How did you choose aurochs—an extinct but real animal—to be the mythic creatures in your movie?

Benh Zeitlin: They came from cave paintings I’d seen—Lascaux, Pech Merle, and a bunch of caves around there. The young girl in the film, Hushpuppy, sees herself as the last of her kind, on the verge of extinction. “How are people going to look back on my civilization?” she wonders. And she sees herself as being in the same position as cavemen: We look back on them and understand them by their paintings. So it’s that parallel that inspired us to use the aurochs. What Hushpuppy sees as coming to destroy her is literally what a caveman painted.

Michael Gottwald: Benh’s always been interested in the cave paintings at Lascaux. And our film plays best as a myth. So he was looking for some sort of frame of reference for the film being its own myth: an animal—a bygone large mammal—that had been prominent earlier but had gone extinct, yet could cause destruction.

So the aurochs tattoos that appear on a character’s leg in the film—that’s a direct nod to the Lascaux cave paintings, where aurochs are depicted?

BZ: Yes, absolutely. In the play that the film is based on [Juicy and Delicious by Lucy Alibar, who co-wrote Beasts of the Southern Wild with Zeitlin], the teacher refers specifically to Lascaux as she teaches a lesson about cave paintings. We sort of reinterpreted that. Plus we thought aurochs would make a great tattoo!

MG: The film is trying to create its own intrinsic mythology. And it makes sense that the character Miss Bathsheeba—as the passer-down of knowledge, an educator who understands the past and the way things work—has the aurochs on her body. In our movie, the equivalent of an animal appearing on a cave wall is the tattoo on her thigh.

What do aurochs represent or symbolize in Beasts of the Southern Wild? What might it mean at the end, when Hushpuppy stands up to a whole herd?

BZ: I think [the aurochs’ meaning] evolves over the course of the film. At the beginning, Hushpuppy’s relationship with nature is that she’s a morsel of food that’s going to be consumed by a larger force. The only way she understands death is a big thing eating a smaller thing—the food chain. All the things that are bigger than her and that have created her are being consumed by things bigger than them—her father being consumed by his illness, her home being consumed by storms and floods and saltwater intrusion and land loss. That violent relationship is the way she begins her understanding of nature.

But over the course of the film her view evolves into a more enlightened, complete view of nature as a flowing system—something in which everything has its place and everything plays its part. She comes to peace with it.

The idea of the aurochs really began at the end of the movie, and I worked back from that confrontation. What interested me is that you have these two animals on the verge of extinction that are designed by nature—one is supposed to eat the other, and the other one is supposed to kill its predator in order to stay alive. But both creatures are these wise, honorable animals that understand at the end of the film that the greatest sin you can commit is to kill an animal on the verge of extinction—to kill the last of a kind. So it’s not just about your own survival. It’s about allowing each other to go on.

MG: If nothing else, the film is a new way of rendering a story from a child’s perspective. We went to great lengths to really represent Hushpuppy’s reality. When you’re a kid of that age, there’s no separation between reality and fantasy. In Hushpuppy’s world, her dad dying and the storm coming means the world is falling apart. And the aurochs are a key reflection of that. As she says in a voiceover, “Everything has to fit together just right. If it doesn’t, it all falls apart.” So the vision of her dad shaking on the ground while a storm brews above her—for a 6-year-old, that’s larger than those two elements.

In terms of facing the herd, I think that’s her recognizing the harmony that she’s always talked about in nature. Everything is its own being. There is a natural point at which organisms in nature show weakness and allow for each other to exist—the same way she learns from her friends in The Bathtub [the fictional Louisiana community where Hushpuppy and her father live] to take care of each other. The aurochs recognize her as a similarly ferocious beast. And so they give way.

In the movie, aurochs are encased in Ice Age glaciers, then set free by the same storm that floods the protagonists’ Louisiana home. Tell me a bit about this.

BZ: The way we developed that stuff was very unscientific, very literalist—in the ways you understand how matter works when you’re a young kid. Lucy, my co-writer, is the first to admit she’s really bad at science. So I would explain something about, say, particle physics to her, and she would explain it back to me as well as she understood it. And then I would explain that back to her. So we sort of played this game of telephone until the science got really surreal and basic—the way a kid might understand it.

Louisiana is in the most precarious place in terms of sea-level rise. I thought the way Hushpuppy would understand the sea rising is if an ice cube melts, the water will rise. And one way she would understand death is if something freezes, it becomes still; when it thaws, it goes back to the way it was. So she might understand that the Ice Age froze all these creatures and they “died.” But if that gets reversed, then the Ice Age unhappens—death unhappens—and these creatures come back to life. We extrapolated the mythology through her logic.

