A tale of a young boy's journey to return his pet cheetah to the wild, Duma is both a thrilling adventure and a moving tale about the power of love, set against the extraordinary landscape of Southern Africa.
"Duma is a film about growing up and accepting the extraordinary beauty in life and how it exists hand in hand with grief," says producer John Wells, executive producer of such acclaimed television series as ER, The West Wing and Third Watch. "As a parent, I'm always looking for films that I'll enjoy as much as my children do. This film helps us to understand the great mysteries and tragedies of life, while still being entertaining."
"Duma deals with issues that are universal," adds producer Hunt Lowry, whose prior film credits include Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, White Oleander and What A Girl Wants. "It's a tale about love, loss, and transition, all told through a seemingly simple story of a boy and his cheetah. But what drew me to Duma the most were the strong character relationships and the inspiring journey that each character has to undertake to succeed. At the end, our characters realize there's no stronger bond than family, and family will always be there for you."
The film's producers knew that the ideal director to tell Duma's story was Carroll Ballard. "Carroll has been one of my favorite filmmakers for over 20 years," says Wells. "He has an extraordinary visual sense, and has done amazing work with animals in the wild."
A veteran of the film industry and director of beloved classic family adventure films like The Black Stallion and Fly Away Home, Ballard is known for his stunning imagery and imaginative storytelling, and the filmmakers were certain that he would deliver an incredible cinematic experience.
"The Black Stallion is a classic and always will be," says Lowry. "In fact, all of Carroll's films have a deservedly classical feel to them. His understanding of the triumvirate of nature, animals and people is complete. He knows how to show their interrelationship so well, while still respecting their individual qualities, which creates a vision that is both engrossing and unique."
The idea of an adventure story set against the backdrop of Africa was a strong draw for the director, who has an enduring fascination with the continent. "After reading a Laurence van der Post story many years ago," Ballard remembers, "I always wanted to make a film like that story - the thought of a young Tarzan kind of movie was very appealing to me. It didn't happen then, but I somehow held this hope that someday I'd be able to make a similar kind of film, and Duma came along and really fit the bill. It's a grand adventure that crosses half of a continent."
For executive producer Doug Claybourne, the road to Duma began about 25 years ago when Francis Ford Coppola first introduced him to Ballard. "Francis asked me to take over a picture called The Black Stallion after I had spent a year in the Philippines making Apocalypse Now with him," recalls Claybourne. "I worked with Carroll as an assistant director on The Black Stallion and became a huge fan of his work. Over the years, we tried to work together again, but the opportunity never came up. So when Duma came along and the opportunity to work with Carroll again arose, I said, 'I don't care how much they pay me, I'll pay them just for the opportunity to work with Carroll again!'
Ballard's extensive experience working on films in which not all of the leads are human gave him a special touch with the animal actors of Duma. "The cheetahs that we used on this movie were very gentle and passive, but they just don't relate to people the same way dogs and cats and horses do," says producer Stacy Cohen. "They are on a different wavelength, purely instinctual. To see Carroll piece together a performance and make a real character out of the cheetah was a marvel. He knew exactly what he needed from the cats to convey any type of emotion, physical reaction, humor. It was a wonder to behold."
Finding just the right young actor to portray Xan was a monumental task. Not only would he have to be able to perform in a very challenging role that would have him acting in almost every single scene and traveling across Africa to dozens of locations, he would need to be comfortable with the idea of having a live cheetah as a co-star and working with a variety of other wild animals. (To add another wrinkle, the animal trainers were very concerned that the boy be of a certain size, because they were worried that the cheetah might consider a smaller boy prey!)
The casting process for "Xan" took the filmmakers to New York, London, Canada, Chicago, and finally to South Africa, where they found their perfect match in Alex Michaletos.
"One day I came home from school and my mother told me, 'You can play in a movie!'" says Michaletos of his entrée into the world of film. "I didn't believe her at first, then I went for auditions and it was tough competition - I think two hundred children."
Michaletos had never acted before, having grown up in a family of six on a farm with lions, wildebeest, wild African dogs, and...cheetahs! This proved to be fortuitous, as Ballard insisted that the boys who were up for the role interact with the cheetahs to see how they would react to the big cats. Auditioners had to approach and interact with the cheetah, petting him and walking him around.
