Bears set Pooh shooting schedule at city zoo

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This article was published 10/07/2004 (7830 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

‘OUR motto is: “Follow the bears,”‘ says producer Kim Todd on the process of making the CBC telefilm A Bear called Winnie.

While shooting in a closed-off row of cages in the Assiniboine Park Zoo this week, schedules have been adapted to two 22-kilogram black bear cub brothers, Chester and Charlie, as they share the role of one of the most inspiring animals ever.

Bears will be bears, so the crew and cast (including Michael Fassbender, Gil Bellows, Stephen Fry, and, in the coming two weeks, David Suchet — a.k.a. Hercule Poirot) are obliged to shoot according to the temperaments of the two pathologically playful cubs at the centre of production by Original Pictures in association with London’s Powercorp Productions.

The $5-million movie, scheduled to air around Christmas this year, tells the sometimes grim backstory of the foundling bear who would inspire the creation of A.A. Milne’s beloved ursine, Winnie the Pooh.

But let’s just stipulate, for the sake of any Disney lawyers reading this, that the film in no way exploits Disney’s vigorously guarded copyright of the Pooh character, something Todd acknowledges was a concern.

“Disney is rubbernecking the movie,” she says.

But the fact Disney is not otherwise involved with the production gives director John Kent Harrison freedom to properly portray the history of Winnie, who, in 1914, was adopted by Winnipeg veterinarian Lt. Harry Colebourn en route to the European killing fields of the First World War. Named for Colebourn’s hometown, Winnie was left in the London Zoo, where Milne and his son Christopher encountered him.

The story of Colebourn’s relationship with the bear, and his own traumatic experiences in wartime, gave Harrison a sharp dynamic with which to work in adapting a script by John Goldsmith.

“The grim truth is that eight million horses died during World War One and here we have the veterinary corps going off to war to look after the horses, so there’s an irony there,” says Harrison, who directed the TNT telefilm A Winning Season in Winnipeg last summer.

“I’m a student of irony. I love irony, above all things. So I try to balance something poignant with something comedic. It’s a family movie after all,” he says. “So the tone has to be such that young kids can watch the movie and in the sense of the war, there has to be a sense of poetic truth about the war but not a grim, grotesque reality.”

That irony was also an attraction for actor Stephen Fry, who says he also enjoyed the lack of responsibility that attended his recent film Bright Young Things, which he performed, wrote, directed, and executive produced. Fry’s part of a zookeeper named Prothero required only a few days of shooting.

“(It was) the joy of having no responsibility whatsoever — sitting in a trailer and not worry about someone coming up and saying: ‘When do you want to watch tomorrow’s dailies?’ You never stop. It’s a 20-hour day sometimes and it’s just so great to come along, get flown to Winnipeg, pop in a hotel, get put in a nice little trailer like this, and go do a bit of stuff.

“It’s far from a sacrifice or an egoless thing. It’s just a delight.”

Fry acknowledges the film also completes a circle he began when he and a producer friend started the charity Bear Rescue to save bears from inhumane conditions in circuses and private zoos following his eye-opening journey to Peru while making another film project about another beloved ursine literary figure, Paddington Bear.

“Americans would call it ‘closure,'” Fry says. “I do love bears. As a child, I had a big collection of bears — obviously not real ones. And then having done that documentary, it was very pleasing to do this.

“I don’t believe in things like synchronicity too ridiculously, but there are certain things that happen,” he says.

Of course, the actor most attuned to the bears in the film is the German-born, Ireland-raised Fassbender, for whom the role of Harry Colebourn required up-close intimacy with his bear co-stars.

“They’re such curious little animals,” says Fassbender, who arrived at the production a week early to slowly introduce himself into their world.

“You sit down on the ground and they’ll climb up to your head to get to the highest point and then they started biting you on the head,” he says with a laugh. (He says he has only had minor scratches.)

“They’re head of the food chain so they have this sort of arrogance. They’re not really afraid of anything and they’ve got an attention span of about two seconds.

“If a boom mike is hanging over their heads, they want to climb it.”

Self-absorbed? Arrogant? Overconfident? Hmmm.

“Sounds like a regular actor, doesn’t it?” Fassbender says. “They come on set and then they wander off and say, ‘I’ll be back in my trailer.'”

Andrew Simpson, of the Vancouver-based service Animal Insight, trains the cubs with the help of his wife Dana Dube. He says Fassbender has gone beyond the call of duty in working with the animals.

“Many actors don’t like to share the limelight with the animal, but Michael’s been great,” he says. “He’s right in there with them, he’s picking up bear poop and helping clean up after them.”

Simpson says, between them, the bears have done an admirable job in the role of Winnie… for novices.

“They’re brothers and they complement each other brilliantly,” Simpson says. “They’re totally different personalities. Chester is more the rough and tough one and Charlie’s more the thinker. He likes to do the more intricate acting parts.”

In the training process, Simpson and Dube are so attached to the bears, they are building a new permanent enclosure for them in their Vancouver home.

“They’ll live out the rest of their lives as movie bears,” Simpson says.

You saw it here first: Stars are born.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca