The Ron Howard movie that was shut down by poisonous snakes
In Hollywood, a million different things can go wrong while shooting a film. From problems with the cast and crew, to delays caused by inclement weather or in-camera effects failing to perform, to budgetary issues and complicated sequences taking days or even weeks to perfect, moviemaking is a complex process fraught with pitfalls.
Just ask Ron Howard, who encountered an entirely new problem while shooting one of his pictures: snakes.
Throughout his career, Howard has prided himself on making every kind of movie under the sun. He has never been a director whose visual style or thematic preoccupations have been instantly recognisable in every movie he makes, instead preferring to try his hand at making a good film with whatever material he finds interesting at the time.
This fascination with many different stories and genres of film led Howard to make docudramas about astronauts (Apollo 13) and cave divers (Thirteen Lives), action thrillers about firefighters (Backdraft) and spacefaring smugglers (Solo: A Star Wars Story), historical dramas about troubled mathematicians (A Beautiful Mind) and scandal-struck presidents (Frost/Nixon), and even the occasional children’s fantasy or adult comedy.
However, when Howard signed up to make Eden, a survival drama about the real-life German settlers who left their native land in 1929 to set up a new society on Floreana Island, one of the Galápagos Islands in Ecuador, he couldn’t have anticipated the obstacles the shoot would face. In the film, the group soon discovers that living in such a remote location is incredibly difficult due to the deadly wildlife and weather conditions they’ve never experienced before. Over time, though, the divisions and rivalries within the group prove much harder to overcome, and a struggle for survival ensues.
To Howard’s surprise, though, art imitated life while shooting Eden, to a certain extent. The shoot threw up some, shall we say, unique challenges from the moment the cast and crew touched down in Queensland, Australia. In order to accurately portray the reality of the story, Howard had to shoot in as remote a location as possible, but finding a place like that became a double-edged sword. He quickly realised he needed to hire animal experts to clear the set of the various poisonous insects and snakes native to the area, as they posed a genuine danger to his crew and cast, including Jude Law, Sydney Sweeney, Vanessa Kirby, and Ana de Armas.
“We had to deal with animals,” a matter-of-fact Howard told Deadline. “We had snake wranglers. An hour before we shot, they came and started looking for the poisonous snakes. And they kept looking all day long, and they found a lot of them.”
Horrifyingly, Howard claimed he had to stop shooting certain scenes if he or anyone else noticed a stray snake that hadn’t been scooped up by the experts getting a little too close for comfort. The slithering reptiles would subsequently be “very humanely” relocated to “a safe place”, but the notion of being that close to genuine danger must have been frightening for the filmmakers. Well, all except Law and Kirby, apparently, who had to be politely steered away from sleeping in the wilderness at night, as their characters would have in 1929.
“Jude Law and Vanessa Kirby were so dedicated,” Howard marvelled. “They wanted to actually live where the Ritters lived, on that set. And the only problem is that when the company left, the creatures of the night would move in, and there was no way we could allow them to be there on their own. I had to talk them off of that one!”
In the end, Howard and company were able to work through the unusual problem of being beset by reptiles at all times, and Eden’s shoot went off without a hitch. In the immortal words of an adventurer who has nothing to do with Howard, though, “Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?”
