Coen brothers interview:
Coen Bros: "We had to have a lizard crash pad for Raising Arizona. A lizard shoots off a rock in the movie, and we had to have a preapproved soft place for it to land." More on animals in movies in comments below
Joel: When you do a Screen Actors Guild movie that uses animals in any way you have to get the American Humane Society to sign off on it. We blew up a cow in O Brother, which meant we had to send the Humane Society work tapes while the film was being shot. When they saw the cow scene they didn’t believe it was computer generated, but I assure you it was.
Ethan: There is a rule that you can’t get a cow anywhere near a moving car.
Joel: It might cause the cow stress.
Ethan: You can’t upset the animals.
=============
Ethan: Yeah, if an animal doesn’t do what you want it to do, you just grab another one. But the rules for working with animals are a lot more stringent than those for working with babies.
Joel: There is definitely no comparison.
Joel: The pit. You can’t do that with animals.
Ethan: Believe me, it is remarkable thing to see how animals are monitored. You cannot kill a mosquito on screen.
==================
Was it challenging to direct all the babies you had in that movie?
Joel: It was bizarre. Whenever you have an infant, you have to triple or quadruple them. When we had five kids in the movie, we had to have 15 babies on the set.
Ethan: The picture babies and the standby babies. Cacophonous, nightmarish.
Joel: We had the baby pit—a big padded pit they were tossed into when we weren’t using them. The mothers all sat around the perimeter knitting.
Ethan: Whenever we needed a baby we reached into the pit and grabbed one. It was kind of like a barbecue pit.
Joel: You can’t really direct a baby, which is the problem. You take one out of the pit, put it in front of the camera and see if it behaves. If not, you toss it back into the pit and get another. It’s a lot like working with animals, actually.
Coen Bros: "We had to have a lizard crash pad for Raising Arizona. A lizard shoots off a rock in the movie, and we had to have a preapproved soft place for it to land." More on animals in movies in comments below
Joel: When you do a Screen Actors Guild movie that uses animals in any way you have to get the American Humane Society to sign off on it. We blew up a cow in O Brother, which meant we had to send the Humane Society work tapes while the film was being shot. When they saw the cow scene they didn’t believe it was computer generated, but I assure you it was.
Ethan: There is a rule that you can’t get a cow anywhere near a moving car.
Joel: It might cause the cow stress.
Ethan: You can’t upset the animals.
=============
Ethan: Yeah, if an animal doesn’t do what you want it to do, you just grab another one. But the rules for working with animals are a lot more stringent than those for working with babies.
Joel: There is definitely no comparison.
Joel: The pit. You can’t do that with animals.
Ethan: Believe me, it is remarkable thing to see how animals are monitored. You cannot kill a mosquito on screen.
==================
Was it challenging to direct all the babies you had in that movie?
Joel: It was bizarre. Whenever you have an infant, you have to triple or quadruple them. When we had five kids in the movie, we had to have 15 babies on the set.
Ethan: The picture babies and the standby babies. Cacophonous, nightmarish.
Joel: We had the baby pit—a big padded pit they were tossed into when we weren’t using them. The mothers all sat around the perimeter knitting.
Ethan: Whenever we needed a baby we reached into the pit and grabbed one. It was kind of like a barbecue pit.
Joel: You can’t really direct a baby, which is the problem. You take one out of the pit, put it in front of the camera and see if it behaves. If not, you toss it back into the pit and get another. It’s a lot like working with animals, actually.
