Animal Magic

by Carolyn Press-McKenzie

  I received an odd reaction when we first walked into the makeshift office in Methven, where we were based for the shoot. Beethoven and I had been travelling all night in my 4x4 beast with home-built trailer in tow. We were tired but enthusiastic, and very keen to get the keys to our room. As I sat down at a desk to await further instruction I could hear the production team talking about me—right in front of me as though I wasn’t there. As I puzzled at the bizarre conversation unfolding I was suddenly spoken to:

  ‘Yes, you’re just the right size, you’ll be perfect.’

  I looked blank.

  ‘We need a body double for Melanie Lynskey, the lead actress, and you are just the right size!’

  They were on a tight budget and as I was only doing the animal work they thought they’d found the ideal solution. ‘But we won’t pay you any extra, is that clear?’

  It was very clear. I wasn’t being asked, I was being told.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, half-bemused and half-disbelieving. What did I know about acting?

  I then found out that I was to share a unit with Helen the production accountant, an absolutely lovely lady whom I knew at once I’d get on famously with. But as I opened the door to our home for the next six weeks there was an immediate and serious problem. There Helen sat reading a book with Freya, a very sweet little fox terrier, perched on her knee. I am probably the least demanding person in the universe, I really don’t ask for much, but I had to explain to the admin team that I couldn’t be near other dogs because Beethoven had a very real ability to kill them. I really thought I was heard. No, I was told, there was no alternative accommodation available for either me or Helen; we’d just have to learn to manage. So for the next six weeks Beethoven spent his time working, sitting or lounging in the beast or asleep in bed with me . . . and the system worked. Phew.

  When you work with animals all day you sometimes forget to think about people and their needs. When I was introduced to the three actors who were playing the skinheads I instantly warmed to them. They were clearly animal lovers, but Charlie Bleakey, the youngest, seemed subdued in Beethoven’s presence. With a little prodding I was told that he actually had a very real fear of dogs. Because he and Beethoven were to work together closely it was decided that I needed to spend as much time as I could with the skinhead brothers to dilute Charlie’s fears.

  What no one warned me about was a thing called method acting. It’s when the actor absolutely immerses him- or herself in the character for the duration of the project. There is no off-switch, they are their character 24 /7. And that’s just the way Oliver Driver, who played Speed, the leader of the skinheads, liked to tune his art. This is great for him and the movie, but as we were spending time together and my mission was to acclimatise Beethoven to the ins and outs of being a skinhead dog, I found my new normal was clutching on to Beet in the tray of the skinheads’ ute, being violently hurled around corners with blaring music and a flood of ‘Oi’s’ being shouted from the cab. On one hand, it wasn’t exactly easing Beet into the role slowly and carefully, desensitising him to stimuli, on the other we were more than prepared for the high-speed car chases by the time the director called action. Though I must say my thoughts still go out to the gentle community of Methven who also had to endure the method acting on their quiet suburban streets.

  Who knew that my role as body double would work so well in my favour? I didn’t have an animal-handling assistant so Beethoven’s care and safety was all on me. Back home, while filming the TV series or a commercial, I could always call upon my mum to join me on set to help with the A to Bs. This is when you release an animal at mark A with the camera rolling, and the animal then has to land at mark B. As Beethoven was to be involved in high-speed chases, I was worried about who was going to give him treats and reassurance at mark B, which was more than 500 metres up the road. Well, as luck would have it, the lead actress did not have a driver licence so I was thrust into wardrobe and make-up and as action was called, it was me driving the car that the skinheads were chasing with such venom. As we hit the end mark and screeched to a halt, there was Beety excitedly smiling at me Staffy-style when I got out of the car and approached him. Yay for low-budget movies; they are just my thing.

  Beethoven was loving all the action and adventure and, actually, so was I. His acting was great . . . maybe there was a little too much smiling in between the growling and barking, and he had a little habit of wrapping his lips around his teeth so it could be argued that his snarling wasn’t as full-bodied as I would have liked, but that was being fussy. Beety rode that ute tray like a professional yachtsman as it keeled around corners, his eyeline was good and he was very nice to any fellow actors/ victims that the skinheads picked up along the way and threw in the ute tray with him.

