Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made

5/27/2018

In the early 1950s, 20th Century Fox invited Samuel Fuller to make a picture in Brazil about a jaguar hunter (John Wayne was tipped for the role) falling in love with a woman (Ava Gardner) he helps to rescue as she flees through the jungle with her cowardly husband. Fuller headed for Brazil to make a preliminary study and settled in a village of the indigenous Karaja tribe. He scouted locations, shot some footage of local nature and customs, and discovered some elements that he might work into the screenplay. In the end, however, the whole project came to naught when insurance companies refused to provide coverage for a shoot in what was then a remote and potentially dangerous part of the world. In Mika Kaurismäki's 1992 documentary, TIGRERO: A Film that was Never Made, Sam Fuller retur