dramatically changed the criteria upon which naturalistic acting was both
approached and judged.” Today’s animals are, paradoxically, both better trained
and styled as more “natural” than their predecessors.
It’s probably not a coincidence that “natural” animal actors
are earning rapturous praise just as we enter a new era of unreal images,
thanks to the rise of C.G.I. Olivia’s trainer, Greg Tresan of Animal Casting
Atlanta, said that his animals are now routinely submitted for full body scans
before filming. Disney’s forthcoming “live-action” adaptation of “The Lion
King” will star a savanna of computer-generated animals. A performer like Towne
— who, Heller assured me, was unassisted by C.G.I. — is now an outlier.
C.G.I. can achieve feats that real animals cannot, but like
the piano wires before it, it can also disturb in its unreality. “A lot of film
theory would argue that no matter how good the fake animal gets, it won’t
produce the same emotional resonance in viewers as a real animal,” White said.
Perhaps Hollywood’s wave of elaborate fake creatures has inspired a bit of a
backlash, too, and a renewed desire for animal images that feel studiously
real.
After all, on YouTube, hyper-realistic animal performances abound,
filmed by amateurs who have all the time in the world to capture interesting
behaviors from their pets. We’ve never been more aware of what cats and dogs
look like in the natural wilds of our living rooms. The social internet is
fueled by such images. Hollywood is panting to catch up.
[Some years ago, one of my
cousins gave me a book as a gift: Broadway Tails by Bill Berloni and Jim Hanrahan (Lyons Press, 2008). The subtitle of the book is Heartfelt
Stories of Rescued Dogs Who Became Showbiz Superstars, all about dogs who’ve appeared on New York’s
stages. (Berloni is the trainer of the dog
that was part of the cast of The Open House. He’s one of New York’s major stage animal
trainers and has a 2011 Tony Award for Excellence in the Theatre.
[Amanda Hess is a
critic-at-large. She writes about internet culture for the “Arts” section of
the New York Times and contributes regularly to the New York Times Magazine. She has written for such publications as Slate, ESPN the Magazine, Elle, and Pacific Standard.]