MG: Where we shot the film in southern Louisiana, the environment is changing in a way that’s extremely visible and more aggressive than it is in a lot of other places. People say, “Twenty years ago, that was a field. Now it’s not. Now I have to take a bridge to get there.” What the film does—and what the aurochs do in their transition out of the ice—is take that already accelerated process and accelerate it even more.

Aurochs were actually ancestors of modern cattle. But in your film they resemble tusked, horned boars. Why the shift from bovine to porcine?

BZ: The source of that was my visit to where Lucy grew up, in the northern tip of Florida. She was the one who brought the aurochs into this story, and I wanted to see where her sensibility came from. She had these two gigantic Vietnamese potbellied pigs in her yard. They’re so big they’re practically unable to move. They just sort of haunt the yard, these two monstrous animals.

The film emerges from Hushpuppy’s view. And I felt like these two monstrous creatures may have haunted Lucy as a child. So those same fears could be extrapolated from the idea of a horrifying, all-consuming creature—pigs that are out to devour the entire universe and pass it through their body. And something about that made sense for how Hushpuppy might create this creature for herself. We weren’t trying to be scientific.

MG: Obviously aurochs are more like cattle than the animals in the film. But like anything with this film, you won’t get very far if you interpret the film literally. People tend to think, “Well, that storm is definitely [Hurricane] Katrina.” Or, “That’s definitely a place that exists in Louisiana.” I think in this case the aurochs are a descriptor of an extinct species that could come back to life. There was no attempt, ever, to accurately portray them.

If the DNA breeding program, Project TaurOs, succeeds and aurochs can be genetically re-created, would you use the real thing in another film?

BZ: Definitely! I’m always up for taking on nature in the name of cinema.

MG: We are not scared of using wild animals in our features. But I would think that if we found actual aurochs and filmed them, we’d portray them as being ten times more ferocious than they actually are. Or we’d have to invent a new mythology with a new word, so we’d be using actual aurochs to “play” a new species that we’d created.

— Jeremy Berlin

There’s lots to love about this metaphysical flick and its magnetic 6-year-old heroine, Hushpuppy. But what really caught Pop Omnivore’s eye was that herd—a group of animals known as aurochs. A couple of years ago National Geographic magazine ran a short piece about these extinct creatures and a novel DNA breeding program aimed at bringing them back to life, Jurassic Park style.

You don’t need to know about aurochs to enjoy the new movie, but here’s a brief primer: Aurochs were massive horned beasts that lived in what’s now Eurasia, India, and North Africa. They were ancestors of modern cattle, and were depicted in cave paintings. Though herbivorous, they were hunted as game and mythologized for their stature and power. “They are a little below the elephant in size,” wrote Julius Caesar, “and of the appearance, color, and shape of a bull. Their strength and speed are extraordinary; they spare neither man nor wild beast which they have espied.” Hunting, disease, climate changes, and habitat loss caused aurochs to go extinct in 1627, when the last individual died in Poland’s Jaktorów Forest.

How did the moviemakers “create” these menacing beasts? In an exclusive interview with Pop Omnivore, second-unit director Ray Tintori reveals the shocking truth. (Hint: It’s cuter than you think.)

You directed all the aurochs sequences in the film, correct? How did you do it?

We used Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs—baby pigs. There were five of them. Four of them were the “supporting pigs.” One of them we got when he was a week-and-a-half old. He does most of the heavy lifting, acting wise. His name is Oliver. He was named after one of the props people on the film.

I developed a really intense bond with him. When we first got him, he was so young he couldn’t generate his own body heat. So he had to sleep in the bed between me and my girlfriend. He was like a small burrito—a home-schooled, supersmart, talented little guy.

He was a little bit older than the other ones [when filming started]—about four months old. The others were about two-and-a-half months old. And we really trained them, especially Oliver. He was a very intelligent, very capable pig.

In the movie, the aurochs look enormous. How big were the pigs?

Well, there’s another pot-bellied pig in the film, a full-grown one. And the initial plan was to use pigs that size. But once we began gaming it out, we realized that getting baby ones [would be better]. They were very strong, even though they were less than a foot long, tail to snout. I have no idea what they weighed. But they were little, little things.

How did you make them look like fearsome beasts?

We used nutria skins. We spent five months training the pigs and trying to figure out the costumes. We were importing different kinds of fabric—we must have tried every single kind. Then this one guy helping on the set suggested we just use nutria skins. Do you know what nutria are?

They’re rodents, right? Beaver-size ones that some people eat?

Yeah, they’re swamp rodents that are very specific to the location [in southern Louisiana] where we were filming. They’re so available down there. And their skins are the only thing that looked realistic when the light hit it. Plus it made sense in the way that the entire film is sort of made from salvaged pieces of regional things. As soon as we put [the nutria skins on the pigs] we realized, “Oh, of course. It’s obvious: nutria! That’s what it needs to be.”

