Did you feed it cocaine?
Oh, shit.
Elizabeth Banks called me,
she's like, "You'll be mauled by a coked-up bear.
"But, really, everyone gets mauled by a coked-up bear."
A lot of us don't make it, and the ones that are left
really are the people you might be rooting for.
Me.
I really felt like this was the opportunity
to really layer up, like, real true comedy, hard laughs,
laugh out loud moments
with real suspense and gore and have a great time.
Like, this bear is gonna fuck some people up.
For Peter's death scene,
I knew Jesse was just gonna go for it from the beginning.
So we're here on set, which is a forest.
The first half of this movie was me and Margo and Jesse
in the woods, doing ridiculous things.
We've been shooting this bear attack that happens in a tree
for about four days now.
Now we're getting to the part where things really get ugly, literally.
This is a guy who thought that bears were his friend
and that they would never hurt him.
Today is a sad day for Peter.
Everything he thought he knew about bears is false.
Especially when a bear has had too much cocaine.
He was game to go up in that tree, like, for real.
So I said, "All right. ” He went to a bunch of rehearsals
where they put on the harness and they strung him up.
You're safe. Bears can't climb trees.
Of course they can!
The scariest part for me was actually falling backwards.
God damn, I'm scared.
It's sort of like a trust fall, but there's no one catching you.
It's just a wire and you're also 30 feet up in the air.
They put all these "just-in-case” mats down at the base of the tree
and that actually made me more nervous.
There's a bit of special effects makeup on this.
When you're in a movie where a bear is gonna maul people,
a lot of people don't know this, they don't actually let the bear maul you.
We tied a whole blood rig to him
that was gonna pump blood all over him, upside down.
We brought this bad boy out. Each one can be controlled separately.
You've got an on-off valve and we ran about eight meters of beer line
down to a Pegler, brought it up to a four-bar and opened the valve.
It's a lot of blood
which tastes really good actually, it's very sugary.
He had to pretend to be eaten by a bear the entire time.
He gave it everything and the performance is incredible.
We really don't cut away from it for a long time.
We really wanted the audience to be in it with him
and the horror of what was happening to him.
No, no!
Get off of me! No, no!
Get off of me!
So me versus the bear, um, went pretty good.
I put up a good fight.
Almost survived. I'm dead.
The Visitor Center attack, I imagined it from minute one.
I remember drawing a picture in my script of the room
and that we were gonna, sort of, create a very flat piece
where we could see everything in the same frame.
Once we built the set, the camera actually went into the fireplace
so that we could get the wide angle lens that I really wanted
and lens the room properly.
In this scene, Cokey the bear is trapped inside a store room
and one of our characters walks in, sees the bear, starts stepping back.
Then the bear knocks the door down, forcing the actor on the ground.
Three, two, one!
To achieve this, we're using a ram,
which we can build up to 500 PSI or as low as 10 PSI.
That way, we've total control over how much force is placed on the door
to remove it from its hinges.
Fall down on the ground, have the door on me,
and Allan, who's the nicest guy in the world,
plays the bear,
and he's jumping up and down on me.
And they have, like, a mat between me and the door
that's kind of taking some of the pressure off.
It's been very scary and it helps…
It helps the acting
because there's actually someone on top of me jumping up and down.
This is our drool rig. It's simply an oversized syringe.
We place our drool in here and just press this,
and the drool is forced out either side.
I am pinned underneath the door
and he's firing the drool at me.
Squeezing it out as if the bear is drooling.
In this case, we've actually made it vegan-friendly
because in this day and age we weren't sure
were there any dietary requirements for the actor,
so we decided to play it safe.
So this is fully and totally vegan drool.
I've developed a taste for it, actually.
That's what they're giving me for lunch now.
They stopped giving me food.
They just give me little cups of the fake drool.
The exciting thing to me was figuring out how to shoot Ponytail in the head.
I was, like, I want full-on camera and I want his brains to come at camera.
That's a fucking bear.
The prosthetics rig, everything,
it's the first time dealing with something like that
and I couldn't have been in better hands and the people are so professional.
The design, it was so cool.
I was like a kid in a candy store, a very bloody, bloody candy store.
Ponytail had a gunshot wound to his head
that was made by Weta and applied by Katie Derwin.
The bit where the skin, it's like…
And we've got a bit of bone here. Well, it's gnarly, isn't it?
That's a very creative piece and a heavy piece to apply.
Weta came up with a great application method
using lace and clips for the back of the piece
because it's quite weighty.
And then Katie Derwin here in Ireland did a beautiful application.
So I spent half my time walking around with this massive wound on my head.
Which… I was kind of like Santa Claus on set.
People just come and take photos with me.
The best thing that happened on set was Ranger Liz.
I mean, her reaction to shooting this guy in the head,
when she screams, that just came out of her.
What the fuck?
The ambulance sequence, my favorite sequence in the film.
It was what I was most excited to shoot.
And I remember saying, "This is like Fast & Furious,
"If instead of two cars, one of the cars is a bear."
The ambulance was, sort of, the most complicated, I would say,
being that you're inside the ambulance.
We have to shoot all the second unit,
which is the action on the outside of the ambulance.
Plate shots to put the cocaine bear in, chasing the ambulance
and make it believable.
Jesus Christ! Shoot it! Shoot it!
Oh, shit!
Poor Beth, the ambulance driver, is like,
"What's… I don't even know why the bear's chasing us."
Nobody does. You have Ranger Liz trying to shoot it.
We already know how well that goes.
This woman couldn't shoot a stop sign that was in front of her nose.
Liz meets her end on a gurney, being dragged with her face in the gravel,
slashed up by the bear and not pretty.
I told Elizabeth Banks,
I said, "I didn't know that I would have to do that."
"Or that, or that.” She said, "Well, you read the script.”
I've done many stunts, you know, I'm a pro at it, really.
Can't even get my leg uncrossed.
And then sweet Scott Seiss' character just getting yelled at by everybody
and just trying to figure out what the heck's going on.
They had me strapped into the back of the ambulance.
I was standing on the back, they were driving down the road.
And I swear to God, it felt like they were going 100 miles an hour.
Like, I was getting so much adrenaline.
I think we hit, like, 20 miles per hour, maximum.
It doesn't end well for me, I'll tell you that, it does not end well.
I'm in the back, screaming.
Bear catches up, jumps in the back of the ambulance
and basically, you know, tears me to shreds.
And then it crashes and my partner in the front goes through the windshield.
It's pretty nasty.
It was really important to me
that we show the fallibility of the humans in the story,
that this bear is not the big problem here.
The humans are the problem.
So, to me, it was really important
that some of the humans be the reason why people die.
So Ranger Liz shooting people, the car accident,
the flipping out of the gurney, all of those things
became, just like, how do we make sure
that we surprise the audience
and we don't just have a bear killing machine.