Sources 's
The Grizzly King (1916) American author
James Oliver Curwood's novella
The Grizzly King was published in 1916. The story was based on several trips he took to British Columbia, and the young hunter, called Jim in the book, is based on Curwood himself. However, many of its plot elements—mainly dealing with the friendship between the bear cub and the adult male grizzly—were fabricated. Curwood's biographer, Judith A. Eldridge, believes that the incident in which the hunter is spared by a bear is based on truth, a fact that was later related to Jean-Jacques Annaud. He stated during an interview that he "was given a letter from Curwood's granddaughter revealing that what happened in the story happened to him. He was hunting bear, as he had done often, and lost his rifle down a cliff. Suddenly, a huge bear confronted him and menaced him, but for reasons Curwood could never know, spared his life." Shortly after the book's publication, Curwood—once an adamant hunter—became a supporter of wildlife conservation. Brach and Annaud decided to set the film in the late 19th century to create a perception of true wilderness, especially for the human characters. In addition, while both the bears and the two hunters are named in the script, only Tom is named in the film. The bear cub is referred to in the script as Youk, and the adult male grizzly is known as Kaar. Tchéky Karyo's character is said to have been called Tom and Jack Wallace's is Bill. These names differ from Curwood's novel; for example, the cub is known as Muskwa in the novel, and his adult companion is called Thor.
Development After the commercial success of Jean-Jacques Annaud's previous films, including the Academy Award-winning
Black and White in Color (1976) and
Quest for Fire (1981), producer
Claude Berri offered to produce Annaud's next project, no matter the cost. The French filmmaker had first considered the idea of making a film that included mammal communication through behavior, rather than language, while working on
Quest for Fire. He became particularly interested in making an animal "the star of a psychological drama", so he "decided to do an entertaining, commercial adventure and psychological film" that would have an animal hero. He discussed this idea with his longtime collaborator, screenwriter Gerard Brach, who within a few days sent Annaud a copy of
The Grizzly King, to which the filmmaker quickly agreed. Although Brach began writing the screenplay in late 1981, Annaud took on another project, that of directing a
film adaptation of
Umberto Eco's book
The Name of the Rose. Between preparing for and filming his next film, Annaud traveled and visited zoos in order to research animal behavior. In an interview he later gave with the
American Humane Association, Annaud stated: "Each time I was fascinated with the tigers, to a point that I thought to do a movie called
The Tiger instead of
The Bear. In those days I felt that the bear, because they're so often vertical, would give me a better identification, or would provide more instant identification from the viewers." The finished script was presented to Berri in early 1983.
Filming , a mountain in the
Dolomites in
South Tyrol, Italy Shot from 13 May to late October 1987,
The Bear was filmed almost entirely in the Italian and Austrian areas of the
Dolomites. Several additional scenes were also filmed in a
Belgian Zoo in early 1988. The crew consisted of 200 individuals. Husband and wife team Tony and Heidi Lüdi served as the film's production designer and art director, respectively, alongside set decorator
Bernhard Henrich. In their book,
Movie Worlds: Production Design in Film, the Lüdis state that as the film's production designers, they "were constantly faced with the question 'What did you have to do?' To which we answered 'We turned the Alps into British Columbia.'" Cinematographer Philippe Rousselot noted that "the only thing Jean-Jacques was unable to control" while filming in the Bavarian Alps "was the weather: he did not manage to have the clouds take part in pre-production meetings." While
animatronic bears were used for several of the fighting scenes, live animals—including bears, dogs, horses, and honey bees—were used on location for filming. A trained, tall
Kodiak bear named
Bart played the adult male grizzly, while a young female bear named Douce ("Sweet" in English) took on the role of the cub, with several alternates. Three trainers worked with Bart (including his owner Doug Seus), eleven with the cubs, three with the dogs, and three with the horses. One day during production, Bart injured Annaud while the two posed for photographers; Annaud's wounds, which included claw-marks on his backside, had to be drained with a
shunt for two months. In addition to the real bears, there were animatronic bears which were used in specific scenes that were made by
Jim Henson's Creature Shop. == Themes ==