The real Lion King: the making of African Cats To Scholey's thinking, he certainly has a Jack Nicholson/Frank Costello among his stars. He is Kali, an imposing black-maned lion about eight years old who, in league with his four sons, is currently upsetting the status quo in the Mara. 'He's got dangerous charisma. He's got Jack Nicholson written all over him," Scholey says. The other stars include Sita, a feisty cheetah raising her cubs alone ('our Angelina Jolie"), and Layla, a brave and experienced lioness, and her six-month-old cub, Mara. It is November 2009, and in the past few weeks the savannah has transformed from dusty brown to lush green. Summer's great migration is past; between June and September a mass of creatures, including an estimated 1.5 million wildebeest and 700,000 zebra, travelled west from the Serengeti into the Maasai Mara, crossing the crocodile-infested Mara river. Scholey's crew has been filming for 15 months, and will continue for nearly another year. Scholey has been visiting the Mara in three-week stints, in the meantime working on other aspects of the production - such as liaising with the composer Nicholas Hooper, who has previously scored the Harry Potter films, and working on a script for the narration, which will be delivered by the actor Patrick Stewart. Before shooting began in August 2008, Scholey and his co-director Alastair Fothergill had submitted a 'script" for an 80-90 minute film to Jean-François Camilleri, the president of Disneynature. 'I put in behaviour that I'd witnessed before, usually several times," Scholey says. He has worked extensively filming cats in east Africa, where he was born and raised, making many wildlife films for the BBC as well as creating the Big Cat Diary series, a living soap opera which ran on the BBC from 1996 to 2008. He also consulted the Hollywood 'screenplay doctor" John Truby, to build a compelling drama from the lives of these creatures. 'John's basic thesis is that character is crucial. If you get the characters right, plot will follow. To select the cast, Scholey, along with the cameraman Simon King and his producer wife Marguerite Smits van Oyen, drew on the detailed knowledge of individuals they had amassed working together on Big Cat Diary. Kali will be familiar to Big Cat Diary viewers as 'Notch," the skulduggerous lion who was deposed from his position as the head of the Marsh pride, one of 20-odd companies of lions in the Maasai Mara. There were false starts. King recalls, 'We followed one cheetah family where the cubs died in the most extraordinary and unfortunate circumstances - they got stood on by elephants. Sita seemed like the best bet when King and Smits van Oyen found that she had gone into a den to deliver her cubs. They knew that she had successfully raised cubs before, so stood a chance of bringing her new cubs to maturity, a perilous 18-month process. They named her Sita, Swahili for 'six," after she gave birth to six cubs; one cub died very early on in a nighttime buffalo stampede, and only five feature in the film. It took the principal photographer Owen Newman and his wife Amanda Barrett, a field assistant producer, from August until November 2008 to find the lion pride with the potential to yield an epic Hollywood storyline. They eventually selected the River pride, based to the west of the Mara river, ruled by an older male with a broken tooth, Fang, whose power is propped up by his formidable lionesses, including Layla. With the animals in control of the narrative, Scholey is having to be more hands-off about plot than most filmmakers. He wants the final film to follow these individual animals as much as possible, throughout. (In the final edit there is the occasional sequence where another animal acts as a substitute. In one hunt sequence shot by King, a cheetah identified by Smits van Oyen as a daughter of Sita from a previous litter stands in for the star.) So far, Sita's story has unfolded according to Scholey's script. By the time of my visit, her cubs are 16 months old; it is expected that she will walk away and leave them after two months, having taught them the skills to survive independently; she is likely to be pregnant again by the time she leaves her cubs. Filming of their story will conclude just before that event; it was decided the distressing separation should not appear in the film. 'We've been very fortunate," Scholey says. We knew of three other cheetahs who had cubs at that time. Two of them lost all their cubs when they were very young. The other managed to raise only one cub. Sophie Darlington, the principal photographer following Sita and her cubs, has witnessed scores of hairy moments getting to this point, such as when Sita and her three-week-old cubs ran into Kali and his gang. 'Lions are about as dangerous as it can get if you're a cheetah. I thought the cubs were toast," Darlington says. Then, as in many situations, it was Sita's breathtaking boldness that saved her offspring. An electrifying sequence shows Sita charging right up to the lions and taunting them in order to draw them away from her tiny cubs. Another major fear for the filmmakers is that their stars will simply wander off. A couple of months previously, Sita and her cubs had sauntered across the Kenya-Tanzanian border, which also marks the edge of the Maasai Mara National Reserve. They could have gone to the Serengeti and we might never have seen them again," Darlington says. 'They don't have quite the same visa issues. Three weeks later they were spotted back in the Mara, to great relief. The lions" story is proving more unpredictable. In contrast to the solitary struggles of a single mother, Owen Newman is capturing the complexities of lion society, and the intensity of pride life -being embraced or rejected by the pride often spells the difference between life and death. Even with his and Barrett's decades of experience (Newman has probably spent more time than any other cameraman filming big cats in Africa for award-winning programmes including the BBC Natural World specials Lions: Pride in Peril and Cats Under Serengeti Stars) they cannot predict the twists of fate affecting Layla and Mara. Living here you begin to feel like a lion," Barrett observes. But just when you think you know them really well, they will do something utterly mystifying. They have seen Kali take over the River pride, and Fang slope off to his probable death. Layla sustained injuries in her attempts to defend the pride against the attempted coups (Newman and Barrett affectionately refer to her as 'Limpy"); she and Mara became isolated from the pride as a result, unable to keep up. Newman has captured the intimate and heart-wrenching family drama that has followed. 'It's a rollercoaster of emotion," Barrett says. 