After 11 years, 132 big cats, more than 70 injuries and a devastating flood, Roar became known as the most dangerous movie ever made.
Most movie injuries happen after somebody yells “Action.” On Roar, “Action” was closer to a dinner bell. The adventure film put real-life couple Tippi Hedren and director Noel Marshall—along with Hedren’s daughter, Melanie Griffith, and two of Marshall’s sons—inside a house overrun by lions, tigers, leopards and jaguars, many of them untrained. At least 70 people were reportedly injured, which explains why Roar is still billed as the most dangerous movie ever made. Nobody died, although the finished movie sometimes looks less like proof of careful planning than evidence from a very unusual crime scene.
A Movie Idea Best Left in the Safari Jeep
The trouble began with an irresistible image. While Hedren was working in Africa, she and Marshall visited a preserve in Mozambique and encountered an abandoned house occupied by a pride of lions. They imagined a conservation-minded film about a scientist living peacefully among big cats. It sounded noble, cinematic and spectacularly ill-advised.
Back in California, the couple began raising lion cubs at their Sherman Oaks home so the animals would grow comfortable around the family. When the collection became too large for the neighborhood—a sentence that should have ended the project—they moved it to a compound in Soledad Canyon. By the start of principal photography, the animal cast included 132 big cats and a bull elephant. Hedren, Marshall and their children would play versions of themselves. Method acting had officially wandered into wildlife management.
Cut, Print, Call an Ambulance
These were not trained movie animals waiting patiently for marks and cues. The crew often arranged scenes around whatever the cats felt like doing, which meant the screenplay had roughly the same authority as a restaurant napkin in a hurricane. When the human characters look terrified, there is a good chance nobody is acting.
Griffith was clawed in the face and required reconstructive surgery. Hedren suffered a fractured leg after an elephant threw her and later battled gangrene. Marshall was bitten repeatedly, developed blood poisoning and kept directing. Cinematographer Jan de Bont, who would eventually direct Speed and Twister, had his scalp torn open by a lion and needed 220 stitches. He returned to work because apparently surviving the lion was not enough proof that the day should be over.
The widely reported injury count exceeds 70; John Marshall has placed the total at 72. Crew turnover became so routine that lasting a month reportedly counted as seniority.
Six Months Became 11 Years
What was supposed to be a shoot of less than a year expanded into five years of filming and 11 years of total production. The budget climbed to about $17 million. Hedren and Marshall sold homes, land and personal possessions to keep feeding both the movie and its enormous cast. Every delay created another expense; every expense made quitting harder.
Then a flash flood tore through the property, destroying sets, equipment and film stock while collapsing animal enclosures. Several lions escaped, and three were killed by law enforcement, including Robbie, one of the film’s principal cats. Rebuilding took months. Wildfires followed, because subtlety had long since left the production.
The Anti-Masterpiece That Could Never Happen Again
Released internationally in 1981, Roar plays like three incompatible movies trapped in the same enclosure: a wildlife sermon, a family comedy and a survival horror film whose performers were not told they were in one. Its bouncy score insists that the chaos is adorable. The blood, panic and splintering furniture strongly disagree.
The film never became the financial rescue its creators needed, and Hedren and Marshall divorced soon afterward. The ordeal did, however, lead to the Roar Foundation and Shambala Preserve. Hedren later became an outspoken opponent of keeping big cats as pets.
Roar’s strangest legacy is the argument it never meant to make. It set out to show that predators could become part of the family and accidentally produced a 98-minute case against the idea. Nobody was killed, which remains its only unqualified miracle. The movie survived; common sense barely made the credits.