  I had had my hair dyed and cut to look like Alice, Melanie Lynskey’s character, and when Melanie sprained her ankle in real life I was required to be her legs. That meant I was filmed setting a car on fire and pushing the car and a dead body over a cliff. My best work, though, was running in the dark through cattle yards full of stock while been chased by an American cowboy . . . who was also a snake . . . while he was shooting at me/Alice with a pistol.

  And then there was the scene where I had to plunge my legs into the foot well of the car, which happened to be full of eels representing snakes. Maybe that doesn’t sound so hard, but I was the animal department and so I first had to catch the 60-plus eels, keep them hydrated and safe, execute the scene with movie-star precision and finesse, and then return all 60 eels to the exact position of the river I took them from.

  So you’re probably wondering how you go about finding 60-plus eels. I had started phoning eel farmers well before leaving Wellington. It took a bit of doing, but I managed to find one up for the challenge, whose nets were about a three-hour drive south of Methven. And that’s where the home-made horse float came into it. I had travelled all the way down from Wellington carrying old carpet for the sole purpose of transporting the eels. I had exactly two days to drive south for the eels and be back on set in time to film, then drive the eels home again. All up, that was twelve hours’ worth of driving alone.

  As I pulled up to the spot on the river I had been directed to, a man in waders approached me. He was laughing to himself.

  ‘Do you think you can do it?’ he asked.

  I wasn’t really sure what he meant. Did I think I could handle the eels, did I think I could keep them safe and alive, did I think I could stick to the timeline? There were lots of questions and the only answer I could give was yes to all the above. I was not in the business of killing innocent eels and I could not be late to set with them either.

  He pointed at four large nets bobbing in the debris about 2 metres from the edge of the icy cold river. Oh my, there were so many and they were so big. Thankfully the eels remained in the nets as we laid them across the wet carpet in the back of the horse float.

  It’s a strange feeling ferrying 60-plus eels behind you; it almost sends shivers up your spine. As I arrived in Methven, it wasn’t long before I had to jump into costume, load the eels into the foot well of the car and do several takes of me seated with snake-like eels slithering around my boots. I was then asked to pull my knees up toward my chin, as though in fright, for several takes. Then I put the eels back in the nets and tethered them to a stake in a private stream, which I had prearranged. They were safe overnight and Beethoven and I were up early in the morning to deliver them back to their home as per my promise to the Department of Conservation (DOC) to return them to the specific area they came from. The thinking behind that is to not mess with the eel’s gene pool or introduce any new disease. I’m not sure if the eel farmer wanted them to stay in their nets so he could cull them for eating, but I had paid for them fair and square and so I released them with the hope that maybe next time they’d be wiser and steer clear of the net.

  Before long the movie wrapped and I was back at my day job on the TV series. I returned Beethoven to his very prou
d mum and handed over a scrapbook of the work he had accomplished: photos of him acting, photos of him hanging out with Kiwi movie stars and photos of us travelling and our road trip together. I was always so impressed by Beethoven’s mum. She was from a different world to me, but the one thing we had in common was a love and an utmost respect for animals and, in particular, the love we shared for one driven bundle of muscle called Beethoven.

  Several years later, long after Beethoven would have passed, I sat in disbelief as I watched a news report about a woman who had been murdered by an enraged family member . . . it was Beethoven’s mum. I had a little cry and thought that at least they would be together, away from all that’s hard in life.

  CHAPTER 6

  A tired dog is a good dog

  Oh God, I was seriously in a pickle.

  Cloudy the poodle was due on set in a few hours and she had gone AWOL. She had totally disappeared.