"That really separated the men from the boys," says Claybourne, "because all of a sudden you had Alex, who could walk up to a cheetah and grab ahold of it, whereas the other kids were very fearful of the animals. It was pretty amazing and serendipitous circumstances that we ran into this particular boy in South Africa who grew up with cheetahs in a family that is all about animals. On the first day we tested him, we realized there was something really special about him."
Of course, comfort around exotic wildlife was only half the battle, as Duma producer Kristin Harms recalls. "Alex came up and was buddy-buddy with the cheetah right from the beginning, and I thought he obviously had the right vibe," says Harms, producer of the critically acclaimed television series West Wing and Third Watch. "Then we did some dramatic scenes and he totally surprised me, because he seemed like a very quiet boy and then suddenly he popped out with an incredible emotionality that I didn't quite expect."
This was essential for the role, which demanded that Michaletos be able to believably communicate all the changes that his character goes through in the course of his journey. "Xan becomes increasingly more independent," says Ballard. "He learns to deal with difficult situations and I think he gets a sense of really how wide the world is. He has to find a sense of balance in terms of his own desire to keep this big ferocious friend and letting him return to the wild."
"Xan is a tough boy," says Michaletos of his character. "He's not afraid of anything. He's a go-getter, and he'll do anything for his best friend."
"Finding Alex Michaletos was a miracle!" Cohen marvels. "He was a needle in a haystack. How many boys do you think there are in the world who were the right age, the right kind of outdoorsy and physical presence, with the right South African accent who could actually act, and who had grown up with his own pet cheetahs? And there he was, a half-hour from our production offices."
Another important role that had to be carefully cast was that of Rip, the mysterious wanderer who Xan reluctantly teams up with on his travels across the plains. "Originally he was going to be more of a young hipster guy," recalls Ballard, "and then Eamonn Walker showed up and he was just so powerful that he gave us a whole new concept of the character. He just blew everyone away with how he could be nasty, how he could be lovable, how he could be scary, how he could be so many different things, and that's the kind of character Rip is - you never know where this guy is coming from."
Eamonn Walker is known to audiences for his role in the critically acclaimed HBO series Oz, for which he won a CableAce award for Best Actor in a Dramatic Series, as well as his roles in films such as Unbreakable and Tears of the Sun.
"Rip's basically a good man who has had a hard life," muses Walker. "He had gone off to the city to try to make some money to send home, a plan that hadn't worked out the way he had hoped. When we first come across Rip, he is a dark spirit. The wonderful thing about this story is that this child helps Rip find his heart and his openness again. They are both away from their families, they both have something to gain by returning home, and they form a really unique bond. In reality, Rip is a sensitive, vulnerable soul who has a lot to offer."
Campbell Scott, star of such films as The Spanish Prisoner, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle and Dying Young, plays the role of Xan's father Peter, whom he describes as "a rather eccentric farmer in South Africa. This film is an adventure, it's a family story, it's an animal story - it's everything. I have a child of my own who's never really able to see my projects, which were always adult material. One of the things that drew me to the film was that it was about a little boy - I have a young son and we are very close."
For Scott, the opportunity to work with Ballard was a huge motivation for joining the project. "I am a big fan of his films and when I heard that he needed a dad in the movie, I was immediately interested, because I've always loved The Black Stallion and Never Cry Wolf."
"I was totally thrilled that Campbell took the role," says Ballard. "It just turned out that he was a bit of a fan and he wanted to do it. We got on great."
The promise of working with his old friend Hope Davis clinched Scott's decision. "We have worked on about six films together," he says, "most recently The Secret Lives of Dentists. It was through Hope that I heard about the project and made every attempt to get the role."
There were many reasons as to actress Hope Davis' decision to join the cast of Duma. Like Scott, she was drawn to the film's director. "Carroll is a master," she compliments. "He's ready to hear anyone's ideas and yet I listened to everything he said because I know that he knows what he is doing. He's a lovely man and I had a great time working with him. Coming to South Africa was also a very exciting idea for me, and working with real cheetahs. I was dying to see them. Being on set with them was really amazing, they are incredible creatures. I have a little girl now and I wanted to be in a movie that she could see. Really, I am doing this for her."
