Warwick Vardy joined Bladon in November 2002 as a part time non executive director for his experience in the natural history division of the film industry.

For the last 15 years Warwick has worked with animals and has worked on a number of wildlife films where he has gained valuable experience and made substantial contacts within the industry. He is recognized as an experienced wrangler (animal handler). Warwicks credits include assignments for BBC Wildlife, National Geographic, Discovery Channel, IMAX films and recently work on commercials, including Guinness.

In February of this year Readers Digest visited Bladon Studios and Warwick's home for some pictures and an interview with the UK's best animal wrangler.

BY J U L I E T B U T L E R

You can download the original PDF file from the Readers Digest UK website here

Deep in a Borneo rainforest . . . .
...a 50-strong film crew manoeuvres tons of equipment around a temperamental star. As the cameras turn over at £ 2,100 per roll, they hold their breath: the leading lady has to perform. She does—beautifully—and a cheer goes up.

But life is not all it seems. The set is no bigger than a postage stamp, the star is a baby caterpillar and in the 3D film Bugs! Currently showing on IMAX screens around Britain, she’s magnified to the size of a double-decker bus.

If you want a mantis
to pray or a bat to swoop
on cue, he’s your man

To avoid mega-buck disaster, director Mike Slee roped in the real star of this £ 4.7 million movie—the world’s best insect wrangler, 32-year-old Englishman Warwick Vardy. Shy and gangly, dressed in safari suit and boots, Vardy loves creepy– crawlies. He started out breeding reptiles for pet shops but is now in constant demand from international film and TV studios to breed, manage and bring on the bugs. Says Slee, “You get everything set up and he’ll be frowning at the bug and then he’ll say, ‘No, wait, don’t roll camera yet—OK, now!’

If they have minds, he was reading them.” Vardy caught much of his cast on location in Borneo, with a slight setback when he opted to stay the night with a it glanced up, started stalking and grabbed the fly seconds before the film ran out. Many five-second “takes” require months of preparation. For one shot
Vardy was asked to get a bat to hover in front of a TV presenter’s nose. “First you train them to fly in and feed from your hand. Next you put food on your nose, and then just the smell of food and the bat will hover in front of you wondering where it is.” just occasionally he’ll help nature along. Like attaching a harness to a fly and tugging it into place like a puppet on strings. “You use very fine silks and make two loops around the neck and abdomen to steer your fly around.” No insects are injured, he insists.

For Vardy, his job is a dream come true, but it isn’t without its risks. Helping in his wife Su’s pet shop while she was out, he was bitten by a scorpion.

Unsure if he’d actually been stung (scorpion bites, so he says, are like pinpricks), he carried on stocktaking.

Ten minutes later he was getting tunnel vision. By the time Su’s new assistant Tony got him home he was in anaphylactic shock and his throat was closing up. Vardy still managed to tell Tony how to keep him alive with artificial respiration until the paramedics arrived. When a shaken Tony returned to the shop and told Su what had happened she said, “God, not again!” and went back to work.

A green sign on the door licenses Vardy to keep 300 scorpions, ten venomous spiders, 20 venomous snakes and three alligators on the premises. The list changes from week to week according to his assignments. “The neighbours are very understanding,” says Vardy, absently dropping dead chicks into the piranha tank by the kitchen sink.

One day recently he got up at 5am for a promotional shoot with B-list celebrity Jordan, who needed to be draped with large snakes. Pottering down to the garden shed where he keeps his reptiles he found that the
colony of young meerkats which lives in the garden had ripped open the nets hung under the shed roof containing thousands of fruit flies needed local tribe in order to hunt for frogs for the following day’s shoot.

He issued everyone with torches and they collected loads of them. Next morning he woke to breakfast
prepared by the tribesmen— delicious rice and meat. Only when they’d finished did he realise they’d eaten the cast.

But the film’s more intricate scenes were shot in a purpose-built studio on an industrial estate in Witney, near Oxford.

The bugs had to be ready to act exactly on cue. “I work on natural behaviour,” Vardy says, pushing back his floppy hair. “It’s more predictability than training.” For a scene involving a praying mantis eating a fly, he bred 3,000 mantises in the small back garden of his Oxfordshire bungalow.

Each had a personality chart stuck to its box (they eat each other if put together) identifying good stalkers, jumpers and flycatchers. Ace fly-catchers were timed to find the quickest. “Finally we sorted out ten identical males with a dozen understudies each,” Vardy explains. “We gave them half rations for two days prior to filming and tested who was keenest by teasing them with a fly.”

The Johnny Depp of mantises emerged and was placed on a lily pad in front of the fly. Cameras rolled but
the mantis sat cleaning itself as the film wound agonisingly away. Finally A praying mantis, which is magnified up to 250,000 times in the 3D film Bugs!

For another shoot. The flies had got into the snake vivariums and while trying to scoop them up he was bitten by a viper. Having no anti-venom to hand that day, he used a venom pump to suck out most of the poison and drove down to London for the day’s work, then sought treatment afterwards.

Vardy has become a local legend and village children who knock on the door are always given a tour.
He also regularly takes his “beasties” round to neighbouring schools, perhaps remembering his own unhappy school days. An undiagnosed dyslexic, he was happier bunking off to go looking for slow-worms than sitting in class.

He tried being a gamekeeper but couldn’t bear the slaughter of the pheasants he raised. He has turned down jobs where he was required to flick away a fly or stamp on a cockroach.

He is keen to portray insects as individuals with their own personalities. He’s at work on his own nature programme on parasites—like the one that attacks tadpoles, burrowing into the spinal cord and mutating cells so the new frog grows up to eight extra legs, can’t escape predators and gets eaten, enabling the parasite to move into its desired host.

Warwick prefers the company of his beasties to people. He dodges into the garden in mid-conversation because he can hear a heron approaching and Daisy, the six-foot alligator, is out. (She nearly had the heron for dinner the last time it landed on the pond.)

“I’m terrible with names and with people,” he says. “I turn up at the studio at the right time with the right
bugs, but I won’t know who it’s for or what the film is. Working with insects and things is much better than working with humans.”

Quote "Working with insects and things is much better than working with humans".... Thanks Warwick!! ps - your turn to clean the kitchen next time....

THIS FEATURE WAS PRODUCED BY READERS DIGEST UK. BLADON STUDIOS WOULD LIKE TO THANK READERS DIGEST FOR ALLOWING US TO REPRODUCE THE TEXT AND IMAGES ON OUR WEBSITE.

You can download the original PDF file from the readers digest website here