Softcover

ISBN 10: 155704631X ISBN 13: 9781557046314

Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2004

The lavishly illustrated companion book to the new film by the award-winning director of Quest for Fire, The Bear, and The Name of the Rose—about twin tiger brothers in the jungles of French Indochina in the colonial period, a major family summer movie from Universal Pictures.

Five months shooting a major feature film in Thailand and Cambodia, amidst the temples of Angkor, with tigers imported from France and the US was an extraordinary, even life-changing experience for the international cast, starring Guy Pearce (Memento, L.A. Confidential), and a crew of more than 400 people. Their leader was the intrepid director/writer/producer Jean-Jacques Annaud who has always been willing to undergo enormous hardship in order to bring the film that he has imagined to the screen, as evidenced by his visionary work on such movies as Quest for Fire, The Name of the Rose, The Bear, and Seven Years in Tibet.

In riveting detail and fully illustrated with stills, drawings, historical paintings, and images that inspired and tracked the process, this beautiful book covers the entire moviemaking odyssey, from pre-production, begun more than a year prior to shooting, through the final post-production stages. Included are fascinating sections on the selection and training of the tigers—cubs and full-grown—by world-renowned animal handlers, including Thierry Le Portier, who worked on the movies The Bear and Gladiator.

Two Brothers is the story of twin tiger brothers born amidst the temple ruins and exotic jungles who are separated as cubs and taken into captivity, one tiger to become a circus performer, the other a trained killer. Years later, the brothers find themselves reunited, but as forced enemies pitted against each other. Guy Pearce plays an adventurer of English origin, whose tragic intervention into the idyllic lives of the two tiger brothers forever intertwines their fates. 100 color illustrations.

From Publishers Weekly:

Set in the jungles of colonial Indochina in the early 1900s, Annaud’s film concerns twin tigers separated as cubs and taken into captivity only to be reunited years later as enemies by an explorer who inadvertently forces them to fight each other. To make the film, the director explains in this pictorial work, he collaborated with trainer Thierry Le Portier, with whom he’d worked on Gladiator, to capture such images as tigers running or climbing on tricky terrain, chasing vehicles and running through temples. He explains these aspects of the filmmaking process and more, offering an instructive glimpse into the world of depicting animals on film. There’s the technique of "getting tigers to act," which requires infinite patience and the ability to create a language common to the trainer and the animal; as well as the challenge of working with cubs-which Le Portier likens to "trying to train your three-month-old puppy." With close-up photos depicting the filming process-as well as other chapters on the actors, costumes, sets and script-this volume is a fine companion to the movie.
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