"Hope Davis is somebody we felt would be fantastic," says Harms. "We were over the moon that we were able to get her and Campbell. They are both very classy, wonderful actors and they have a natural charisma together."

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
Duma was a challenging picture to shoot on many levels. The fact that one of the stars was 12 years old and another was a wild animal flew in the face of W.C. Field's famous advice to "never work with animals or children." Luckily for everyone involved, having Carroll Ballard at the helm assured them a skilled and steady leader.
"I think Carroll has the patience of a saint," says Scott. "He's great at finding an opportunity where one doesn't exist. Maybe the kid and the cheetah are out on the motorcycle, and you think the cheetah isn't looking the right way, and there are all kinds of things that seem to be going wrong and possibly could go wrong, but he'll just let it play, and then capture something that is quite amazing."
Incredibly, the film was shot at over 75 locations, including Johannesburg, the Vaal River, the Entabeni Game Reserve and the Northern Cape. A second unit also went up to Botswana to shoot in the visually stunning region of the Okavango Delta, a lush oasis in the middle of the arid Kalahari sands.
"The production was a roadshow," says producer Stacy Cohen. "With all the magnificent landscapes in the film, the cast and crew traveled through mountains and deserts and rivers and cities, farms and salt pans and jungle and bush. It was a logistical problem of the highest magnitude, but the people and animals alike handled it in stride. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience that was truly a privilege to be a part of."
Ballard, a veteran of many challenging pictures, shares his insight into the demanding shoot. "We moved all over the country and had to deal with crossing vast distances and filming in pretty inhospitable places, which made it tough. But to me, the most challenging part of any movie is always the story - getting the story right and keeping the entertaining process ongoing through the course of the film, keeping the characters and their relationships together so that when the audience walks out of the movie, they've had an experience that means something."
Production designer Johnny Breedt, who recently served as designer on the acclaimed Hotel Rwanda, was charged with creating just the right atmosphere at every stage of the far-reaching shoot. "As a child, The Black Stallion and Never Cry Wolf were two of my favorite films," says Breedt, "and to be working with Carroll and learning from him was a real opportunity for me. When I spoke to foreign producers that I've worked with before and I mentioned I was doing a film with Carroll Ballard, they all went, 'Wow! This is a guy you want to work with.' He's a legend."
Ballard and Breedt felt that the key to designing for Duma was to keep it simple. "We didn't want to overdress," explains Breedt. "It's possible to end up designing a movie so much that it takes away from the story. This film is about a kid and a cheetah and the journey they take, and about a little family that lives on a farm, and we've tried to keep the focus on those things and make it as simple as possible - that is the look of the film."
While Xan and Rip manage to navigate the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans, it clearly wouldn't be practical to actually shoot in the barren region. The Salt Pans are the remnant of a vast lake that dried up thousands of years ago, leaving behind over 4,600 square miles of rock and drought-resistant brush - the name Makgadikgadi means "vast, open, lifeless land."
To recreate the arid terrain on a sound stage, Breedt had to research the color scheme of the environment and the authentic type of sand and vegetation in the area, as well as study paintings made on cave walls that figure into a tale that Rip tells Xan during their journey about the origin of the cheetah's distinctive markings. Breedt studied locations in the Kalahari, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and the Sahara, and a good deal of information was also sourced from the archeological department at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
"It was an exciting challenge to find the right look," recalls Breedt. "From our major location in Johannesburg, we worked in the bushveld, then moved up to the salt pans, and the Okavango swamps, and the mine shafts. We finally ended up in what is, for my part, the most beautiful part of the world, the pans of Askham. The design elements are minimal, but the locations, which were spread very far apart, were challenging."
Among their myriad other projects, Breedt and company had to conjure up a plane wreck in the open Kalahari desert, where Xan and Rip come across the remains of a downed 85-seater DC-6. The interior was re-created on a stage, which also housed sets including the interior of Xan's family farm, the tree house where his father first outlines the plan to take Duma home, the Johannesburg apartment where Duma goes a bit stir-crazy, and the scene of a mine collapse, which augmented footage shot in and around an actual working mineshaft.
