8 Directors Who Did Crazy Things To Get Their Movies Made

6. Tim Burton Trained Dozens Of Squirrels (And Used Them To Attack An Actress)

You'd be forgiven for thinking there isn't anything overly difficult or complex about Tim Burton's remake of Willy Wonka, just a lot of make-up and CGI €“ but you'd also be wrong.

One scene in the movie sees Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka reveal to the kids and their parents that he's trained an army of nut-cracking squirrels. Once the nuts are cracked, the squirrels place the nut onto a moving conveyor belt. It's sort of like a rodent workforce, and it's a fairly striking scene in a rather mediocre film. The amazing thing about the scene is the length that Burton was willing to go in order to get it made. Burton ordered dozens of squirrels be trained over the course of several months, cracking thousands and thousands of nuts ad nauseam just so that he could honour the description of the scene found in Roald Dahl's book. But Burton's stipulations didn't stop there. He wanted as much of the scene to be real as possible, even the scene in which the squirrels attacked Veruca Salt. This meant fashioning a mask for an adult actress in order to make her look young (and so she wouldn't be blinded) and then training the squirrels to swarm her body. According to the animal trainer on set (a man named Steve Vedmore) things often didn't go according to plan:

"The placid ones are good to handle and other ones are aggressive, so we use them as runner animals if we can run them from A to B because they're not good for human contact. They bite."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DQIagGarJk