'That cub's gone through things a screenwriter could never imagine. The pair head out before dawn every day to track down their subjects (a challenge in itself) and to try to piece together what action might have taken place the previous night. Unlike cheetahs, lions are largely nocturnal. 'It's not so much patience as obstinate determination," Barrett says, noting that Newman has been filming daily for more than four months, and is not inclined to take a break. 'It's like addictive gambling. Just one more day... Late in the evening, Scholey shows me edited footage from the first year of filming; a plasma screen is set up in the mess tent at Rekero safari camp, which has been providing tented accommodation, support and food for the film crew at various locations in the field. The footage is ravishingly beautiful - sometimes almost implausibly so, in the case of the majestic tracking shots of Kali and his sons, their lustrous manes rippling, which were filmed from a rig on a moving vehicle by Simon Werry, a specialist aerial and tracking cameraman. 'The lions all get together and look into the sun and the camera jibs up and you think, hang on, this is CGI, this can't be real," Simon King says later. But it is. You couldn't choreograph it better. The film is rich in eye-popping incident. There is a visceral sequence where the lions find a dead hippo at the edge of the river and, just as they start to feed, about 30 crocodiles appear and attack the feeding lions with extraordinary ferocity. You feel the roars of the lions right in your gut. 'That's the only time I've seen that," Newman says. While the team has got a substantial number of astounding episodes in the can so far, there is still apprehension as to where the unresolved story­lines will go from here. Scholey remarks, 'If a feature film finishes badly, it's a bad film. Neither he nor Disneynature intends this film to carry an explicit conservation message, but Scholey hopes that 'people will come out of it and never forget how wonderful a lion or a cheetah is. The first step in conservation is to build the knowledge and understanding and connection with the animals. This film will take people to an emotional level, further than a documentary can. On the film's release in America last year the African Wildlife Foundation received a proportion of the opening week's box office, which has been invested in creating 50,000 acres of protected corridors between national reserves to allow the free movement of wildlife. In Britain there will be a charity premiere benefiting the conservation charity Tusk. Driving out the next day in the Land Rover, Scholey explains how he was lured to work on the film by Alastair Fothergill (Frozen Planet, Planet Earth, The Blue Planet), who has a multi-film deal with Disneynature. Scholey succeeded Fothergill as the head of the BBC's Natural History Unit in 1998, and by 2006 he had ascended to the position of Head of Factual Television. I had become a BBC suit by accident rather than design," he says. I used to be known for driving a car round the Mara. I'm desperately trying to regain my reputation. Scholey's move back into the field faintly echoes David Attenborough's decision aged 50 to head out and film Life on Earth rather than take up the post of BBC Director General. Scholey has known Atten­borough since working as a researcher on The Living Planet (1984). I talked to David about this opportunity, and he said, "Go for it, my boy!"" We meet Sophie Darlington; she is parked 100 yards or so from Sita and her cubs, who are lying elegantly in the shade of a tree. Though the animals tend to ignore the vehicles (they are accustomed to safari groups in the area), the camera operators aim to give the animals as much space as possible. Darlington's field producer, Natasha Breed, is in another Land Rover not far off, watching for any potential activity. Darlington raves about Breed's extraordinary ability 'to spot a leopard up a tree from about five miles away. I'm not joking. Earlier in the shoot, Breed had clocked a pair of aardvarks fighting early one morning, resulting in some of the most hilarious footage that would eventually make it into the film. Darlington is as voluble and outgoing as Newman is softly spoken and self-contained. This is the best job ever," she enthuses. 'Scholey's Safaris, we're calling it. She shows us round her filming car - the Sony F23 camera ('It weighs more than my nine-year-old son"), the front seat reclined way back 'not because I'm a lazy cow, but because it takes too long to put up and down again." In the back is a sleeping bag and pillow - the pillow is also useful for placing between her and any cat that gets too close to her car, hardly an impenetrable shield, but it seems to work. She points out her rain hood, a piece of kit designed by Newman which enabled Darlington to film some of her most affecting footage, of Sita and her cubs trembling under the onslaught of a heavy rainstorm. Darlington reflects how this film has offered a unique opportunity to spend time with an individual animal. As a wildlife camera person you usually get three weeks, so to spend time over two years you really get to see a personality," she says. Sita is so feisty, and also quite snooty. I love it that she completely ignores us. Though wary of anthropomorphising, Darling­ton, a single mother herself, could not help relating to Sita and her struggles. 'It's that whole thing of being a single mother, watching another single mother and thinking, I know how you feel. Darlington's son, Louis, stays with his father when she is filming, but has also visited the Mara. Once we were filming and five big male lions were roaring all around us. I was looking at Louis, thinking, "You will never forget this," and he was sitting there with his Garfield book, completely unaware." Darlington did not have extensive experience of filming in the Maasai Mara before African Cats (she was initially asked to cover some filming for Simon King, but as his other commitments mounted she ended up filming the majority of Sita's story). She had worked extensively in the Serengeti, spending seven years learning her craft with Hugo van Lawick, the photographer, filmmaker and former husband of the primatologist Jane Goodall. So I was introduced to the Maasai Mara by Sita," she says. 'Everywhere she went it would be the first time I'd been there. She wears the landscape so well. My visit to the Mara lasts three short days, but the landscape, the light, the teeming life, have a profound effect - it is a wrench to leave. King says, 'The Mara could only be captured in cinema, on a scale that embraces your peripheral vision. When I speak to Scholey again by telephone some time after filming finishes in October 2010, he tells me he has just returned from a 'glorious" 10-day holiday. He spent it in the Maasai Mara. We saw some of the old friends," he says. Our boy Kali is still ruling the roost. African Cats" is out now