Photo courtesy of Momentum Pictures
Daniel Radcliffe in "Jungle."
Inspired by true events, the new wilderness survival thriller Jungle is one of the highest-profile projects to date in the filmography of St. Louisan and film producer Mike Gabrawy. Starring Daniel Radcliffe and directed by Greg McLean (Wolf Creek, The Belko Experiment), the film portrays the real-world story of the harrowing three weeks Israeli backpacker Yossi Ghinsburg spent lost in the Bolivian rainforest. Jungle is rolling out to select theaters and numerous VOD platforms on Friday, but St. Louis filmgoers will have early access to the film: It will be screening for free at Chaminade’s Skip Viragh Center on Thursday evening, with Gabrawy on hand to introduce the feature. He recently sat down with St. Louis Magazine’s film critic Andrew Wyatt to discuss Jungle, his favorite films and filmmakers, and his path to becoming a globetrotting movie producer.
You grew up in St. Louis, and I believe that you’re a Chaminade alum, correct? So the Jungle screening this week is something of a ‘local boy made good’ occasion.
I am. I’ll actually be back for my high school reunion this weekend. And, yeah, I’ll be screening Jungle at [the school’s] Skip Varagh Center this Thursday, which is something like a 1,000-seat theater, so we’re trying to get the word out.
Tell me a little bit about your time growing up here.
I was born in Egypt, and my folks are doctors. My dad got his residency at Firmin Desloge Hospital [Ed: Now a part of St. Louis University Hospitals.] My mom is an ophthalmologist, and got her residency in St. Louis as well. I immigrated when I was about two years old, then went back to Egypt, then came back again when I was four, and grew up in St. Louis.
My mom was a cinephile, so I grew up in the 1970s going to see probably one or two movies a week. I was raised properly on '70s arthouse movies. [Laughs.] At a very early age, I was exposed to Woody Allen’s films, and a lot of movies that were generally for older viewers.
Do you remember particular films from those days that were formative, or perhaps films where you had a fond memory of seeing them with your mom?
I pretty vividly remember seeing Annie Hall at, I believe, the Esquire. I think I understood maybe two jokes in the whole movie. I would have been like 8, 9, or 10 years old, so I’m sure Child Protective Services would have been interested in talking to my mom. [Laughs.] But I knew the films she was taking me to were about something more than just what was on the screen, and that’s what stayed with me. For me, Smokey and the Bandit had more of an impact than Star Wars. I wasn’t raised on science fiction; I was raised on these '70s character-driven films.
All those Hal Needham car stunts probably didn’t hurt, either, in terms of capturing the interest of a little kid.
[Laughs.] Exactly. The same goes for Hooper, and all those films. I think when the credits rolled at the end of Smokey and the Bandit, my friend and I immediately sat down and watched it again.
That’s a classic ‘young cinephile’ moment, when you discover that film that you have to re-watch immediately after seeing it.
There were a lot of films that left an impression on me at an early age. I grew up in the 1980s in St. Louis, and that was the beginning of video. I remember the very first videocassette we got for our Betamax video player was Diner. I remember that being a seminal film. It explored the lives of these guys, and it was about so much more than what was on the surface.
That sort of segued into the films of John Hughes, who I think is one of the most influential filmmakers of any generation. I was seeing my own experiences mirrored in what seemed like two movies a year, for every year I was in high school: Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, all of those. Those films hold up in a way that most popcorn movies don’t.
You would have been exactly the right age to feel that connection to Hughes’ cycle of teen pictures. That sense that “this movie was made for me.”
Absolutely. Elvis Mitchell, who is a former New York Times critic and now has a show on NPR called ‘The Treatment,’ cites him as one of the most influential filmmakers for our generation. If only because everyone came to believe that his films reflected the idealized high school experience. That image of a sort of suburban Chicago perfection became the image of high school for a whole generation.
Which is not to take anything away from Meatballs or Porky’s, which probably had a pretty big impact on me as well. [Laughs.]
How did that childhood and adolescent love of the movies evolve into a career in the film industry?
My dad was an amateur photographer, and he made the mistake of putting a camera in my hands when I about was 11 or 12 years old. There was something about the combination of those two things; I knew early on that film was something I wanted to do.
I started making short films at an early age. I made a lot for my religion class at Chaminade. I asked the priest who was teaching the class, “Can I make a short film instead of writing a mid-term paper?” He said, “That’s one less paper I have to read. Absolutely.” Eventually I went to Kansas University, starting out in the journalism program. My thinking was that I would use advertising as a back door to commercials, which I had always loved. Ultimately that had nothing to do with what I was interested in, and I switched to the film program.
