by Zelie Bullen
Sled had originally been planning to use Craig as a zebra trainer, and I asked Genevieve if they still wanted that to happen. She said that would be up to the man now in charge of the zebra department, and Craig had to submit a résumé. Fortunately, his application was successful.
We arrived in South Africa in June 2003 to work on Racing Stripes, which was a very big animal movie. The animal department was extremely well treated, and we met many lovely people. We were given one or two days off every week, and on the weekends we went to game parks. We did a lot of travelling in a short space of time and met many animal people at the different game parks.
Among the first people we met were Jim and Silvana Stockley, based in KwaZulu-Natal. Craig knew of the Stockley family because Jim’s father had been friends with Stafford (in fact, it was during one of Stafford’s overseas trips that he met Jim’s family and was inspired to open his own drive-through safari parks in Australia and New Zealand), and also because Craig had worked for Jim’s cousins at Chipperfield’s Circus in New Zealand several years before. Craig and Jim had led almost parallel lives in different countries. They both came from circus families, had raised and trained various exotic animals, and as a result they basically understand each other without having to speak. They got along very well.
Jim is a little older than Craig, and is extremely articulate and very well educated. To this day, I turn to him for advice on many issues. For example, I had always thought it strange that the Bullens didn’t get along better, but Jim explained that that’s often the way with circus families as can happen in any family business.
Silvana also fascinated me—she was so youthful, always immaculately dressed, and full of energy. I love her attitude to life and enjoy her stories, her experiences, her humour and her company. She too had been raised in a circus family, and I found it so helpful to talk to them both. I knew I adored Craig and yet there were still things I didn’t understand about him. Jim and Silvana helped me by explaining, and they continue to help me understand many complicated situations at different times.
Jim and Silvana, along with Jim’s sister Jane and her husband Brian Boswell, run a zoo on their private property; but they also have a circus that travels throughout Africa, plus an animal-training facility, a large studio for filming bluescreen, a game ranch and a drive-through lion park.
For an outside film company, it makes sense to go and shoot films on the Stockley property, and many do. The Stockleys have the facilities, generations of animal knowledge, and animals on site that have been hand-raised, handled, trained and loved. Every time we go there, there is something new happening that we can be involved with, whether it’s getting slobbered on by a baby giraffe, looking after a range of big cat cubs, hand-raising young monkeys or a rhino, or taking a look at a new circus act in training. It’s a pretty unique set-up.
Their property also provides winter quarters for Jane and Brian’s circus. Jane is a delight to be around and her brother Jim is monumental in animal work throughout Africa and the world.
Working in South Africa was a totally different experience for me, compared to the last film I had been on in Africa. Running Free had been shot entirely in a secluded location in Namibia, whereas Racing Stripes was set on a farm near Durban and security there was very tight.
Before this job, I had no idea how dangerous South Africa was. The intensity and frequency of crime was shocking. Many of the South African tribes are still strongly influenced by witch doctors, some of whom are pretty shonky. It wasn’t unusual to read in the local newspaper about various barbaric practices, such as a witch doctor who had boiled up a child’s head for medicine. One potent belief in some of the communities is that you can be cured of AIDS if you sleep with a virgin, so rates of child rape are high and sometimes even babies are victims.
I adore South Africa. Although, I would not recommend it as a backpacker destination, I would highly recommend it for a well-planned holiday with a reputable travel and tourist company. On our days off, we used to rent a car and just set off with a map, heading towards a game park. On the way we sometimes had to stop and get petrol, and we usually had no idea what that petrol station would be like. We could easily find ourselves in a very hostile environment, wondering if we were going to be able to get out. Many of the people around us were clearly very poor, and you could often feel the hostility. At times we needed to act very carefully to be able to get out of those situations.
We were very lucky in a couple of instances. On one occasion, Craig, two American trainers and myself had got lost in Pietermaritzburg. We turned left instead of right at a particular intersection and the American boys began to freak out. We were in this very rundown area and they were yelling, ‘Wind up your windows! Let’s get out of here—look at how they’re looking at us.’ Craig was driving and even he was obviously uncomfortable, but at the time I just thought they were being dramatic.
When I told Jim that story, he looked at me and said, ‘Zelie, you need to learn about Africa—you need to develop a local antenna. If you are the only tourists in an area and you feel hostility, that is because you are in the wrong place and you may be in real danger.’
South Africa is potentially a very dangerous place, but it is also a place of beauty and magnificence, opportunity and adventure.
CHAPTER 37
Racing Stripes
Jim Stockley supplied some of the zebras used in Racing Stripes. Along with the rest of the zebra crew, Craig had a series of complicated situations to work out, often with the smaller barnyard animals. My job was to train the three brown miniature ponies who played ‘Tucker’, one of the main characters; they all had to be liberty trained. Often the horse and zebra departments had to pull together to achieve the sequences.
