On the set of Wolf Totem, a command had to travel through an odd little border crossing. The film was Chinese and French, the story was set on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, and the animals at its center were Mongolian wolves. When the wolves were asked to sit, snarl, or fight, the words they had learned were English.[1]
For the 2015 film Wolf Totem, director Jean-Jacques Annaud used real Mongolian wolves instead of dogs, with the animals trained for years by Andrew Simpson. After filming, the wolves were moved to Canada because their working commands were in English.
Jiang Rong’s 2004 novel began with a young Beijing student sent to Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution, then drawn into the world of the steppe and its wolves.[2] The book’s wolves were not scenery. They were danger, discipline, mystery, and ecological force, the creatures the human characters feared, studied, hunted, and admired.
That made the film version unusually hard to build. Beijing Forbidden City Film Corporation first sought a Chinese director, but filming people with real wolves was considered too difficult.[1] Peter Jackson was approached, but the production did not move forward with him.[1] The job eventually went to French director Jean-Jacques Annaud, whose Seven Years in Tibet had been banned in China. His personal ban was lifted before he was hired for Wolf Totem.[1]
Annaud did not want dogs pretending to be wolves. He had already worked with animals on films including The Bear and Two Brothers, and he said cinema had long relied on dogs to stand in for wolves.[1] For this story, the substitution mattered. The film needed the posture, movement, and hunting presence of the real animal.[1]
Four Years for a Few Seconds of Wildness
The production team visited zoos around China looking for wolf pups.[1] Annaud acquired pups in China, and Andrew Simpson, a Canadian-based animal trainer, trained them for several years.[1] The production fact that has followed the film is more specific: 35 Mongolian wolves were trained in China for more than four years, learning actions such as sitting, snarling, and fighting on cue.
A moviegoer was meant to see instinct. The crew needed routine. A wolf that seemed to burst into a scene had been shaped, off camera, by repetition, containment, reward, and trust. A snarl that looked like wilderness could also be the answer to a familiar human voice.
The rest of the production was built on the same scale. Wolf Totem was a Chinese-French co-production with a reported budget of US$38 million, filmed in Inner Mongolia for more than a year.[1] It was released in China on February 19, 2015, and in France on February 25, 2015.[1] The film later grossed about US$125.7 million worldwide.[1]
The Wolves After the Movie
When filming ended, the animals could not be packed away like saddles or cameras. They had been raised and trained for a very specific working life, and the language of that life mattered. Because the wolves understood commands in English, they were ultimately relocated to Canada after filming rather than left in a Chinese-language working environment.[1]
The strange afterlife of Wolf Totem sits outside the finished frame. The film worked hard to make its wolves look untouched by human instruction, but the animals carried that instruction with them across continents. Beyond the poster and the box office numbers was a pack of Mongolian wolves in a new country, still answering to English words.
