How we trained the cock­roach in Saint Maud

Occu­pa­tion: Bug Wran­gler. Well, on this occa­sion any­way. I’ve worked with every­thing from tigers to camels and croc­o­diles, but these days I spe­cialise in the small­er crit­ters that most oth­er peo­ple don’t like: bugs, rep­tiles and rodents. I joke that some­one has to do it, but the truth is these ani­mals have always been my favourite; I have a pas­sion for shar­ing them with peo­ple and chal­leng­ing the mis­con­cep­tions asso­ci­at­ed with them. The irony being that this niche most­ly involves enhanc­ing the fear fac­tor on a film production.

Such was the case with Saint Maud, on which I proud­ly rep­re­sent­ed Stunt­dogs and Ani­mals. If you’ve seen the film you’ll have no doubt have noticed the cock­roach, Nan­cy, who’s even cred­it­ed for her stel­lar per­for­mance – though to real­ly appre­ci­ate why she’s spe­cial you’d have had to be there behind the scenes where every­one fell in love with her.

Most folk don’t realise that small­er ani­mals such as mice, rats and even bugs can be trained to per­form spe­cif­ic actions and behav­iours on set like dogs can, but with the cor­rect prep and han­dling tech­niques it’s amaz­ing what you can achieve. Prep reduces fear and stress on the day and pro­longs the animal’s lifes­pan, but it also means the mon­ey shots are bagged much faster and more successfully.

Species selec­tion is every­thing, so liais­ing with the pro­duc­tion team in advance is key. Dif­fer­ent species have vary­ing looks and char­ac­ter­is­tics (jumpy or calm, for exam­ple) and there’s dif­fer­ences between the sex­es also. With bugs, I pre­fer females as they tend to be less ner­vous. I love Pep­pered cock­roach­es as they are winged and so look more authen­tic than their more com­mon­ly used Mada­gas­can hiss­ing cousins, but are still large and slow­er-mov­ing than most oth­er winged species so read bet­ter on-cam­era and are more manageable.

For any assign­ment I will prep (or audi­tion, if you like) sev­er­al indi­vid­u­als to select the one with the best apti­tude for the task and always make sure there’s at least one back up, in case it gets tired on the day. They learn in baby steps, with time­outs in a safebox or a sip of nec­tar as rewards.

The sequences in Saint Maud were done on green screen because Nan­cy was too heavy to do crawl across the ceil­ing for real unaid­ed. With green-screen fab­ric on the floor and light­ing direct­ly above, she had to walk in an exact straight line sev­er­al times. To achieve this, we put a mark­er at each end and I coached her to show the route, repeat­ing a cou­ple of times so it was famil­iar and so she could lay a scent trail down to follow.

Sure enough, when prompt­ed she then walked the route unaid­ed to my assis­tant at the oth­er side who passed her back to me to repeat. We used a sim­i­lar method for get­ting her to span the room, though we had the added chal­lenge of it being a rel­a­tive­ly large open area (their instincts usu­al­ly com­pel them to bolt for the edge of a room rather than cross an open space) and the rug pre­sent­ed quite a step for her to crawl up and over, where her nat­ur­al instinct was to instead skirt round the edge.

For the sink shots we con­struct­ed a hid­den ramp in the sink to help her climb out and again showed her the route so she could con­fi­dent­ly walk it a few times for that love­ly reveal, again get­ting the per­fect posi­tion­ing for pulling focus at the right moment. The crew had wise­ly sched­uled three hours to get all the shots need­ed, but we achieved every­thing and more with­in an hour.

I was first intro­duced to the world of train­ing ani­mals for film back in 2002 while doing work expe­ri­ence at the UK’s only pur­pose-built zoo that pro­vides wild ani­mals for film. I start­ed a six-week pro­gramme but nev­er left, return­ing after com­plet­ing my course and lat­er doing a degree in Ani­mal Behaviour.

In the years that fol­lowed I dipped in and out of the film world in between work­ing at a num­ber of pub­lic zoos where I trained and pre­sent­ed ani­mals for edu­ca­tion­al dis­plays, and today I free­lance what I do, liv­ing with a col­lec­tion of over 70 heads of ani­mals (if you count colonies as ​“one”) rep­re­sent­ing some 40 species.

Most of my work comes through some of the indus­tries most high­ly regard­ed ani­mal agen­cies with whom I’ve con­nect­ed over the years, and I also con­tin­ue to pro­vide ani­mals inde­pen­dent­ly for pho­tog­ra­phers, kids par­ties, cor­po­rate events and also schools and col­leges, lec­tur­ing up to uni­ver­si­ty lev­el and beyond.