Pre-Production Diary: Snakes
9 May 2007 in Blog | Comments enabled

Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?

Because we wrote it that way. That’s why.

So we have this scene in the movie. I don’t want to give too much away, but let’s just say it’s a very suspenseful scene involving a rattlesnake. Now that’s something that’s easy to write, but when you have to start thinking about shooting it, it becomes a bit of an issue.

We had one place in mind that had casually mentioned that they might possibly let us use one of their rattlers, so I called them this morning to formally ask them. The lady on the phone was mortified. She did everything but plead with me not to shoot this scene. She went on and on about how deadly rattlesnakes are telling me several horror stories of death and amputated limbs. Needless to say, she declined to be involved.

I must admit, after getting off the phone with her, I was seriously rethinking this scene. I’m not really afraid of snakes, but she had sufficiently frightened me. My mind was trying to figure out how on earth we were going to shoot that scene - rubber snakes, stock footage, complete removal of the scene?!

After several frantic phone calls to my brother, I hopped on the internet to look for actual snake wranglers for film/television. Boy am I glad I did. I found one here in Georgia that has not only agreed to do it for a very reasonable price, he has assured me that he can get any shot we can come up with. He showed me a demo reel of a rattler striking someone’s leg. Scary stuff. It was a fake leg, but it didn’t look fake. Wow. I just now shuddered thinking of it.

We had a long talk about the scene and how we could go about shooting it. He’s going to bring several snakes that he can swap out if certain ones aren’t being cooperative. He’s also going to bring stand-in non-venomous snakes that we can use for wide shots with actors.

So all of that to say that our snake scene stays in the film! Not only that, but it’s going to be even better than we had originally conceived it. I’m so pumped.