Jon Favreau has an idea of what he might like to do next. The director/actor/writer/producer — perhaps best known for directing the first two Iron Man movies, creating The Mandalorian, and portraying Happy Hogan across the MCU — just launched the Nat Geo docuseries Lion, which he executive produced along with the BBC’s Mike Gunton, and says that his next project might be as far away from the African savanna as possible.
I spoke with Favreau and Gunton ahead of Lion’s launch to discuss the massive amount of manpower that went into producing the series, how the show compares to Disney’s The Lion King (Favreau directed the 2019 photorealistically animated version), and what they both want to do next.
“I think the pendulum swings the opposite way,” Favreau says. "[Lion] was one where we were really resigned to whatever was presented to us by the way events unfolded, and then we figured out how to tell a story within those parameters. The other extreme is full animation, where you can create a world. I learned a lot with Oswald, [a live-action animated project coming to Disney+] in February, [and] working with a 2D animation on that."
“I love storytelling and I love collaborating with other people and animation is a very collaborative process. So I've always had a little bit of it here and there. The animation pipeline certainly informed pre-production on the Mandalorian [and other] Star Wars projects. Marvel projects [have] a lot of animation. And so now I feel like a kinship to that discipline.”
On the other hand, Gunton plans to keep things a little more (literally) grounded.
“I am a bit obsessive about plants,” Gunton says. “I'm doing a show about plants, which feels like you're watching Planet Earth. The plants have character, they have motivation. You just have to look at it through a different perspective.”
Lion, which spans four episodes, shot over 1,400 filming days across in Kenya's Maasai Mara. The show tracks the “remarkable four-year journey of a tiny lion cub named Kio as he becomes king” of his pride. Favreau says the similarities to The Lion King emerged slowly throughout the course of production.
“It's a real testament to the original animated film because you realize the images that we associate with that movie are interpolations of the real environments and the real characters,” Favreau says. “And they found a way to curate it and add the music so that it felt so narrative."
“[With Lion], the icing on the cake was that this little cub, Kio, was born and looked like a Disney animated character. Certainly [with] as much character and personality as anything created in CG, except of course it's even more real and beautiful because this is a real living character.
“Everything that happened to [Kio] was driving this amazing, almost unbelievably close to a hero's journey story,” Gunton adds. “The downside of that is that lions spend a lot of time asleep, but when they do stuff, it's golden. It's very interesting. You can't say, ‘Oh, hold on, we're not ready!’ You have to go. And that's one of the many skills of these crews, predicting when that’s going to happen so they’re ready for it.”
Favreau says that, although Kio ended up being the star of the show, his arc only became obvious well after filming had started.
“We didn't know what story we were going to be able to follow [at first],” Favreau says. “And it was only over time [that] the footage began to be focused and we started to eliminate storylines that were not paying off in the future and focusing on this one character.
“The footage that we were watching in the first year [focused much more on] the four matriarchs from the pride. We didn't know what fate had in store. There was a lot of disruption in that pride. But Kio emerged as a character [because he’s a] very compelling little cub. We got this beautiful eye-level photography for this little character that felt very cinematic, like a shot you would've composed for an animated movie.
After years of making mega-budget tentpole movies, Favreau says making Lion recalled a more “back-to-basics” filmmaking process when it came to post-production.
“Once we have most of the footage, it becomes about using the tools that you have,” Favreau says. “You have more tools, as you could imagine in a traditional narrative film, especially in animation. [With Lion], we decided very early on that we weren't going to do any digital manipulation to the footage. We weren't going to paint out flies or vehicles. And the tools that we had at our disposal, it's like the old days in film. You had music and you had the editing room. You got to choose what shots to use. You got to choose how long you linger on something. And it's juxtaposing those images to create the story.”
“Identifying and relating to characters that aren't humans, you have to pull all the levers you can,” Gunton says. “The music and the narration and the editing are all about reminding people of the context of [Kio’s] story. The camera gets you into that world and you have to keep the audience in that world with all these other tools that you have at your disposal.”
“[And then] you start to feel echoes of other stories, like The Lion King,” Favreau adds. “I thought it might've just been me, [so] I called up Hans Zimmer [who composed the music for both 1994 and 2019’s The Lion King and also scored Lion] and showed him some footage in the first year and he saw it too. I thought it might've just been my imagination. And he joined the project and composed beautiful music that felt akin to the spirit of what he had done before with Disney.”
Gunton says that, unlike narrative projects, surprises are par for the course when it comes to making a show on as grand a scale as Lion and that, when working with creatures as volatile as lions, even their sleeping patterns are dramatic.
“There are always these sort of incidents,” Gunton says. “Trucks getting washed off roads and all that kind of stuff. The story of making these shows [would] make a very romantic story. The truth is it's a lot of sitting watching lions asleep. It’s actually a very zen thing. It's a strange experience. It's intense. It's something almost like a sniper.”
“The producers who were in the field [during Lion] told me that the way to get a lion to do something is to brew a hot cup of coffee and set it between your knees in the car seat,” Favreau says. “Because as soon as that happens, [the lions are] going to hit the accelerator."
Lion is airing now on National Geographic and streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.
Michael Peyton is the Senior Editorial Director of Events & Entertainment at IGN, leading entertainment content and coverage of tentpole events including IGN Live, San Diego Comic Con, gamescom, and IGN Fan Fest. He's spent 20 years working in the games and entertainment industry, and his adventures have taken him everywhere from the Oscars to Japan to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Follow him on Bluesky @MichaelPeyton
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