Sometimes, filmmaking can really be an excuse for nerds to research stuff. Writer and director Isaiah Saxon spent years developing “The Legend of Ochi” to be a fantasy adventure that looks and feels like it could take place in one last undiscovered corner of the world, one where the mysterious primate Ochi navigate living on the fringes of human civilization. This required a lot of preparation and planning, collaboration with artists and designers and puppeteers, but also a lot of Wikipedia diving.
“ I’ve become an amateur primatologist through the course of making [the film],” Saxon told IndieWire. “In the larger picture of writing towards these zoological elements, [I’m looking] at everything that’s on the Internet. I’m reading Wikipedia articles about the one venomous primate and how does that actually work? I’m reading about Tarsiers and lemurs and the sociological structures of Bonobos.”
All of that research eventually coalesced into the Ochi, a species of scavenger primates with a unique, throat-singing ability to communicate with each other and, miraculously, with one human girl (Helena Zengel) who saves a baby from her father (Willem Dafoe) hellbent on eradicating the creatures he sees as monsters.
“ I was like, ‘Let’s invent a primate and then do our best to make it feel real and grounded — but of course also have a dynamic emotional range,” Saxon said. “We grounded the design of them physically, but also their behavior and their language and social structure and all of that. I wanted it to be grounded in like real patterns that we can identify in nature.”
Those grounded patterns then needed to be brought to life. Saxon turned to John Nolan Studios, and every time he had a little bit of development money, pushed the prototypes of the Ochi further. The team studied Stan Winston’s work on apes in “Congo” for both juvenile and adult Ochis. For the baby Ochi at the film’s heart, they also crafted a moveable metal armature for the body, with silicone skin layered over it — years before the project was officially greenlit by A24.
“[We had] this naked little baby monkey with no facial animatronic that was completely realistic and alive once the five puppeteers were working with it, which just speaks to the ancient nature of puppeteering. We’ve been making shadows on a cave wall for thousands of years and we just accept the movement of the human hand embodied in a character. We believe it,” Saxon said.
But once Saxon had the $1 million creature budget for an honest-to-goodness Ochi — with fur strategically layered to provide a sense of mass and weight, animatronic face to act alongside the humans, and coloring that would blend into the deep colors and misty fantasy of the landscape — the puppeteering team could really get to work. Robert Tygner, who worked on “Labyrinth” and the Jim Henson “Ninja Turtles,” is the lead puppeteer for the young Ochi, and he gathered a team of five other performers in order to pull off the movement and facial work for it.
“Together they create this unified performance where Rob is on the head, he’s the quarterback, and one person is on each limb. And then the actual animatronics designer, Karl Gallivan, he’s one of the remote controlled operators, and then there’s a second one, and they all have to be completely synced up. Rob is the one to do that,” Saxon said.
Like any team, the Ochi puppeteers had to practice rigorously in order to create the appearance of single sentient, curious, bug-hungry baby. “We did a performance workshop the moment we were greenlit in London. My production designer Jason Kisvarday and cinematographer Evan Prosofsky and my producers all met in London to go through every single shot and setup that involved the baby Ochi puppet through the whole film in this sort of duct tape and cardboard format to build the ergonomics of what the set needed to be for proper access for the puppeteers,” Saxon said. “Because it really is a holistic magic trick when you try to do these shots.”
The “Legend of Ochi” is now playing in theaters.
