Gorilla expert Josh Ponte has no hesitation in vouching for the old "no animals were harmed" claim that pops up on screen at the end of The Legend of Tarzan.
"I can 100 per cent give you my assurance that no animals were harmed in making this film, because no animals were present on this film," he says. "If anyone was hurt, it was the visual effects guys who worked day and night trying to create the digital animals."
Yes, you read that right. Though the film is packed with Africa's wildest creatures, not one of them is real: not the lion against which Alexander Skarsgard's Tarzan nuzzles; not the elephant whose trunk he caresses; not the ostriches with whom he runs or the wildebeest he corrals. Not even the gorilla with whom he violently wrestles.
In fact, especially not the gorilla with whom he violently wrestles. Not just because Akut was born and raised in a computer, but because he's not even a gorilla. Well, not quite.
"They're not gorillas in the Edgar Rice Burroughs books," says Ponte, who served as technical adviser on the film, facilitated the location shoot, and has a co-writing credit on several of the traditional songs sung by the Kuba tribe visited by Tarzan (aka John Clayton, aka Lord Greystoke) and his wife Jane (Margot Robbie).
Margot Robbie as Jane. She's Mrs Tarzan, but she's not entirely domesticated herself.
Burroughs' ape was in fact called a mangani. "It's the caricature of a gorilla through Victorian eyes," he explains. "They're more this thing that the Victorians were really scared of, this wild, huge beast, rather than the slightly placid, tender animals that gorillas really are. That's not to say silverbacks aren't without the ability to fight and display."
Ponte knows full well how a gorilla can turn, because he's had it happen to him. He has spent a good chunk of the past 15 years working with gorillas in Gabon, in western Africa. In 2009, he was appointed special adviser to the country's president, tasked with helping formulate the management plan for the national parks that were established in 2002. He organised the loan of the presidential helicopter that allowed the production to capture the stunning images of the jungle to which Tarzan returns when he once again hears the call of the wild.
Alexander Skarsgard and those abs.
Ponte first arrived in Gabon in 2001, having fled the UK after a relationship ended. He took a job managing a scheme to repatriate orphaned gorillas in a patch of rainforest that was seven hours' travel – by plane, car and boat – from the nearest town. "The truth is I was nursing a broken heart," he says, "and that will make a man behave irrationally".
Eighteen months into his two-year stint, Ponte was challenged by the eldest of the young male gorillas. "He was developing into sexual maturity and he became convinced that our play wrestling was something else," he says. "I couldn't convince him that I wasn't after his women, so I left."
There is a scene in The Legend of Tarzan – which is directed by David Yates, who made the last four Harry Potter films (and the forthcoming spin-off Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them) – that echoes Ponte's real-world experience: returning to the tribe of mangani that had raised him, Tarzan realises he must face off with Akut, who used to be his brother but now sees him as a traitor for having left the jungle. The fight that ensues would be enough to send most men back home to England post-haste.
A computer-generated mangani.
"That is more extreme," Ponte says of the on-screen clash. "At no point did I and Marco, as he was called, run towards each other and fly 20 feet through the air and lock in deadly combat. But he scared the living daylights out of me, that's for sure."
In fact, apes rarely fight with the intention to kill or maim. "The vast majority of fighting in gorilla communities is about display: beating your chest, running around, breaking trees, beating the ground," he says. "You try to avoid coming to blows at all cost. To actually get hurt in battle is very bad news in the forest, because you get infected very easily and you die very easily."
You might say, then, that the fight in Tarzan is loosely anchored in the real world but aspires to something grander, more mythical. And in a sense, that's the case with the movie as a whole: not for nothing is it dubbed a "legend".
Josh Ponte and a real baby gorilla.
The creatures are digital creations because it would have been impossible to get the real things to behave the way they do in the film. The aerial shots of the jungle are genuine – "anything that looks beautiful and astonishing and very real forest, that is Gabon," Ponte says – but much of the film was shot on sound stages in London. Real forest and unreal sets were seamlessly spliced to create an elevated version of Africa.
The film draws on real elements for its narrative, too. Uncommonly for a jungle romp, it has a well fleshed-out historical back story – of the merciless exploitation of its African colonies by Belgium at the tail end of the 19th century. So Christoph Waltz plays yet another variation on his now-familiar suave villain turn, as King Leopold's linen-clad man on the ground Leon Rom (loosely based on a real historical figure).
Christoph Waltz as the suave but cruel colonial administrator Leon Rom.
So we see natives in chains being forced into labour, a generation after the slave trade has been outlawed. So we see obscene numbers of elephant tusks being carted out of the jungle to service the ivory trade.
To Ponte, all this was a big part of the attraction of the movie. "Films operate on three primary levels: they're entertaining, they're emotive and they're informative," he says. "Hollywood often shirks from the third of those but David hasn't and I think that should be celebrated.
"If this film makes one kid get onto Google and find out more about that chapter in African history, then what a great service the filmmakers have provided."
Karl Quinn is on Facebook and on twitter @karlkwin