What about the horns and other things you used to make them look more like aurochs, more monstrous?

We put a foam, bison-like hump under the nutria skins, to throw off the shape. With the horns, well, safety was the No. 1 concern at all times. And we must have gone through 40 versions of costume design, trying to figure it out. The first time we put wooden horns on one of the pigs, we realized we’d just handed a switchblade to a toddler. Because the pigs were always rooting around and charging everything. They’d run into us, and we’d be like, “Ow! Oh, my God that hurts!”

The horns we wound up using were really soft, like cast latex. In some of the footage we have, the horns would bend every time the pigs ran into something. The coolest thing about it was figuring out how to design the horns to look like they’re part of the skull. Because you really can’t have any wobble. We had to design a way to attach tusks and horns to a pig’s head without hurting the pig.

If an animal is unhappy, it will refuse to do what you want it to do. There’s no way you can trick or bully or force an animal to do anything it doesn’t want to. If you want them to go down a specific path, they need to be on your side. With the pigs in general, we set up a system of positive reinforcement. Those pigs are smart enough that you can make a social contract with them.

In the film, there are certain scenes when they’re running really, really fast, and we did these super close-ups of them running. But for the shots that are a little wider, we set up a 30-foot table and had the camera super low to get the angle to make them look bigger. And we’d have them run across the table as fast as they possibly could, and we’d be dollying the camera, trying to keep pace with them. It was chaotic, but good for the wide shots—those shots had a lot of energy.

So we realized it would be really great if we could get them to run full gait on a treadmill. And it was like, “Can you get a pig to run on a treadmill?” It turns out you can.

What is the contract? What did you offer the pigs?

It’s all about food. But it’s a process. First you get the pig to stand on a treadmill. And it knows, “OK, if I stand on this thing I’ll get fed.” Then you slowly start moving the treadmill so that they walk. It took months to really get them to the point where the pig’s on the treadmill, the pig’s running, the pig feels totally safe, totally fine—so when the shot’s finished, you see them totally happy.

Same thing with the costumes. We did some early tests where we went out to a farm and did some shots of the pigs there. And it became clear that if you shot it from the right angle and slowed it down, they would look big enough. But those pigs would do about two minutes before they would get confused about what was happening. And when they get confused or they get scared, all they do is lie down and curl up into a little ball. You can’t get a good performance out of them.

Actual aurochs were basically cows. In your film they were pigs. Tell me about that.

I don’t think most people had ever heard the word “aurochs.” So we figured we could make them whatever we wanted to make them. At the very outset, we knew that the only two options were dogs and pigs, because those are the only two animals smart enough. By the end [of our shoot, these pigs] could hit marks. The amount of dialogue we had with them, what we needed them to do, was pretty amazing.

In the last sequence, we were shooting them on green screen, to composite into the stuff that we shot on location. And you really had to have the pig hit the right spot and look in the right direction. There were times where the cinematographer would be like, “Can you just get the pig to look down about two inches? Now could you move him two inches to the right?” And everyone sort of forgot how crazy it was that we had the luxury to do that.

Also, I think aurochs didn’t really get frozen in icebergs [as they did in the movie], right?

Right. They didn’t go extinct till the 17th century.

So we were factually inaccurate on multiple levels.

Did you set up a separate soundstage to film them?

The rest of the crew was down in the bayou, shooting the live-action stuff. My unit was in New Orleans. We took over a 1916 firehouse in the Marigny neighborhood that hadn’t been used since [Hurricane Katrina]. It was an amazing space, with a huge backyard. That’s where we had the pigs, where they were being trained on the treadmill and stuff. And I had a team of eight to 11 engineers and special-effects people working indoors, building the miniatures and stuff.

How did you film them?

Low angles and slow motion, mostly. The biggest issue with the pigs is that their normal gait is very prim—they have this dainty little walk that they do, which gives away their scale really easily. So we found that if we got them running really fast, we got this horse-like motion.

The biggest trick was the scene right before they’re eating each other, in this mucky wasteland. We wanted [to convey] that they’d reached this point where they’re straggling and having trouble moving forward. And you can’t really tell a pig, “I need you to walk with this emotion right now. I need you to pretend that you’re having difficulty.”

But when the pigs were walking up the ramps we’d built, so they could get up on that 30-foot table by themselves, we saw them walking with the motion we wanted. So we built [the wasteland set] on a 45-degree angle with a painted backdrop, and hole cut in it for the sun to come in. You just have to build everything around them, to coax out of them the performance that you need.

So Oliver—where is he now, and how old is he?

He’s about two years old now. He lives in southern Ohio, on a farm where there’s a complete, Charlotte’s Web-like menagerie of ducks and horses and stuff. He has his own building. He’s retired to a very good life.