At KU, I did something like what I had done at Chaminade, where I would go to my professors in different departments and ask if I could make a film instead of writing a paper. They almost always said yes. I made a film for the psychology department, a documentary about violence on campus.
Was this your strategy because you loved making short films so much, or because you hated writing papers so much?
[Laughs.] I think they can both be true. Probably a little bit of both. I grew up with a camera in my hands, and I was kind of a classic visual learner, so I learned a lot just by watching documentary films. I’m still a bit of a documentary freak.
After graduating, I moved to Los Angeles in 1992 and got my foot in the door in the entertainment industry. I came up in physical production. The very first big film I did was actually the last Naked Gun movie, Naked Gun 33 1/3. I fell in with a German circle, and I eventually worked with Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin on Stargate and Independence Day. I went on to work on other big films like Waterworld and The Little Princess.
In those early days, what was your usual role in the production?
For the most part, I was assisting a producer, or I was [working as a production assistant]. I got my foot in the door with some KU alumni who helped me get started. For a brief time, I got to work as the first assistant on the second unit of Independence Day. I think I was something like 25 years old, helping to run a very big second unit, which is all the action stuff.
Eventually I segued to a company called Constintin, the big German film production and distribution company. At the time, they were the largest independent distributor in Germany.
Constantin was where you played a role in first expanding the Resident Evil franchise from video games into film, correct?
Yeah, that was my big claim to fame when I was there, bringing in Resident Evil, which has gone on to become this billion-dollar franchise.
In those days, video games were not seen as a viable basis for enormous multi-film franchises, the odd box-office success like Mortal Kombat aside. What convinced you Resident Evil was a property worth pursuing?
It’s a great, kind of typical Hollywood story. A girl I know from St. Louis was dating a lawyer, and he was representing Capcom, the company that produced the Resident Evil game. We were out together, and he mentioned that was going to the studios with this video game called Resident Evil. I’m not a video game guy, so he came over and brought a PlayStation and we played it. I said, “This is a movie. It’s terrifying.”
I told him, “Push your meetings one week. Before you go to Warner Bros. and Paramount and all the other studios. We have real money at Constantin; let me have a shot at it.” So we brought it in and pitched it. At first it was a lot of tall, thin, chain-smoking Germans, saying “We don’t do zombie movies.” At that time Constantin had been responsible for The Name of the Rose, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, all these high-minded adaptations.I fought them on it. I insisted, “This is a movie. This is huge.” And we ultimately optioned it and developed it. I was there for three years of its development, and I think it got made four years after I left, so it was a seven-year process to bring it to fruition. I did get kind of a negligible associate producer credit on the film.
When you left Constantin, did you think Resident Evil was ever going to emerge from Development Hell?
They were such a big company; they could have used it as a write-off, rather than make it. You know, I came up in physical production, and I grew up with a camera in my hand, making movies. I was in this business to make movies, but I thought it was going to be a miracle if the first [Resident Evil] ever got made. I could see the potential, but I didn’t realize that it would become so big. I can’t watch them now. [Laughs.] They’re pretty specialized films, for a specific audience, but they did very well for the company. And I changed their business model from literary adaptations to video games, pretty much overnight.
Where did you eventually land after leaving Constantin?
I wasn’t personally interested those kind of films, comic book and video game adaptations, having grown up with the likes of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I left Constantin to start producing my own films independently. I did several them, to varying degrees of distribution success.
After I got married, I realized I had to start making some more commercial films again. I folded two films into Arclight in 2008, around the same time as the global financial crisis. Arclight is an Australian company, and at the time, the head of the company, Gary Hamilton, wanted to get more involved in film production, to ramp up the production side of the company.
That’s when I joined Arclight, and I’ll be celebrating 10 years there this coming Cannes [Film Festival]. We focus almost entirely on international co-productions, and on utilizing international subsidy systems and governmental treaties to produce and finance films.
I watched Jungle recently, and I can see how the material is suited to director Greg McLean, and why you might have wanted him on board. It’s not a horror film per se, but it shares some physical and thematic elements with his horror films like Wolf Creek and Rogue.
Absolutely. Gary Hamilton had handled Wolf Creek, and it was his idea [for Greg to direct]. Jungle is a tale of survival, and Greg is masterful at that sort of story. We shot half of the film in Colombia and half in Australia, but wherever you are, he’s a master at using landscape as a character and making it terrifying. We identified him for that reason. The film is a survival thriller, but he does bring that horror point of view to the experience, which makes it that much more riveting.
Not everything in Jungle is pure, ground-level grit, however. There are some more stylized sequences in the film, some daydreams, flashbacks, and hallucinations. They give it a bit more of a fanciful, subjective feel, storytelling-wise, than what you find in McLean’s other work.
