Here’s how Vice Principals pulled off those insane tiger scenes
By Erin Qualey
Danny McBride.
photo: Fred Norris. Acquired via HBO Media Relations site.
The series finale of Vice Principals brought something brand new to the table of half-hour comedies: a freaking tiger. How’d they do it? We’ve got the scoop.
And, like that, Vice Principals will go down in history as a wild, boundary-pushing comedy. Caution: If you haven’t seen the series finale of Vice Principals yet, you might want to turn back now or face the wrath of some psycho chick in a wedding dress…
In the final minutes of the series, frenemies Neal Gamby (Danny McBride) and Lee Russell (Walton Goggins) team up to stop the whackadoo Jen Abbott (Edi Patterson) from wreaking havoc on the North Jackson High graduation. (We had an eye on her since the beginning.) Too late. Jen swoops in and unleashes all her crazy by letting a rented tiger out of her cage and into the school. Insanity ensues.
More from HBO
- Hacks season 3 gets exciting release update: Here’s what we know
- Blue Beetle gets disappointing Max release update
- Friends snags No.1 spot on U.S. streaming services – and we’re not surprised
- Will there be a Steven Universe revival? Rebecca Sugar says “if there’s a huge amount of public demand”
- Industry season 3 is not coming until 2024: Here’s what we know about the release
Both Lee and Neal have showdowns with the tiger, with quite different results. While shocking, the tiger climax marks a fitting yet genuinely unexpected conclusion to a show about friendship and competition in a small town. Since it was so unique, the sequence got us thinking about how exactly the show pulled this off. That tiger sure looked real, right? But it couldn’t be. But what if it was…?
Director David Gordon Green, a frequent collaborator with Vice Principals co-creators McBride and Jody Hill, directed seven out of the eighteen episodes of the show, including the finale. He spoke with us this week about how he and his crew brought those insane tiger scenes to life for the shocking – and awesome – climax of the series.
Hidden Remote: Vice Principals was conceived as a two-season series, and it ended with a bang. So it must have been exciting to direct that final episode.
David Gordon Green: “Absolutely. It’s a very complicated series, but it’s a ton of fun. It’s one of those things where, as a reader, when I get the scripts and open them up, I never know what I’m getting into. Then, all of a sudden, you get to that climactic action and you think… really? In a half-hour comedy? Let’s go!”
HR: In particular, the inclusion of the tiger seems like something that’s never been seen in a comedy setting before. How did you pull that off? Is the tiger CGI or is it real?
DGG: “It was a little bit of everything. We had two tigers. They were lovely. To me, it was just hilarious because we’d show up at this high school, and the most unlikely thing to see roaming a high school hallway is a tiger. It was cool. They were really sweet and really well trained. Like, if we needed the tiger to roar, the trainer would do a little dance, and it would roar. Some of the time we had a cage constructed – well, obviously there’s a tiger cage for a good bit of when the tiger is on screen – but we had another one constructed for the crew for where the camera would be. It was designed for security, but these were extremely well domesticated tigers that were charming and adorable and lovely to have on set. We’d just rotate whenever one would be tired and we’d bring in the other tiger.”
“We tried to do as much as practically as possible. Of course, any time you see a human interacting with the tiger it’s done with relatively simple split screen. We’d do a pass with the tiger, and then a pass with the actor there, and in post-production, this company Cutting Edge out of Australia did the visual effects. We looked to Life of Pi a bit, so when we needed viciousness or an expression that could be a bit more finessed in terms of tiger performance, that’s when we’d use CGI.”
HR: Since both of the tigers were super sweet, it sounds like they were good actors.
DGG: “They sit and pace on command, and they can stop and give the camera a look. They’re pros! Any time somebody is seemingly face-to-face or interacting with the tiger though is a blend of effects. There’s very little 100% tiger creation in the physical effects, but that was always there when we needed it.”
HR: There were two parts in the finale where the tiger actually attacks someone. First, she attacks her trainer, who obviously deserved it, and then Russell. Both times it looks like the tiger is actually eating something.
DGG: “The trainer would put something [the tiger] liked to eat down, like chicken, and that would be incentive for the tiger to go fetch a snack. So it’s basically like playing Frisbee with a dog in the yard. These are wonderful feline friends. A lot was learned on Life of Pi, specifically for the world of visual effects.”
HR: Life of Pi won a bunch of Oscars, so it’s definitely the gold standard for tigers in Hollywood.
DGG: “It was certainly a technical reference. Cutting Edge was a company I had worked with several times. It’s always an education for us. Obviously you always have to prioritize safety for the animal and ethics for the animal, and safety and ethics for the crew, but being able to be at a point in technology where you can have the option to take over and get the scene to be that much more excruciating and intense, we really wanted it to not play like a laugh-out-loud moment, but to play it dramatic and real. As absurd as it is, it wouldn’t work if it wasn’t successful on a technical level, it wouldn’t work on a dramatic level.”
HR: The incident with the tiger definitely speaks to Russell’s core. He hired the tiger, and then when it gets loose, he tries to “tame” it using his zen tricks. That moment is so true to him that it almost plays out like the climax for his character as a whole.
DGG: “When I opened the script, I was like ‘huh, how the hell are we gonna do this?’. And it’s really a testament to HBO and the crew for letting a show like this really reach for the stars for how we’re going to execute something that’s really like nothing else on TV. It’s always an education. I’m scratching my head, thinking, ok we’ve got six days per episode and a limited budget, but we want this to feel epic. So we huddle with as many like-minded people as we can and come up with a cool game plan.”
Related Story: Will school ever be back in session for Vice Principals?
HR: Because of the popularity of CGI, practical effects are kind of going away a bit, so it’s cool to see that you used a real tiger in the finale.
DGG: “For great reason, the treatment of animals is very regulated on set, so you want to have an environment where it’s like playing with the tiger like a dog with a Frisbee and then adding vicious sound effects and things like that. I know for a lot of the projects with a concept that’s a bit more aggressive, they want to generate it all artificially. We’re getting close. It’s not 100% yet. If you can get enough real elements and render them correctly, you can get away with it. Ten years ago I would have rolled my eyes at [animating] an animal with fur, or any of the more specific detailed elements to animate. That gets really complicated. But then again I was watching some massive Marvel movie the other day, and I was thinking, ‘why didn’t you just shoot on top of a building?’ [laughs]”
HR: Right! So it’s kind of exciting to know when practical effects are being used on a show like Vice Principals.
DGG: “I’m pretty old school, so as long as there’s something to learn I’m there. We just try to keep it all efficient and ethical.”
‘Vice Principals’ seasons 1 and 2 are currently available for streaming on HBO GO and HBO NOW.