I'll have you.
Turtle.
Come on, up here.
Hey.
Leave that guy alone.
Ay caramba.
Zero, get in your box.
Squirrels are by nature really difficult animals.
They're clever animals but they're extremely wild.
They don't like to be handled,
they're flighty.
Get back onto your seat.
They're a really challenging animal to work with.
Okay, or just running wild in our room.
Our poor squirrel-people, I think, did go kind of squirrelly by the end.
I had no idea of what it actually involved when I did finally read the script it was
a bit overwhelming.
But it is a lot of fun.
Look, remember you ripped it off last time.
It's good.
We had a squirrel training camp that lasted for several months.
The squirrels all came here from England and most of these squirrels actually came from
squirrel rescues.
Training squirrels to, you know, jump on people, kick people.
I mean they were quite amazing.
In order to train the squirrels, it's actually a fairly slow process.
You really have to take baby steps.
Everything happens a millimeter at a time.
Come on guys.
Go on.
The first stage, obviously, when we have a wild squirrel is just getting him to come...
...out of his cage and into the box that we transport him in or into his little stool that he sits on on the set.
That's the first challenge and that is quite a challenge in itself.
Go on.
Flash, go.
Good, come one Flash.
We've actually named every squirrel so that we can keep track of them.
There's a couple documentaries on squirrels.
If they want something, they'll go through quite a lot to get it.
There was some story where the squirrels were stealing Christmas lights off of the people's
houses and just unscrewing them and taking them away and burying them somewhere.
I don't know, some sort of private squirrel Christmas or something.
I was amazed to find out the varying personalities of the squirrels we have here.
They don't all have the same personality.
They are all capable of learning.
Some are better at other things than others.
We have found that some just don't have an interest in picking up the nut at all and
so that makes the initial stages difficult because you have nothing to work with.
And those squirrels that don't lend themselves to being what we're calling "good-nut-squirrels"
move to our groups that we're training to run across the floor.
And there they go.
And another one.
Ba-bing!
And then Slowpoke.
So our smartest squirrels do the nut-gags.
Rather than teaching them to put it right into the conveyor belt we use this little
bowl because it's a much more defined area for the squirrel to put it in.
After he learns to put it in here, then we turn that into putting it into the little
conveyor belt.
This is Mugsy and he's been doing it for about a week and a half.
It probably takes about 2000 repetitions for him to start to understand that he's gonna
put it into the bowl.
And he's probably, you know, at about four or five hundred repetitions.
So he doesn't quite have the idea yet.
Good boy.
Peter!
Take the nut.
Peter.
You turd.
One of the considerations we have when we're teaching the squirrels to sort nuts is we
obviously can't give them real nuts because they would just wanna eat them.
So what they've done is they've made us these little plastic nuts.
They look quite real.
But there's a rogue element in the squirrel department and they're actually eating through
the plastic nuts.
So we've actually had to make them out of dental acrylic so that they can't bite through them.
But there's still one squirrel left who's actually biting through dental acrylic...
...so we've actually got to make some of them in metal, aluminum nuts, just to train this...
...one particular squirrel to stop biting the nut.
Another one of the gags we have to do besides actually showing the nut is the squirrel has
to tap the nut so that he can listen to it and tell whether it's a good nut or a bad nut.
So we spent a lot of time training that and what we found was that when we trained the...
...squirrel to tap the nut for real, it didn't quite read like the director wanted it to read.
It didn't look human enough.
So we've come up with a clever little idea where we've got this nut mounted on this stick...
...and the squirrel will come and pick the nut up and as he's tapping it we can manipulate...
...it a little bit to make it look a little bit more human.
By nature, they don't wanna sit there and hold it while it's moving and being manipulated like that.
They don't wanna necessarily keep their hands on it so that was quite a bit of training
to get them to do that.
Veruca sees the squirrels and wants the squirrels.
Her father says no and so does Mister Wonka.
So she goes in and gets one herself except all the squirrels pounce and dump her down the hole.
We're teaching the squirrels to do the beginning sequence of that attack.
What's gonna happen is the squirrels are gonna run out of these boxes.
They're gonna run up Joe and onto the boxes behind her.
When we actually shoot it we're gonna use a stuntwoman that is going to double our little...
...actress called Veruca and she's actually probably gonna fall down with squirrels.
This is made to look like Veruca so this is Veruca's face.
We took shots of her and sculpted her to look like this at this moment on her stunt double.
We needed to be able to protect her face from the little claws and the activity of the squirrels...
...as they run all over her face.
I remember one day a squirrel jumped on me.
If you've ever had a squirrel jump on you, it's not a feeling I wanna feel too much in my life.
But it helped create the sequence because it's quite a spooky, strange sensation which...
...we were able to use in the sequence.
The script actually calls for about 200 squirrels to be in this nut sorting room but we've got...
...40 squirrels.
And through a lot of Hollywood magic we're gonna make it look like it is 200 squirrels.
It was a mixture of real squirrels, puppet squirrels and some CG squirrels but we always...
...tried to mix it up so we never relied on one technique.
Okay, this is one of our squirrels.
We're making twelve in total.
They sit on their little seat and they're part of the whole entourage of squirrels that...
...sort all the nuts and decide which are good nuts and bad nuts.
The idea is that most of the shots we probably have a real squirrel in the foreground...
...doing an action and then several animatronics in the background repeating that.
One of the reasons for using animatronics is because they...
...don't mind doing it over and over and over again, they don't complain.
The disadvantage is, obviously, they're never going to be as real as a real squirrel so...
...mixing and matching is a good way to go.
Don't touch that squirrel's nuts.
It'll make him crazy.
We're playing an intermediate role between the real squirrels and CGI squirrels.
We had the one sequence of shots where they run across the floor and jump onto the little girl.
And that was something the squirrels turned out to be very good at.
But once they landed on Veruca, now was the moment we had to take over entirely CG because...
...there really isn't much you can do with the real squirrels, they're so fast.
What we then had to do, obviously, was then keep developing the look of all of those shots...
...so that they stayed photorealistic yet still told the story to the audience which was that...
...this sort of swarm of squirrels had managed to pull her onto the ground, get underneath her...
...and then like a moving carpet dragged her across the floor.
It was a long long process from first designing and developing the squirrels all the way to...
...the end product of delivering the final shots.
I really hope it's gonna be a memorable sequence.
It was in the original book so it's really sort of a privilege for us to be able to be...
...a part of this and make this sequence happen.