Read the whole article at WaterForElephantsFilm.com and you must watch the video! Especially at 12:39 when they ask Tai if she's in love with Rob :)
- The studio in fact brought Rob, Reese and Christoph out to convice them to do the movie.
- Rob fell in love with Tai after doing loads of tricks with her and seeing how intelligent she is. #TaiPattz anyone? He was all over her, thrilled to be in her presence. After the meeting when he was driving back to LA, he was calling people telling them how excited he was meeting her and doing the movie.
- Reese loved Tai. They have a routine together in the movie, so she trained with Tai for countless hours over many weeks.
- Christoph brought his whole family to meet Tai.
- Everyone was a sweetheart and all were genuinely nice and very respectful of Tai.
- Tai would recognize Rob and Reese because they spent so much time together on the set.
- Tai would spend days at a time out on set to make it easy on her.
Rosie (the real one!) is also in WFE! She has a bit part in the “modern circus” scene.
- Reese and Tai did a Vogue magazine shoot – not sure when it hits stands but probably March or April edition.
If you missed it, Rob talked about meeting Tai in an interview for Details Magazine last year
"Did you know elephants purr? It's completely scary if you don't know what it is. They purr like cats, but their heads are so deep they sound like velociraptors. You feel it in the ground under your feet. So this big female started sniffing my foot—big female elephant, that is. She sniffed it so hard it came up off the pavement like her trunk was a vacuum cleaner. Then she took my entire body in her mouth. I was holding on to her head, and as I slowly let go she tightened her grip really carefully until I'm just upside down in her mouth and she's going through my pockets with her trunk, looking for peppermints. It was the best day of my life."
So you gave up control to an elephant, got groped, mugged, had your candy tugged at—and it was glorious?
"Yeah. So beautiful you can't imagine. And the baby elephant was so excited that it sprinted out and did its routine in five seconds and then curtsied to everybody. It was actually laughing. Brilliant. Did you know they can also do imitations of other animals? A horse, a chicken, a monkey—these elephants could, anyway. They were movie elephants. One had written a screenplay, and one really wants to direct."
He laughs. He was in Los Angeles, in discussions to star with Sean Penn in Water for Elephants, an adaptation of Sara Gruen's novel. The elephants are actors like him, and he wonders if he might, on some cosmic level, be a bit like them.
"Do you know how they die? The elephant guy told me their molars get ground down from eating wood but regenerate like six times. And after that they slowly starve to death. Which is poignant, but that must also be what gives them time to get to the elephant graveyard. They're incredibly designed creatures. I mean, people hang on way too fucking long. If I knew that when my teeth fell out, that was it . . . Wow. The best day of my life. Beautiful, beautiful day."