I was very grateful to Bobby Lovgren and Bill Lawrence, two of the horse trainers, for their continuous guidance. In Namibia in 1997 I had been Bobby’s assistant; I hadn’t seen or worked with him since, but he realised that I had continued to practise what I had originally learnt from him and that I had a ‘feel’ for it. Since Running Free, Bobby’s reputation as a liberty horse trainer had escalated, and he was now considered to be one of the best in the world. In the seven months we worked together in South Africa he took my training skills to another level.
Bill is an American Indian who was born and raised on the White Swan reservation in northern United States. He has generations of horsemanship behind him and has raised, handled and educated thousands of wild horses in his lifetime. I know it is not unusual for him to muster in thirty wild horses, and break them in on the reservation all at once. He has an innate well-tuned response to reading a horse, he is a natural.
I was on set with my ponies most days, often all day. It was right up my alley, although I have to say that my knees have never been the same since. When I first started training the ponies, I had been wondering what was wrong with them and why they didn’t obey my cues, but then I realised they couldn’t see me or my cues! I quickly learnt to lower my cues and spent much of my time kneeling or crouching and it was hard going on my knees and ankles.
It soon became apparent to me that I needed an assistant to help me with training the ponies. At the same time, the woman in charge of the barnyard department had become very bossy and demanding. She had told me not to do any training sessions with the ponies unless she was there, because she wanted to learn how I did it. I wasn’t comfortable with that, so I would shut the barn door and continue to train on my own, but then she would come in and tell me off.
In my career I’ve been lucky enough to have been shown a lot of training techniques and methods by various people, and also how to handle various situations, but it was never because I’d demanded that they show me their secrets! Professional trainers are generally private about showing their techniques to strangers—they first need to know the person’s capabilities. Chris Anderson taught me, very early on, that in the film industry attitude is ninety per cent of how good you will get. I learnt that, w
hen I arrived on someone else’s turf, ‘rolling over and showing your belly’—never being presumptuous, and never pretending to know more than I did—resulted in almost everyone I met being very generous to me with their knowledge and experiences.
I went to talk to Bobby. He had predominantly trained me and he didn’t want his knowledge passed on willy-nilly, so he sorted it out with the producer, Lloyd Phillips. Bobby also knew that I needed an assistant but there wasn’t enough time to train anyone. Then I had a thought. I told him I knew of a horse girl from Australia I’d worked with before—maybe she could be my assistant. I spoke with Lloyd, and then I called Brit.
I’d heard of Brit Sooby for years before I actually met her. She and Tamzin had been best friends at school, and Tamzin had told me all about her. When Tamzin got married, Brit and I were both her bridesmaids; I got to know her a bit then and thought she was really sweet.
Later, Brit had moved east to become a stunt performer. I had welcomed her into my home and introduced her to people and stunt coordinators whom I felt would help her, and away she went. She is a lovely girl and we’d quickly become friends.
After Craig and I had left for South Africa, she’d had a very emotional breakup with her first serious long-time boyfriend. She called to talk to me; she was devastated and didn’t know what to do. Her world had been tipped upside down and she was thinking of travelling, so I suggested she might like Africa.
In August, Craig and I picked her up from Durban and we asked how her flight was. ‘I hate those long economy flights,’ she replied. ‘Is there anywhere we can get a soy latte?’ Craig and I looked at each other and thought ‘Uh-oh.’ We were in Africa; someone could well kill all three of us and take our money and steal our clothes—and she was after a soy latte?
She looked at our faces and asked, ‘Is that a bad question?’
But as it turned out Brit’s easygoing personality meant she fitted in with the crew, and she adapted to South Africa quickly. As my assistant, she was a huge help.
One of the sad things for me on Racing Stripes was learning that I couldn’t help every single person that I came into contact with.
There was a bit of theft going on within the animal department, and one of the stable staff was sacked to be made an example of. People had been stealing bread and other things and this particular guy was sacked because he had used some shoe polish. A trainer had asked him to darken some rope with the polish so it didn’t look brand new, and then he’d used some of it to polish his own shoes. I really rebelled against that, saying that I didn’t think it was fair, but I was told repeatedly to stay out of it and that I didn’t know how things worked in South Africa.
The guy who got the sack hung around for weeks, begging for his job back; then he started to work for free, wanting to pay for the shoe polish he’d used—anything to rectify what he had done. Even when we moved locations, he continued to turn up, but he wasn’t allowed to return. In situations where many people are poor, if you steal or do something wrong, there is always someone there to fill your shoes. Whatever he had earned wasn’t much, but it was important to him.
He seemed like such a lovely guy. His English was poor, but he always smiled when I said good morning to him, unlike a lot of the local workers, who would look down at the ground. Understandably, some of them were hostile towards white people, while for others it is part of their culture not to look a woman in the eye—they think it is disrespectful. Or they might feel that you are trying to pity them, which is an insult to them also.