I think that’s the reason he did it. Recently he did a horror film called The Darkness and another called The Belko Experiment, that one with some other St. Louisans [James and Sean Gunn]. He has a background in that kind of contained action/horror, but he saw this as a different sort of opportunity. I think Jungle is a faith-based film in some ways. It’s a story about perseverance and letting go, and I think that’s what Greg gravitated towards.
The film has a spiritual side. It’s a true story, and Yossi Ghinsburg, who was on set with us for a majority of the shooting, came out of that experience a changed man. He wrote a memoir, and now he’s a motivational speaker all over the world. He’s Israeli by way of Queensland, Australia, and he’s just an amazing guy to talk to, just to see how his worldview has been shaped by what he went through.
I think it’s crucial that the film doesn’t romanticize Yossi’s experiences, or recast him as some manly adventurer, boldly blazing a trail through the untamed tropical wilds. He’s naïve. He’s not well-prepared. He makes crucial blunders. He endures this unbelievable physical punishment, but there’s no prideful motivation driving him by the end, just the raw desire to make it out alive.
In the film, the photographer character Kevin is the real outdoorsman, and he’s the one that finds Yossi in the end. Kevin’s the kind of the heroic character you expect. Yossi was so ill-equipped for what he was doing. It’s about the hubris of youth, where you feel invincible and you go on these adventures, but you can so quickly get in over your head. There’s this great moment in the film where Yossi finds these footprints, only to realize that they’re his own footprints from days ago and he’s just been going in a big circle.
I liked that moment a lot. Sort of a subverted Robin Crusoe homage. Momentary elation followed by sinking despair.
It’s one of those moments that is just heartbreaking. Ultimately, the only way he survives is by dreaming or hallucinating himself this other purpose. That’s why he creates this imaginary native Amazonian girl, Kina, to keep him going, to have someone else to live for. He has a unique perspective on that. Many Holocaust survivors attributed their survival to having someone else out there to live for, to keep them going within that insane, horrifying environment. In the same way, Yossi is thinking about his mother and uncle, but also about this girl who is a fiction he’s created to help him keep moving forward.
Can you talk a little bit about Jungle’s production history? At what point did you become involved?
We got on board about four or five years ago, I believe. The script was brought to us by another producer, who was Yossi’s partner and had tried to mount the film at a much higher budget. We said, no, this movie should be done at a more intimate budget. We had a history with Greg McLean and thought it would be perfect for him. So I started packaging the film with talent.
The two sort of key roles are Yossi and Karl, the guy that takes them into the jungle. We took a chance in going after Daniel Radcliffe as Yossi. After the Harry Potter franchise, he doesn’t really need to work anymore, so he really takes things that inspire him. I put him on a call with Greg and they hit it off and the rest is history.
As soon as we got Daniel on and were able to take it to the market, we put the movie together as an Australian film shooting abroad. We shot half of the film in Colombia and half in Australian. And ironically, the Australian forest looks more like the Amazon than the actual Amazon, which was a happy accident.
Were you able to be there for most of the on-location production?
Yeah, definitely. We had a crazy year: five movies over 18 months. But I was there for the majority of Jungle. I was there for most of Colombia, and back-and-forth for two years sort of preparing things there with the film office. There are obviously challenges to shooting in Colombia for other reasons, so I was there quite a bit, and I was there for the Australian portion as well.
I have to ask, given that you shot on location in wilderness areas: What’s the craziest thing that happened while you were out in the forest, in either Colombia or Australia?
The craziest thing that happened in Colombia was the wrap party. [Laughs.] They know how to celebrate there. I think it went until eight in the morning. Honestly, it was an incredibly challenging shoot. We’re shooting on riverbanks in remote jungle locations. You’re using zip lines to bring equipment up and down from the riverbed to the trucks. The other challenging part is that when you shoot in Australia, it’s a little scary. I did two movies in Queensland this year. You have funnel-web spiders, which are the deadliest spiders in the world. We had a safety officer on set who would shut down the set and say, “Let’s just let this venomous brown snake through here. Nobody move.” You had that sort of thing; you’re around some pretty fearsome wildlife.
Another big challenge was the river sequence, where the characters separate and Yossi and Kevin take a raft down the rapids. That was a pretty harrowing sequence. Daniel’s not a strong swimmer and we had to have a lot of safety people. One of the safety guys was in a kayak and he got snagged on one of the stunt wires. It held one of the stuntmen underwater and one of the rescue guys had to immediately dive in, untangle him, and pull him out. You’re out in open nature, in the proper Amazon with rapids and other treacherous conditions. It was a challenging shoot for sure.