And the other pigs?

They found different people in New Orleans who keep them as pets. They’re fine. But Oliver is the one I really miss. We had a very emotional bond, me and that pig.

–If you’d like more info on the film, we spoke to director Benh Zeitlin and co-producer Michael Gottwald, who talked about what the aurochs mean to them and about the movie in general.

But is their behavior based in reality? To parse wolf fact from fiction, we caught up with Daniel MacNulty, a wildlife-ecology professor at Utah State University whose research on Arctic wolves is funded in part by the National Geographic Society.

First off, would wolves see men as prey and stalk them in the wild? I’d think that in a remote area like this one, wolves might fear or avoid humans.
In my 16 years of studying wolves in Yellowstone National Park, I have never been approached by a wolf or wolf pack. On the contrary, when I’ve inadvertently bumped into wolves they turn and run away—which is a problem when my objective is to observe them!

One of the characters in the movie says these wolves a) have a 300-mile hunting radius, b) will attack anything that comes near their den, and c) “are the only animal that will seek revenge.” Is any of that that true?
No. Nonsense, all of it.

Would a wolf attack a man standing next to a fire, with other men nearby, as happens in The Grey?
Not a chance.

At one point two men are running alongside a riverbank in the middle of the day. Two wolves race out of the trees and charge them. Possible?
No.

Some of the wolves in the movie are huge—not Twilight size, but larger than I’d expect. How big can a gray wolf get?
In Yellowstone, the average weight of adult male wolves ranges between 100 and 120 pounds. The average weight of adult female wolves ranges between 84 and 93 pounds.

Do wolf eyes really glow in the dark, as they do in this movie?
The eyes of wolves and many other wildlife appear to “glow in the dark” because of a layer of tissue in the eye called the tapetum lucidum. It reflects visible light back through the retina, which improves vision in low-light conditions. So when light shines into the eye of an animal [with] a tapetum lucidum, the pupil appears to glow.

The cooperative hunting nature of the pack is played up a lot in this film. Is that accurate?
The extent to which wolves cooperate while hunting in a pack is greatly exaggerated. In a recent study, I showed that wolves are often freeloaders. That is, most wolves keep up with a hunt simply to be on hand when a kill is made. Imagine tackling a moose or bison with only your teeth, and you can start to appreciate the incentive a wolf has to hold back during a group hunt.

Speaking of cooperation, in one scene a lone wolf enters the men’s nighttime camp. The protagonist says it’s an omega wolf “sent in” by the alpha wolf to test the humans’ defenses. Does anything like that ever happen with wolf packs?
No. This is pure fiction.

At the end of the movie, the hero finds himself in the wolves’ den. It’s littered with bones and carcasses. Is that a realistic depiction?
In the dens I’ve examined, most of the bones and carcass remains are on the outside of the den rather than in the inside.

In the final scene, the protagonist prepares to fight the alpha wolf. He tapes broken mini liquor bottles to his hands. Would that give him a chance against a large male gray wolf?
If I was lucky enough to encounter a large male gray wolf in the wild, he would turn and run before I could tape the first bottle to my hand. Most people don’t realize this, but wolves are wimps.

Jobs changed the world from Silicon Valley, whose fortunes and rise mirrored his own. Back in 1982, National Geographic magazine chronicled the burgeoning tech hub in “High Tech, High Risk, and High Life in Silicon Valley,” recognizing that the “former prune patch an hour’s drive south of San Francisco” was becoming the “heartland of an electronics revolution that may prove as far-reaching as the industrial revolution of the 19th century … Silicon Valley may well be a glimpse of a computer-and-communications culture that is the prototype of the future.”

He may be hard to recognize without a black mock turtleneck, but that's 27-year-old Steve Jobs on the motorcycle. Photo by Charles O'Rear.

That story also contained prescient words about Jobs. Even then, it was clear that his distinctive taste—and taste for distinctions—was firmly in place:

“We’d rather call the Apple a personal than a home computer.”

So was his role as corporate, revenge-of-the-nerds idol:

Jobs has become a potent role model for a new breed of bright kids who are writing and selling software programs and, with their arcane computer skills, gaining the prestige formerly tasted only by the high-school football team.

But the most fun reason to read about Jobs in an old National Geographic? It might be to see a bearded, booted young man zooming about on a boss 1966 BMW motorcycle.

“Although Jobs drives the requisite Mercedes,” adds the article, “success seems not to have spoiled the first folk hero of the computer age. In plaid shirt and jeans, he still prefers, as a friend said, ‘to drive his motorcycle to my place, sit around and drink wine, and talk about what we’re going to do when we grow up.’”

–Jeremy Berlin is an editor at National Geographic magazine.