Gerry Cott, Founder of A-Z Animals

0:02Welcome to the Business of Modeling, the podcast where we explore the fascinating world of the modeling industry. I'm Tessa Dewing, Managing Director of Sandra Reynolds, a commercial model agency celebrating its 50th year of business. If you thought all models were human, think again. We're in Surrey today with someone who proves at least half the saying, never work with children or animals, wrong. As the founder of agency A to Z Animals, Jerry Cott has supplied everything from horses and deer to Russian squirrels for some of the biggest film, TV and advertising shoots. But here's a twist you might not know.

0:43Before training animals for the screen, Gerry was a founding member and guitarist with the chart-topping punk band, The Boomtown Rats, spending six years with them and playing on four albums and seven UK top 30 singles. But today he takes us inside the fascinating world where your style talent has four legs, feathers or fur.

1:08So, Gerry, thank you so much for chatting to me today. No, real pleasure. Great to see you. So, can you take us back to the beginning? How did your extraordinary career unfold? Well, I come from a country background in Ireland, County Gildare, where all the horses come from. And I came from what would be considered quite a wealthy family. But the downside was it was a very dysfunctional family, so a very toxic family. um there was no happiness in the home right i came from a family of five and we had all the trappings but there wasn't any real kind of emotional grounding in the home and so i suppose from two three years of age that emotional grounding i found in animals you know our dogs and we had pet pigs and we had my father wasn't a farmer he was a business person but we had sort of two or three cows in the field and they didn't really do anything.

2:06They just grazed and it was nice to look at. But I got to know them. And so all of the emotional grounding that I had and nurturing and I suppose solace, if you like, as a youngster from three, four years of age onwards was me and animals. And so I was very, very happy and content in my own company and with the animals. So my life was outside. Even if it was raining, you could always stand under a tree or hide in a bush and with the dogs or making up stories in your head and going on adventures with the dogs particularly and not being not being nervous around cattle and getting underneath cattle and so forth and they equally and almost as well as importantly um they not being afraid of you that was my grounding so my childhood up to about the age of 11 was uh my grounding and then music took over i started to play guitar and music was my solace so So animals in the early days and then music from 11, 12 on, they were my, how would you say, my winning formula.

3:28And what were you like at school? Not particularly academic, but I went to a local school. And that was a fantastic thing because when I was 11, 10, we moved from the country, from County Cildare, to what's colloquially known as South County Dublin. which anybody listening to this in Dublin would South County Dublin has a kind of a nuance to it it's like South London, North London, West London it's, you know, they have character aspects to it so we moved to South County Dublin to the sea beside the sea, a place called Sandy Cove really enjoyed the process of walking to school or cycling to school in the days when, you know, you were just totally independent You know, we lived within 300 meters of the sea.

4:19So during the summer months, we'd swim every day in the sea for, you know, from that age. So I've never been particularly temperature sensitive being Irish and being having Irish weather. So that was from 11, 12 years of age. I took up guitar, discovered Bob Dylan, discovered blues guitar. So during the teens, played acoustic guitar, got pretty good at it, had flamenco lessons, so fingerstyle, quite accomplished. So later on, late teens, I went to college, I studied architecture. And during that time, we started a band, the Boomtown Rats. we got to a point where uh it was very apparent bob was a star it was very apparent that we were becoming very well known locally and the next jump would be to try and get a record deal in the uk you had to go to london and you had to commit to the record company yeah we're going to live in london we're going to tour like nobody's business in a transit up and down.

5:31We're going to build an audience. We're going to be great, right? And that's what they're buying. They're buying a spirit, that steely determination to do this because they're investing in the music, but really they're investing in the people. So anyway, we came over here. We had two deals on the plate. We had one from Richard Branson. Richard Branson and Simon and Draper, the two guys at Virgin, they came over to Dublin, saw us live, they see all the 400 people in the club going like this. That tells them. There's something exciting on the stage. We can make this bigger. We can put them in the Hammersmith Odeon eventually.

