Benjamin
Mee - We Bought A Zoo
Interview with
Benjamin Mee by Sean Lynch
Inspiration
for the film We Bought A
Zoo
We Bought A Zoo is
the amazing true story of a man who did the unthinkable and brought a
zoo back to life and his family closer together from acclaimed
filmmaker Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire) and starring
Matt Damon (Contagion, True Grit), Scarlett Johansson (Iron Man 2, Vicky Cristina
Barcelona) and Thomas Haden Church (Easy A, Sideways).
It follows Benjamin Mee (Damon) is a Los Angeles newspaper columnist
and adventure writer who, as a single father, faces the challenges of
raising his two young children. Hoping that a fresh start and a new
life will restore their family spirit, Mee quits his job and buys an
old rural house outside the city with a unique bonus feature : a zoo
named the Rosemoor Animal Park.
Web Wombat Movies' Sean Lynch caught up with the real life Benjamin Mee
whose life is now finding a whole new meaning on the big screen...
Anyone who
has ever had a dinner party has stumbled across the "If a movie was
made of your life, who would play you?" conversation - what's it like
actually getting an answer to that question?
Amazingly, they asked my opinion and I
didn't expect them to at all. Fox called me and said "It looks like the
film is going ahead, a big Christmas release, any A-Lister will do it.
Pick anyone!".
And I didn't have a list at all, so I just asked all my friends to come
up with a few suggestions. Some of them said Hugh Grant... which...
wasn't great [Laughs].
Another was Ewan McGregor - and that sounded a bit more interesting!
Then someone said Matt Damon. Amazingly, no one suggested Sean Connery [Laughs]. So I
ended up suggesting Matt Damon just to shut them up, not really
thinking it would ever go through.
Then about five months later I was cleaning out a storm
drain, pouring rain, up to my armpit in this damn drain. Phone rang,
and it was someone who had pulled over on Sunset Blvd to tell me Matt
Damon had agreed to play me. I could not believe it, it was almost as
if the sun came out and I was on
Sunset Blvd for a second.
Obviously
there are a few differences between yourself and Matt (for starters,
you are English)...
I did think he might come over and copy my
mannerisms, but they did have a TV series to go on [Ben's Zoo]. So he
saw that, read the book and of course Cameron Crowe's script and he
just made a decision on how to do it. He just played it as a guy trying
to do the right thing I guess... with hair [Laughs].
I've
always wondered how people deal with having their lives on screen
(while they are still alive), do you worry about being misrepresented -
as your mainstream legacy from this point on potentially resides within
this film?
Certainly signing the contract, I did it with
some trepidation because Hollywood could take any direction at
all. I've been incredibly lucky that Cameron Crowe was the director
because he is an incredibly kind and thoughtful man - and so is Matt
Damon. So I've been very lucky because it could have gone a different
way.
In the contract I noticed that Fox had
the rights to make a fictional sequel. I said to them "This is an
interesting clause - so in Zoo
2 I could become an axe murderer and start feeding people
to the tigers?".
They just stopped and paused and said [confused] "We
wouldn't want to do that" [Laughs].
The film
takes a quick look at your life as an journalistic adventurer, can you
tell us a little bit about your adventures prior to this one?
I did do adventure travel for over ten years.
Dog sledging in Alaska, I jumped into the Arctic Ocean in a dry suit,
learning to dive off an Olympic Diving Board backwards in a day, that
sort of thing. Freefall parachuting was the thing I didn't like the
most.
That's the really interesting thing,
getting yourself into situations where you are utterly reliant on a
trainer.
But, in fact, I got into journalism to write about animals. I was a
science writer, and I specialised in Dolphin Intelligence. My first
piece was on why whaling was morally wrong, because there is a
difference between a Whale and a Cow. I found that due to the size of
its brain, its social groups, that it has the capacity for empathy and
suffering.
If you kill one cow, all the other cows will look at the body and go
"Mooo". If you kill a whale, they all freak out because it's Auntie
Mildred - and they've know Auntie Mildred for generations.
Much like Elephants, if poachers take
one of them - the herd mourn for years.
Running
a zoo seems like an incredibly costly venture to take up on a whim.
Have you found it's like the film Fierce
Creatures where you need to juggle the commercial nature
of sponsorship versus the integrity of the park itself?
Totally! There's a project at the moment where
we stand to make a lot of money if we endorse it. It's an incinerator
[for burning rubbish in Plymouth]. Even within the environmental world
people are struggling to agree if it's a good thing or a bad thing. I
think on balance it has
to be a bad thing if the plan is to just burn everything.
I think the incinerator project would be great if it didn't include
plastics or food [which could both be recycled much more efficiently],
so I think I'd be up for a modified version of it. But effectively,
they are offering quite
a lot of money to us for our endorsement. To my bank
manager's horror I keep saying no... but I can't pay the
wages. So, I must admit, it's very tempting to take that money.
You know what
this sounds like to me... that's is the sequel right there - We Bought A Zoo 2 : Operation
Incinerator.
[Laughs]
But you have to be,
ethically, in the right place - because a zoo is all about conservation
and education. So if you are standing there saying "We must save the
environment and this endangered species... but it's ok to burn plastic"
it's not going to work.
Everything
you've already done in your life is what most people include on
their bucket lists as "crazy never gonna happen" dreams. Is there
anything left on your Bucket List?
I really want to work closely, understand and
explore Elephants and Dolphins. I want to promote the idea that these
big brain mammals have a theory of mind, which is, that they understand
that they are individuals and that their relatives also have a mind
like we do. Which gives them a moral right not to be killed routinely
like they are in, say, Japan.
So if I could change the
perception and demand for, say, ivory in China by explaining that these
animals have a sense of humour [that would be fantastic]. I've seen it with Dolphins and Apes. By
doing that, by them having the ability to make each other laugh it
means they have to
have an understanding of theory of mind. As soon as you can prove
humour, you've proven theory of mind.
There is a group of Elephants in a Zoo in Portland where we've seen one
elephant pull the back of an ear of a third elephant and then pretend
it wasn't her. So she
knows that he doesn't
know who did it and thinks the middle one did it. Theory of mind -
right there! So if you can get the Chinese to understand that - that's
my life long ambition.
I like how
most people's Bucket Lists include "I want to bungee jump" - and you've
decided "I'm going to save everything"
[Laughs].
And you know what... why not?
WE BOUGHT A ZOO IS OUT NOW ON DVD & BLU RAY
|