  As Cloudy grew into adolescence she had become quite the character. She was just so darn smart. Cloudy actually belonged to the TV show but was able to live with me full-time while I was her trainer; essentially she was the star and I was the hired help. She had a great life on my 5-acre block but the problem was (as with most adolescent dogs) that you really couldn’t take your eyes off her for a moment or she would be staring down the barrel of mischief. We had had a few days off between shoots and on that day in particular the callsheet had us scheduled back on set at 1 p.m. I was distracted with office work, and the boredom was starting to get to Cloudy.

  My philosophy is ‘a tired dog is a good dog’ and it’s one that I usually so passionately live by. If dogs are kept busy and enriched and they’re either mentally and or physically exhausted during the day, then they are not as likely to look for something else, or even something naughty, to do. They are also less likely to develop bad habits such as barking, digging, fence guarding or escaping. To be honest, if a dog is playing up, think about the day you have provided them with and often you’ve only got yourself to blame.

  Cloudy had struck up a firm friendship with Nugget, a slightly older wirehaired pointer I had rescued from a shelter to rehab and rehome. Together, the two of them were double trouble. On her own Cloudy would have got into mischief in full view of me as she liked to stick close and engage in constant conversation. But with Nugget on the scene Cloudy didn’t need my reassurance and she had someone else to rely on to take the lead.

  That meant that I was now looking at the open gate of the purpose-built deer-fenced dog park that I had left them to play in while I had my morning shower.

  Cloudy had opened the latch, which ironically was probably something I had taught her to think through during a TV scene. My block of land had ramshackle farm fencing and beyond it was an abundance of super-fun sandhills. So I jumped in the 4x4 beast and raced the 600 metres or so to the beach. I drove up and down madly calling. If I didn’t have her safe and on set for her afternoon scene, I could kiss my job goodbye.

  I paced and pondered. I had no doubt she’d be chasing a rabbit somewhere in those dunes, but they stretched for kilometres and unless I could pinpoint her location I had no way of breaking her attention and calling her back.

  In between calling out ‘Cloudy’ and ‘Nugget’, I dashed onto the bus and rang the studio.

  ‘Hi, it’s Carolyn here, are we on time today? . . . We are? Okay, well is Cloudy absolutely necessary in that scene? . . . She is, okay. Cheers, thanks.’

  As soon as I put down the receiver the phone started to ring. It was the producer. She could sniff out trouble on the horizon from miles away. I didn’t even have a chance to explain. She said that she was expecting Cloudy on set in a few hours—‘no excuses’—and hung up.

  I paced up and down and called into the dunes some more. If only she’d look up from what she was doing and listen; she had amazing recall.

  I just needed to be in earshot . . .

  Desperate times called for desperate measures.

  I picked up the phone again.

  ‘Hello, is that Kapiti Helicopters? I wonder if I could hire you this morning for a quick job. I’ve lost two dogs on the sand dunes . . .’

  The copter man was so understanding and said he’d call back in half an hour—if the dogs had not returned he would deploy his helicopter . . . and for a very affordable price.

  Thirty minutes passed, with no sign of Cloudy or Nugget. I was standing in the galley of the bus with Felix pecking at the toggles on my jumper, totally oblivious to the drama. I felt panicked. Although it wasn’t a life-and-death situation, I really prided myself on being reliable. I took my job seriously and I had made a promise to myself very early on that letting down a producer or a director wasn’t an option.

  I picked up the ringing phone.

  ‘Yes, they are still gone,’ I said. ‘And allowing travel time to get to the studio, that gives us just one hour to find them.’

  I was hanging up the phone when I saw some dune grass rustling in the distance. I ran off the bus so fast I scattered Felix, who gathered himself and flew down to my shoulder. There they were, the terrible twosome, leaping across the dunes towards me, bursting with excitement and as though they couldn’t wait to tell me all about their adventures. I threw my arms around the dogs, gave them a drink, cancelled the helicopter, and loaded them and Murphy into the beast. Murphy drove wingman with me into Wellington, while Nugget and Cloudy lay unconscious in the back. There was just enough time for a quick spit and rub with a hanky, like my mum used to do to when we kids were heading off to school. Sand was sprinkling out of Cloudy’s dense curly coat as it began to dry, and from close up she looked like a canine pepper shaker.

