Cocaine Bear, hitting theaters Feb. 24 from Universal, doesn’t mark Hollywood’s first fascination with bears, although it might be the only project about the animal’s rampage after ingesting a massive amount of the titular drug.
Taking a more naturalistic approach was 1988’s The Bear, which told the story of an adult bear befriending an orphaned cub as they flee human hunters. Director Jean-Jacques Annaud, who won the foreign-language Oscar for 1976’s Black and White in Color, adapted James Oliver Curwood’s 1916 novel The Grizzly King for the film. Annaud considered 50 bears as the adult grizzly, eventually casting a 1,500-pound Kodiak named Bart the Bear, later seen in White Fang (1991), Legends of the Fall (1994) and The Edge (1997). Cinematographer Philippe Rousselot recalls the challenges of using real animals — the two bears could rarely be filmed together.
“The big one would have killed the small one,” he tells THR. “Bart was wonderfully well trained,...
Taking a more naturalistic approach was 1988’s The Bear, which told the story of an adult bear befriending an orphaned cub as they flee human hunters. Director Jean-Jacques Annaud, who won the foreign-language Oscar for 1976’s Black and White in Color, adapted James Oliver Curwood’s 1916 novel The Grizzly King for the film. Annaud considered 50 bears as the adult grizzly, eventually casting a 1,500-pound Kodiak named Bart the Bear, later seen in White Fang (1991), Legends of the Fall (1994) and The Edge (1997). Cinematographer Philippe Rousselot recalls the challenges of using real animals — the two bears could rarely be filmed together.
“The big one would have killed the small one,” he tells THR. “Bart was wonderfully well trained,...
- 2/24/2023
- by Ryan Gajewski
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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