There were all sorts of cultural issues and problems. I didn’t fully understand it. Seeing people be treated unfairly was very hard. I used to spend some of my living-away-from-home allowance at the store on things for the staff, such as chocolate and locally made jewellery, until I was asked to slow down with that as well. I learnt there were several reasons for that: I could be taken advantage of; I would be seen as weaker than the others, so I would get pestered and hassled; or I was making myself different from everyone else, more vulnerable. Some of the local people told me that I was setting myself up to be stolen from as I would be identified as having money. I just had to make myself back off, and that was hard.
We were working in a well-guarded compound provided with vehicles, drivers and security guards. As a result, we had a false sense of security. Craig, Brit and I used to go jogging along our road. The Van Gessels, the lovely people who owned the B&B where we were staying, said that it was fine to do so as long as we were back before dusk. ‘Don’t stop and talk to anyone,’ they advised us, ‘and if a car slows down, don’t look at the car—just keep jogging.’ It all seemed a bit over-protective, I thought.
It was a lovely little road and we had been jogging along it for months, but then Craig read in the paper that a man had been found there eating another human being. Boiling in a pot next to him were parts of the person he had been eating—right where we went running. I thought, ‘We’re fine jogging along here? When the people are eating each other on the side of the road?’
We worked long hours on Racing Stripes, but we were well looked after and we had a lot of fun. It was the first time Craig had been to any part of Africa and he loved it, as I did.
At the end of production, the hardest thing for me was leaving behind those ponies I had trained. My career is a childhood dream come true, but there is one major setback. When I work with an animal for any period, I usually end up falling totally in love with it. I go in knowing it’s not my animal, but when I form a relationship with that animal, I feel obliged to ensure that it continues to have a good life. That animal has learnt to trust me. Just because production has packed up and gone home doesn’t mean that I can leave it until I feel comfortable about the sort of life it will go on leading. Saying goodbye to that animal at the end of the job can be completely devastating for me, but my sadness is eased somewhat when I know that the animal is going to a loving, knowledgeable home.
Two of the ponies, Mini-Me and Austin Powers, were returned to their owner in South Africa, who had a great home. However, we didn’t know where the third pony, Ben Hur, was going to go. Although I would have loved to bring him home with me, we couldn’t import him into Australia because of quarantine restrictions against African horse sickness, a deadly virus spread by insects that has no known treatment.
I was delighted when Jane and Brian Boswell bought him for their circus. Once I showed Jane all of Ben’s cues, he fitted into circus life very quickly. He still loves the attention he draws when he performs in front of a large crowd, and Jane has a team of six miniature ponies who have become Ben Hur’s family.
CHAPTER 38
Fort Worth and Las Vegas
We enjoyed being with the Stockleys so much that, when filming finished on Racing Stripes, we didn’t leave Africa straightaway but instead took the opportunity to explore other countries nearby, Zambia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, before returning to the Stockleys’ for Christmas.
During the filming of Racing Stripes, Tad Griffith had called and asked if I wanted to be part of an international trick-riding act he was putting together for the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo in Texas at the end of January. I didn’t need to be asked twice; I was very excited by the prospect, but also nervous. I am never at my fittest when I’m shooting a film and working long hours, not to mention eating a lot of great catering food. On the other hand, I couldn’t believe my luck: although I felt unfit, I had with me in South Africa our very own personal trainer—Brit! Utilising her expertise and experience, Craig and I both got into shape before the end of filming.
After Christmas we left South Africa and went home for a couple of days, repacked for a northern hemisphere winter and flew to the US then headed to Tad and Wendy’s. There we met up with the one of the other trick riders, Tonia Forsberg.
Tad worked with Tonia and me, rehearsing for two solid weeks. The pressure was on, and I loved it. It was going to be the first time Tad had performed at his old stomping ground, Fort Worth, since hi
s mum had passed away, and I was honoured to be involved.
We hauled Tad’s horses the 2200 kilometres down to Texas in a gooseneck trailer with Tad, Wendy and their two little boys. Tonia had left a day or two before us in her own truck and trailer; it was a long way to go by herself. When we arrived, we met the third woman of our team, Niki Cammaert, who came down from Canada.
We were in the opening parade and then we had a twelve-minute act; during our trick-riding act we each had individual tricks that Tad had chosen for us to perform. When we became too sore from doing a particular trick we would swap them round. On my first night, just as I was about to go into that amazing arena, I remembered being up there in the audience with Heidi all those years ago and thinking what an amazing trick-riding arena it was—and now I was about to ride into it. It was the most exhilarating moment.
In the buzz of the live-show environment, Tad was in his element—managing us and each of his horses, looking after costuming, rehearsing, performing and socialising. We rehearsed each day before performing.
Craig and Wendy were invaluable as the ground crew, both of them again proving themselves completely dependable and wonderful. As had happened with Jim, Craig also became very close friends with Tad; it was as though they were family, in a way. Of course, Tad also came from a live-show background. He knew exactly what it was like: you travel, you pick up the animal poo, you perform and give it everything you have; then you get in your truck and do it all again in a new town. I could see a lot of similarities between Craig and Tad, and I think Wendy and I are alike in some ways too. Like us, they tend to ‘live in the moment’, and they obtain a lot of joy from their lives and from the people around them.