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This piece was first published in March.
We are recirculating it timed toCocaine Bearsstreaming debut on Peacock.
There, the partially mauled Ranger Liz (veteran character actress Margo Martindale) is loaded onto a gurney.
In many ways, the ambulance-chase sequence is the heart of the movie.
This sequence wasThe Fast & the Furious but one of the cars is a bear.
That was how we first approached it.
I never wanted the bear to be responsible for all the death in the movie.
The bear to me was a metaphor of chaos.
If theres a bear on cocaine, then itischaos and itcreateschaos.
And how do we make the bearnotthe cause of death for everyone?
Those were the parameters.
Jimmy Warden wrote a funny sequence, but we really had to build this thing out.
In the script, I dont believe she scraped her face.
Everybody can relate to that feeling.
So I want one of these kills to be relatably horrifying.
I wanted to show the demise of Ranger Liz in a close-up of that.
And we strapped her to it like a gurney.
It bounced a little on its wheels.
It didnt just bounce and flip over; it kind of bounced and fell down.
That detail ended up in the movie.
So we did a lot of tests on things.
It was a very complicated piece, this one little scene with the ambulance.
The bears cocaine superpowers are peaking in that scene.I dont use slow-mo in the movie.
I reserved it for the one moment when the bear is jumping in the back of the car.
We dont have a lot of super-wide shots of the bear doing things.
We have the wide shot of it going down one tree and fast up the other.
I call those the key frames for the movie.
What are the iconic moments for the bear going to be?
Dragging the hiker back, that was a key frame.
You barely even see the bear.
And then the bear roaring for the title those are touch points of visual excitement.
Thats the first key frame.
Another was Margo in close-up scraping her face on the ground.
And Kai I wanted her to come through the windshield right at camera and land at camera.
That was technically hard to do.
We ended up digging a ditch for the camera to rest in.
And that was all Kai.
There was no stuntperson.
But in this sequence, I left everything with the characters inside very loose.
There was tons of improv.
I would say 75 percent of the dialogue in that scene was improvised.
Kais line, What the fucks wrong with that bear?
was in the script.
Why is that bear chasing us?
was in the script.
But everything else Shut the door, you fucking dumbass!
and Scotts line, Not the tree, the big fucking bear!
that was all improv on the day.
So I dont think this bears in full-blown addiction.
Thats where Ill find this taste of something.
You havepublicly statedthat you have never done cocaine.
And we really felt like it made the bear seem too animated.
So all of its behaviors had to be based in some realities.
We looked at a lot of bear videos the internet is just filled with them.
A lot of research went into it!
We did that on the tree climb.
Obviously the bear is searching for cocaine in that scene.
So that was a good scene for us to test it out.
When I say tweaking, I mean, how fast is it blinking its eyes?
What are the behaviors bears normally do?
So thats how we figured it out: trial and error.
Your screenwriter has said the bear isnot the bad guyin this movie.
So where did you draw the line at how much violence we see the bear inflicting?
Heres the thing: The bear is a peaceful creature.
The character played byJesse Tyler Fergusoneven says, Bears are peaceful creatures.
You must have done something to upset it.
What did you do?!
Thats the question of the movie.
I blame the humans.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
