All eyes on the tigers

The tiger cub stops dead in his tracks, his whole body tensing with alertness. He’s heard an unfamiliar rustling in his jungle habitat, and we see his reaction tightly framed: his striking blue eyes convey surprise and curiosity but also fear. Swiftly he turns and scampers back to a safe haven, a place he knows his mother will be. It’s a dramatic, rich little scene -- and it has been caught in its entirety by film cameras.

This is no small feat, as French director Jean-Jacques Annaud can confirm. His new film, “Two Brothers,” stars a pair of tigers, Kumal and Sangha, in the main roles. He fondly calls them “my tiger actors,” and the phrase is literally true. “Two Brothers” is not remotely like a wildlife documentary; Kumal and Sangha were required, through body language and facial expressions, to carry the narrative and convey its emotions. Their names appear above the film’s title; they are its stars.

Annaud used some 30 Bengalese tigers in “Two Brothers.” Between them, they played half a dozen roles in the film, including the central roles of Kumal and Sangha as they grow from cubs into young adulthood. These animal actors were the responsibility of Thierry Le Portier, who has long experience in training animals for films: It was he who orchestrated that memorable sequence in “Gladiator” featuring a tiger in an arena.

Still, tigers are potential killers and hugely dangerous to be around. “You can train them,” Le Portier would constantly warn the “Two Brothers” crew, “but you can’t tame them.” Le Portier owns all but two of the 30 tigers himself; they feature in his animal show at Puy du Fou, a gigantic theme park in France. The other two belong to American trainer Randy Miller, who also coached his tigers on set.

“Two Brothers” is set in Cambodia in the 1920s, when it was a French colony. Kumal and Sangha are born in the jungle, raised as cubs by their parents in the ruins of an overgrown, forgotten temple. Aidan McRory (Guy Pearce), an Indiana Jones-style character who dabbles in big game hunting and looting sacred statues, stumbles on the tiger sanctuary; the cubs’ father attacks one of his hunting party, and McRory shoots him. A series of events separates the cubs until as adults they find themselves in a ring, facing off against each other.

Method acting

Over lunch at a hotel off the Champs-Elysees, Annaud recalled writing the first draft of “Two Brothers” in 1997, during a Christmas holiday with his family off the African coast. The story combines several themes dear to his heart: the natural world, game hunting, despoiling sacred sites. He has also traveled widely in France’s former colonies.

The 300-strong crew shot mostly in war-torn Cambodia. A specialist company had to be hired to remove thousands of land mines from the ground at the film’s locations, left long ago by the Khmer Rouge, the loyalist army and the Vietnamese, as well as unexploded bombs dropped by U.S. aircraft. With 100-degree temperatures and humidity near 100%, the crew sweated perpetually, which gave many of them skin problems. Dozens fell sick to typhoid fever, and blood tests confirmed as many more were likely to succumb; courses of antibiotics were needed.

Still, nothing compared with the problems of capturing tiger behavior on camera. Annaud said the secret was to treat each one as an individual, like human actors: “People think because they’re animals they have no personality. But animals aren’t objects without emotions or feelings. There’s an extraordinary difference between tigers. They’re all predators, of course. But some are shy, some are jealous, others are clever, ambitious or witty. You adjust to each one.”

The animals, then, were truly the stars. “The pressure wasn’t on us human actors,” said Pearce, speaking by phone. “We took a step back and left it to the tigers.” But because of the dogged patience needed to persuade them to “act,” the length of the shoot extended to 169 grueling days over an eight-month period. Each scene involving tigers required long preparation.

“We had to put up big nets and fences,” Annaud said. “The way we shot was to have the tigers free in a vast compound, covering many acres, and to have us, the crew, in cages. That was important. It gave the sensation of freedom and put the tigers in the right mood for the scene. Animals are like human actors. If they feel the situation is right, they’ll re-create naturally what the screenplay says. So the principle was to put the netting so far away that not only the camera wouldn’t see it but the tigers wouldn’t either.”

The cages, adjustable in size, with metal frames covered in wire that could be cut for the long lens of a camera to poke through, were assembled before each day’s shoot. Often, cameras stood outside the cages, with a crew inside operating them by remote control, panning, zooming and changing direction. This method yielded spectacular results; adult tigers walked across the line of cameras, their open jaws inches away from the lens.

All cast and crew had to be safely inside their bolted cages before any of the adult tigers could be released into the massive compound of the sets. Only head trainer Le Portier and his assistant were allowed outside.

Annaud, a tanned, fit-looking man of 60 with round glasses and a shock of white curly hair, related all this in perfect English. On the way to the restaurant, many Parisian passers-by had acknowledged him with a nod or smile; he is famous here. “Two Brothers” is a huge hit with French family audiences, and he is among the few French directors who make globally distributed English-language films. (“Two Brothers” was partly financed by Universal.) Annaud makes handsome, epic films with an international flavor: “Enemy at the Gates,” about the battle of Stalingrad, with Jude Law; “Seven Days in Tibet,” starring Brad Pitt as a German mountaineer who befriended the Dalai Lama (it led to Annaud being banned from entering China); the sexually explicit “The Lover,” which dealt with an affair between a French schoolgirl of 15 and a Chinese businessman in Vietnam.

Yet Annaud may be best known for another family film starring animals. His 1988 hit “The Bear” was about an orphaned bear cub who tags along with an adult grizzly; together they try to elude hunters trailing them.

“That was very different,” he recalled. “Bears are like pigs. They have tiny eyes and no expression. They’re short-sighted, so they don’t express anything with their eyes. But tigers have beautiful green or light blue eyes, on the front of their head, not on the side. And it’s not a slit, it’s a round eye. I wasn’t expecting the complexity in the tigers’ expressions.”

Still, capturing that complexity required careful planning. When Annaud needed a shot of one tiger looking intrigued, a pickup truck was parked in the distance, with a man inside banging with a hammer on a piece of metal. “It works once,” Annaud reflected. “If you don’t get it on the first take, the intrigue is gone.” He ordered a collection of hunting whistles that sound like bird calls: “I had a full range, at various pitches, and figured each one equaled one take for each tiger. After that, it wouldn’t work.”

How to coach a big cat

This need for spontaneity dictated his filming style. He used several cameras for each shot, because no one could predict which way a tiger would turn. He also made full use of high-definition digital cameras, which roll for 50 minutes without reloading: “With animals, you need to keep the cameras rolling for long periods to capture moments. The tigers usually did what I wanted between minute five and minute 25. If they hadn’t done it by minute 50, they’d be tired and bored and wouldn’t do it at all.”

Le Portier employed various tricks to influence the beasts’ behavior. If Annaud wanted a tiger to keep walking along a path, Le Portier would lay an attractive scent along it. If a tiger had to avoid a specific area, it would be sprayed with water: “Tigers don’t like the feeling of wet grass,” Annaud explained. If the filmmakers wanted a tiger to pause and look in one direction, Le Portier made a hole in the vegetation and displayed an unusual object in the distance. “You can place your cameras and be 90% certain he’ll look,” Annaud said. The tigers reacted in various ways to the acting challenge. One adult male would always walk on set and empty his bowels through sheer nerves -- but then did everything asked of him with apparent ease.

Annaud detected a personality in all the tigers, especially a large male who played the cubs’ father. The director nicknamed him Sean Connery and attributed complex attitudes to him: “He was a very good actor, but his style was: ‘Guys, I’ve done my scene well. So now I’m not going to do it again. You weren’t in focus? Too late, too bad! Be as professional as I am.’ ” In one scene, Pearce dandles a tiger cub on his knee and tries to wean him off his mother by inserting his finger into the cub’s mouth. Doing this, he looks remarkably calm. Pearce has grown up with pet cats, and felt at ease around tigers: “I was used to their energy, movement and sensibility. They felt familiar to me.” For this scene, Le Portier instructed him to keep his face out of range of the cub’s claws. “Thierry also told me to put my finger in his mouth straight from the front,” Pearce reported. “Apparently if you go in from the side, there’s far more chance of danger. Either way you have to be careful, because their mouths are the size of a small dog.”

Happily, “Two Brothers” wrapped without serious incident, and Annaud, in retrospect, still invests his animal actors with human qualities: “Despite the difficulties, it was a happy shoot,” he mused. “Our stars were so dignified and charming when they were small, so their mood reflected on the entire group. The tigers brought me serenity. I love being forced to identify with any actor, but when my actor’s an animal, it’s great therapy. It was good to remember I’m just a mammal among many other species. That makes you feel humble.”

David Gritten can be contacted at calendar@latimes.com.