I think the rapids sequences are one of the film’s highlights, especially given your modest budget. They’re genuinely convincing and frightening. There’s a pivotal moment in the film where Yossi and Kevin’s raft is wedged violently up against a rock and they become separated. It just looks very technically impressive, a great old-school movie illusion. I found myself marveling at how the hell you did it.
Thanks. One of our biggest challenges was that there wasn’t enough water in the rapids in Colombia. We looked at other locations, including Australia and even Fiji, but fortunately there was a big downpour a few weeks before we started shooting, and we were ultimately able to do it Colombia.
It’s been an exceptional year for Australian thrillers. I recently saw a very impressive debut feature, Killing Ground, which was shot on location in New South Wales. It’s a grueling story, kind of an abduction-slash-survival thriller set in this remote campground.
I just watched that a week ago! I’m talking to the director, Damien Power in two days. It’s very disturbing, sort of this decade’s Wolf Creek. Australia has one of the best subsidy programs in the world. It’s a good structure to get movies made, and they have a great tradition of phenomenal films, especially recently with features like Animal Kingdom and Lion. I just finished a film, Hotel Mumbai, which was [shot partly in Australia] and is about the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.
I wanted to ask you about Hotel Mumbai, as it looks like it’s shaping up to be one of your biggest films to date.
Gary Hamilton, who is the head of Arclight, was on his way to the Goa Film Festival [Ed: The International Film Festival of India, held annually in Goa.] He got stuck in Thailand in a coup, which for Gary is not unusual. [Laughs.] Gary’s father calls him and says, “Where are you? Turn on the TV.” Gary was actually due to check into the Taj [Mahal Palace Hotel] the day before the attacks.
Gary calls me a few years later after seeing The Impossible, a film about the 2004 earthquake and tsunami. He tells me we should think about doing a movie about the Taj Hotel attacks. [Some time later,] I’m meeting one of the government bodies in Australia that supports film. I know that they have a great documentary film tradition and I asked them for recommendations, because I’m a documentary freak. They sent me two films, one was an Aboriginal documentary and the other was Surviving Mumbai, about the terror attacks. I was like, “Oh, I want to make a film about Mumbai...”
Surviving Mumbai turns out to be this unbelievable film. The people in it are so heroic you couldn’t put them in a narrative film because no one would believe it. A couple of months later I met an Australian short film director, Anthony Maras, who had made a film called The Palace, about the war in Cyprus in the 1970s. It was short-listed for the Oscars and had won all these awards on the festival circuit. I realized this was our director.
What was it specifically that you saw in The Palace that caught your attention?
The film is about the Cyprus War, and there is this harrowing sequence in it where soldiers are going into a building. This woman is hiding with a baby who is crying, and she has to almost smother the baby to keep it quiet and prevent them from being discovered by the soldiers. There’s a scene in Hotel Mumbai that’s similar, and it’s based on a true incident. Anthony approaches things in an almost documentary style, and his films feel very real.
So I brought Anthony on board and partnered with the documentarian who had made Surviving Mumbai. We hired a writer named John Collee, who is this major Australian screenwriter who did Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. He and Anthony delivered one of the best first draft scripts I’ve ever read.
During that process, I brought in Thunder Road [Pictures] and Basil Iwanyk, to be kind of the lead creative producer on the picture with us. I think we got the first actor we went for with almost every role, the script was so strong. We set it up to shoot half the picture in Mumbai, and half in Adelaide, Australia, which easily doubles for Mumbai. We shot the interiors in Australia and the exterior India portions in Mumbai.
Our director Anthony really delivered. Our first day of shooting in Adelaide, at the South Australia Film Corporation Studios, was essentially shooting the same scene from his short film. I think the film does a great job of subverting expectations. You see Armie Hammer and you think that this guy is the Captain America character and he’s going to save the day. Ultimately, it does not turn out the way you expect.
It looks like a very strong cast, I will say that. Hammer, Dev Patel, Jason Isaacs, Nazanin Boniadi from Homeland, Anupam Kher, who is a ridiculously prolific Indian actor.
We were very lucky. Armie is a big sweetheart. Dev is a wonderful guy. […] We were blessed with an amazing cast. The day we wrapped was actually the day Dev was nominated [for the Best Actor Academy Award] for Lion. And we used a lot of crew members who had worked on Lion, and on Slumdog Millionaire, and they were really an incredible crew. We’re proud of it, and hopefully it will debut at one of the festivals next year.
***
Jungle will screen for free on Thursday, October 12, 6:30 p.m., at the Chaminade College Preparatory School’s Skip Viragh Center (425 S. Lindbergh Blvd). If you would like to attend, please RSVP via Eventbrite. Jungle opens theatrically in select cities on Friday, October 13, and will also be released the same day on VOD through numerous platforms, including Amazon, Charter, Google, iTunes, and Vudu.