  On set Cloudy settled among the child actors for a long scene . . . thank goodness it wasn’t a high action day as she truly was exhausted. Her mood was perfect and as the director thanked us both for some great work, I thought to myself as I smiled, A tired dog is a good dog.

  CHAPTER 7

  The lost monkey

  My next big project was a BBC production, a full-length film adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World.

  Once again, the timing luckily coincided with a hiatus from the TV show. It would mean six weeks away from my bus and my furry family, and a friend who in the past had enjoyed looking after my life while I was away was not available this time. So I decided to hire a bus sitter. She was perfect, old enough to be responsible, but young enough to have no prior engagements. I showed the sitter how to pump water from the bore and light the Califont for the gas-heated water. She met the motley crew and was introduced to my collection of rescued rats that lived in a two-storey manor under the awning of the bus. Felix seemed at home with her, as did my pet cats, and I had farmed Murphy and Cloudy out to very good friends.

  This was a big-budget movie, with the big-budget actors Bob Hoskins, James Fox and Peter Falk—exciting and serious stuff. I read through the script which was about an explorer setting off on an Amazon adventure in search of a lost world of dinosaurs and other extinct creatures. I made a list of the animals that I would need to provide: cart horses, marauding camp dogs and chickens, pigs, a parrot, exotic insects and moths, some eels, a tuatara, a monkey and a tarantula spider.

  Straight away I could see that this project was going to be a different kind of challenge. My rescue and rehomed animals were not going to fit the bill so I was going to have to rely on other people. I got to work in the six weeks of preproduction time I had been given. Before the cameras were set to roll, every last detail had to be locked down with precision, with absolutely no room for error.

  After a recce of the South Island locations I organised some old-fashioned drays to be transported to a family on the West Coast who had a horse training business and they busily set about teaching some of their horses to pull the carts. I spent a few days in Nelson with a breeder working with her Basenji dogs so they wouldn’t react to chickens. Basenjis are hunting dogs, and also one of the most ancient breeds, so while they were th
e most ideal casting choice with a strong prey drive and an aloof nature, they were a challenge to train. I borrowed some eeling nets and found the best spot for an easy stress-free-as-possible catch and release at a river nearest to the location where the eels would be needed.

  I arranged the two-day hire of a monkey and the one-day hire of a tuatara. The tuatara came from Orana Park, the local wildlife park. They knew the movie was coming to town and were really relaxed about hiring out their tuatara as long as it was accompanied by a staff worker. One tuatara in particular had been on educational visits before so he was chosen as the star.

  I visited the basement of a university research department where I was shown shelves of click-clack containers each housing a tarantula. I chose the Peruvian pinktoe over the Chilean rose as I thought its soft pink toes would contrast nicely with the actor’s jacket it was to be placed on. I ordered a giant Atlas moth (the world’s largest) to be imported in larvae form from Malaysia to a certified butterfly garden for incubation and I hired a capuchin monkey called Tuku Morgan’s Underpants, plus his trainer. Last on my list was a parrot that I first met as an egg and then purchased from the parrot ranch just a month later while she was still a fledgling, so I could hand-raise and train her myself.

  It was all about timing. It wasn’t the finding and coordinating of the animals that was so exhausting, it was more the momentous piles of paperwork and endless ticking off of checklists that came with so many unusual animals and being so reliant on other people. The tuatara needed DOC permits to travel from its home and had to be insured for a million dollars. I had to imagine every worst-case scenario and then show them how I’d manage the risks. The Atlas moth needed consent from both DOC and the Environmental Risk Management Authority and for the monkey I needed to jump through hoops with the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (MAF) to ensure there would be no glitches with either people’s safety or the monkey’s containment. To give you an idea of the detail, DOC requested that I even pick up the horse poo, so any seeds they might have been eating in their feed wouldn’t start growing in the wrong places.