One of the more complex sets was the creation of the Erongo village where Xan takes Rip to Saliwa - the tribe's "sangoma," or shaman - in a desperate attempt to restore him to health in the wake of a dangerous injury. While location scouting, Breedt and Ballard researched and photographed the various styles of village that they came across. "In the beginning we were going to do mud hut villages," Breedt recalls. "Then as we progressed, Carroll started liking the look of the shanty towns more, and he wanted to bring in elements of that style. So we ended up putting together a combination of those villages with the villages found in the more rural, tribal areas, which required quite a bit of reference. Saliwa's hut, in particular, was researched very thoroughly to match the proper tribal traditions."
Having wild animals working on his sets brought up some unique issues for Breedt. "My biggest problems with the animals arose because you can sit in tons of meetings and discuss what an animal's going to do, but on the day, when you want her to sit on the toilet, she just says, 'Well, I'm not meant to do that.' So it doesn't always work out as you've planned it."
Some of the larger props had to be cheetah-ized as well. "A real challenge was putting a cheetah in a motorcycle sidecar," Breedt recalls. "We redesigned our sidecar four times to suit the cheetah. We ended up extending the sides and it was almost ridiculously high - I personally wouldn't be able to climb in it, but a cheetah can hop right in, which is what's important."
It took three months of very hard work to properly train the group of cheetahs who play Duma in the film. "Cheetahs are fairly lazy animals," reveals South African trainer Jim Stockley. "Mostly you need to exploit the natural behavior you require from the animal. Obviously, you can't have an animal do something that is impossible for them. When they do what you want them to do, they get rewarded, and you improve on that and then reward the behavior again."
Throughout filming the filmmakers worked with four different sizes of cheetah: three-week-old cubs, eight-week-old cats, an eight-month-old and four adult cheetahs. Cheetahs are an endangered species, and extremely fragile when they're young. The production was fortunate to find cheetah cubs that were only a few weeks old. "Doug Claybourne was relentless and didn't give up on getting these tiny cubs," says Harms. "The young ones can't be trained, but they're adorable!"
"There's really no training whatsoever, just cub management!" agrees cheetah handler Jules Sylvester, a veteran trainer whose prior credits include Jurassic Park, There's Something About Mary and Dr. Doolittle 2. "It's more a matter of making sure the cubs are content and happy. Scenes that could possibly be dangerous to them were written out immediately."
It was essential that the little cubs be kept warm enough during filming. Small oil heaters were running all the time, and miniature baby blankets were also employed. Like all babies, keeping a routine of their feeding schedule was very important, so the cubs drank from baby bottles every three hours, like clockwork.
As every animal has their own individual personality, the four adult cheetahs who portrayed Duma were each trained to specialize in performing various specific behaviors, with each of the animals handling the activities they were best suited for. One cheetah worked very closely with Michaletos, another was the star runner, one cheetah who was particularly possessive by nature specialized in grabbing things and walking away with them, and a fourth was especially emotive and proved to be skilled at making a convincingly worried expression for the cameras.
"It's a strange phenomenon with cheetahs," notes Sylvester. "They are very gentle as far as big cats go, but they have the attention span of a three-year-old child - they will look at you once and that's it. So you have to have a trainer on either side, and it can be very difficult to get the stare. The only time you will get that is when he zooms in on something he sees in the distance - their design is, 'Spot it, chase it.'"
While spectacular onscreen, the cheetahs' famous running prowess proved at times to be a handicap to filming. "There are parts of the film that required the cheetah to display their speed," explains Ballard. "This turned out to be very difficult because the tracking vehicles couldn't keep up with them since they can accelerate and run so fast, and they were gone before we even got going. Working with most animals doesn't require that kind of physical exertion!"
"When it comes to the adult cheetahs, when you want them to run very, very fast, they'll run just for the love of it," says trainer Jules Sylvester. "In the scene where Duma runs after the motorcycle we had two cheetahs who just loved chasing it - no bait required. They ran alongside, but were not quite brave enough to jump on it."
As everyone knows, if there's one thing cats hate, it's water. With this in mind, the filmmakers were apprehensive about shooting a scene where Xan attempts to coax Duma onto a raft. They needn't have worried - the cheetah turned out to be a consummate professional. "I thought we were going to have to make this up from a whole lot of little pieces of film and sort of cheat our way through," recalls Ballard. "Amazingly, the cat did everything in one take. He looked out at the river - 'I don't want to go there! Well, ok, I have to go with my friend,' and he got on and did everything just right."