EXCLUSIVE: Slithering into SXSW this afternoon at the Alamo Lamar, The Python Hunt is a documentary that might do for the Burmese Python what Jaws did 50 years ago for the Great White Shark.
The acquisition title is the third documentary backed by Artists Equity, the company hatched by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Redbird Capital’s Gerry Cardinale. Directed by Xander Robin from an idea by producer Lance Oppenheim, the docu lays out as a Hands On A Hardbody-type quest as amateurs and pros gather in the Everglades to hunt and kill the Burmese Pythons that local government maintain got into the waterways and has decimated the indigenous creatures that called the swamps home. How does one capture a Burmese Python that grows as long as 20 feet with a propensity to coil around its enemies and squeeze the life out of them? Says one young hunter: “You grab the tail and tire it out until you can grab the head.” While the Python is not venomous (other snake species in the Everglades are), it delivers a nasty bite that is treated as obligatory shrapnel by the hunters. Some of the competitors begin to question whether, to mix animal metaphors, the Burmese Python has been a scapegoat for local government and industry, a cover for practices that include dumping pesticides and other harmful substances into those swamps. Here, director Xander Robin explains how he ended up in the Everglades for more than a week of nightly hunts. His narrative work included the Venice pic Are We Not Cats and the HBO series Chillin Island.
DEADLINE: One of your characters says you loathe snakes, but you can’t look away from them. How did you find this snake tale?
Xander Robin: I grew up in South Florida, and knew about the invasive reptiles in South Florida. It’s been a thing. I’m a filmmaker in general, not just a documentary filmmaker. I was trying to write narrative scripts about the reptile trade, the exotic pet trade. My friend Lance Oppenheim approached me basically with the concept of, what if we made a documentary about the Python Hunt competition? He didn’t feel like he would be right to direct it and thought I should. And yeah, I was interested in it, and joined the competition one year just to film a little bit, take some photos, but mostly just meet people. I met two of the subjects that were in the film, and it convinced me there was a story that was more than I expected. I thought it was mostly professionals going out hunting pythons. I thought I was more interested in the pythons than the people back then. But I became more interested in the people, after experiencing the competition.
DEADLINE: How many Pythons did you personally capture in your year in the competition?
ROBIN: Zero.
DEADLINE: Why did it become such an exercise in futility for you? If I saw one of those snakes, or an alligator in the dark night, I would run the other way…
ROBIN: Well, they are well camouflaged, and they are exactly the same color of the grass. They don’t shine that much. And also, no one really knows what they’re doing. I was like, are there really that many pythons out there? I met Richard and Jimbo that first year, and Jimbo basically had views opposite everyone else [who was gung ho]. He was flirting with those opposite views at the time, which had developed as we filmed with him. I became interested in what was true and what was not true, and what the government was saying. We are all aware there’s issues in the Everglades and it’s nice for the government to say all the problems are the fault of this one snake. And of course, we all hate snakes. We have since Genesis.
DEADLINE: The sharks of the land.
ROBIN: Sharks get a bad rap too.
DEADLINE: You are filming all these people wandering into the Everglades with bare feet, with other snakes in there that are venomous and poisonous. How concerned were you these people were going to get hurt?
ROBIN: I tried to be as concerned as the subjects personally, but it doesn’t stop production to be more concerned. In this day and age, you shouldn’t ever laugh away safety concerns. But I think sometimes because of the propaganda, safety concerns get a little overblown. Everyone wanted to hire medics and all this stuff. And I think the first few days we were out there, our producer did hire a person for safety, and then it became clear we didn’t need that person because I was able to understand what to be afraid of. And honestly, like Toby says in the film, people are probably the biggest thing to be afraid of, more than stepping on venomous snakes. The subjects, even the ones that were barefoot, they were all like, I do have to watch out for moccasins.
DEADLINE: Any close calls?
ROBIN: We did see a ton of venomous snakes. I did walk into the water in the middle of the night, and that was scary. I think our DP was scared of alligators, but we were with subjects that were very, very knowledgeable. But you saw in the film, the Cottonmouth scene was scary. You’re filming someone jumping out of the car and trying to catch a snake that turns out to be venomous. We’d had a whole safety presentation that day. That was the first day of the challenge. We all talked as a team, what to do, and then it was the subject that made the error. It was a close call. I’m glad we didn’t have to go to the hospital. We had a whole protocol though. We took it very, very seriously, is all I’m trying to say. But it was an inherently dangerous project.
DEADLINE: Some of these python hunters are so compelling. Maybe none more than Anne, this 80-ish woman who is with Toby, who comes for the sole purpose of driving a knife into the brain of a Burmese Python. She sees one early and is captivated by its beauty, and you thought maybe she’d back off.
ROBIN: It’s such an interesting thing with reptiles and invasive species. The people that end up being the most moved to remove them are the ones that are actually often reptile lovers, animal lovers, people that really appreciate how beautiful the creature is. They’re also the same ones that are willing to go out there and do it. And I think Miss Anne was just longing to see a snake, after five days of searching, and finally saw one and just thought it was beautiful but she still wanted to pith one too. She was hilarious.
DEADLINE: You show opponents of these snake hunts who believe the snakes are being scapegoated, and that pollutants finding their way into the swamps could be more responsible for the wildlife disappearing. Where did you come out in that regard? Is the Python situation as bad as they make it out to be, strangling all the other wildlife?
ROBIN: I agree that there’s definitely, from what everyone said and from what I saw, not much wildlife in the Everglades. And the media wants you to believe it’s all the Python’s fault. I don’t really think life is ever that simple. I found the narratives that other people were saying were interesting. I don’t know if all of them are true. I think the idea that, yeah, maybe there’s sugar runoff from Big Sugar, maybe there’s too much herbicide being sprayed because there’s incentives to spray it. Maybe it’s a lot of development. Maybe they’re messing up the flood control; they don’t know how to deal with the droughts and then the flooding and all that stuff. And maybe all of that has also led to some of the population collapse. I think it’s compelling of an argument that it’s easy for people to wrap their head around hating a snake, and blaming that instead of something boring and in the weeds. And also because the government gets their own funding for this, they want to seem like the heroes. So they don’t want to say it’s their own fault, why the animals are gone. They want to blame a snake and then create a program to remove the snake. Not to say that the snake is innocent. I guess it’s innocent that it didn’t ask to be there, but it is doing some damage.
DEADLINE: The docu says right off that there’s 100,000 of these things and they keep reproducing and they’re out of control, with no natural predator to keep them in check. And so this hunt, 209 are caught and killed. Does that make any difference in solving the problem or is it propaganda?
ROBIN: The Python competition definitely doesn’t do much damage. We don’t cover it as much, but every year they hire contractors and those people are paid to go out there and they do a better job than the Python challenge. So the Python challenge is basically a publicity stunt.
DEADLINE: This guy Toby, who finds the snake for Anne to kill, he hangs it out the window and the python coils around his arm tight enough to shut off the circulation as he tries to control the head to prevent being bitten again What was that like?
ROBIN: We love Toby. We trusted Toby. We were in the car with him, saying, are you good? Need help? And he’s like, no, I’m good. I’m good. I’m good. He just kept moving the snake, basically giving himself some slack every now and then. But yeah, we were just happy that he caught a snake.
DEADLINE: It bit him, more than once it looked like.
ROBIN: I think for some of them, getting bitten is a badge of honor, if it’s a small snake. Over 10 feet long, I think those bites hurt.
The Python Hunt
Courtesy of Artists Equity