6:14But the people we went with were from the Polygram group, and they were led by two guys who were music guys. They have to have the marketing, they have all of the other stuff but you want someone who understands and can talk music so we got a deal here we did it for as you say I did it for five years and so when we came here we knew you know bigger market the new wave was happening we were surfing the wave very much so as were the police because a lot of those guys they were jazzers But they had to become punks because every musical time epoch has a wave. And you have to become part of those surfers of that wave.

7:06Otherwise, you're going to drown. It's not going to happen. So they were all kind of, yeah, they had their, you know, spraying walls and stuff. But, you know, it wasn't who they were. It's what you had to do. Attempting to throw a TV at a hotel room. Yeah, spit at you and, you know, all of that stuff and pogoing up and down. That was the time. We lived in a house in Chessington called Barwell Court. It's still there. It was rented by and then, bizarrely, leased to the new record company we were signed to. And they would put us in there. So we would have a rehearsal room. We would have individual bedrooms.

7:47Mine and Kathy's bedroom was graced with a mattress on the floor. and we slept on a mattress on the floor with a hi-fi and a turntable for two years until we got out until there was a little semblance of success and then we bought a place

8:06the exciting part of a band and if you speak to anybody and I mean like really famous names they'll all tell you the same thing there's something so bonding and exciting seeing the chart and the line begin to go up in terms of popularity, in terms of brand awareness, brand recognition. We're a brand, we're a band, but we're a brand. And you arrive in a city and people are really pleased to see you. We never reached a point in the Boomtown Rats where we were headlining that. I'm very musical. There's two things in my, well, there's three things in my life. There's my family. There's music, even now, or the appreciation of music and playing solo guitar and animals.

9:01And that's it. Ever. Yeah. I'm feeling really nostalgic hearing you talk about this. I really miss aspects of the old industry. I feel like, you know, all the album covers, the art that went into the album covers. The videos that people did. Yeah, so much creativity. Yeah, and I feel like, I guess this generation would say it hasn't gone at all. It's just different. Well, it is. It's just different. However, my experience of music, it was so exciting, building it. When we had a band and we had a record deal and we had a single in the charts, I went to this Japanese company's UK office and said, I'm in this band, that's me.

9:43Can I have free guitars? said, you know, I'm interested to form a relationship with a guitar company because there will be time to come that it will be advantageous to you as a company. But I want to have the ability to ring up and say, I need such and such a modification done. Or if I'm touring in the States and something happens, you know, this is an international company. And so we did that. And we came to a deal and so forth. But when we went to Japan and we were playing in Japan, We played quite big venues, three, four thousand seaters. So when we went there, because I had a relationship with the company, I was met at Tokyo Airport by a representative and an interpreter who had a car and a driver outside.

10:34And so we had three or four days off. And I said, I'm going, seemingly I'm going up in the mountains for a few days. And they'd all go, because in a band, everybody's, what's he got? Why haven't I got that? You know, it's a bit acquisitive. It's a bit kind of, you know, all the time because you come up ostensibly as a all for one and one for all. But it isn't really like that. All right. You've got, you have to have a star. You have to have a leader. And the rest kind of file in. But I made my own experience with Boontal Rides. So in Japan, I was brought up into the mountains. Masomoto is like the Swiss Alps.

11:11and that's where all the Yamaha, all of the big names you know about, that's where they're all based because of the air. And they make all the instruments up there. So I spent three, four days there staying in the traditional Japanese guest house. And their client relations are incredible out there. They really look after you, don't they? And I played for the workforce in the canteen. You know, I really engaged with the whole process. So I did five tours of the Boontown Rats. four world tours

11:47what then made you pivot from the music to animals okay so I did four tours world tours and you get to a point in the music industry if that line isn't going up it's flattened out the joy had gone out of it for me it was a job It became a job. And it became a job that I was working in an environment that I wasn't the boss. And I had to kind of sign on to stuff that, you know, I'm not feeling this. The traveling, the hour and two hours on stage, that's great. But it's the 22 hours be around that that is mind numbing eventually. so I decided Kathy I told Kathy I'm going to leave the band and and so and she said yeah that's great and so I came home and also when you're away for that length of time you go a bit crazy and you come back and all of a sudden you know because you've been in a situation where you don't have to you don't carry your own passports you don't have to think and as much as I look back with it with a very fond heart.

13:06It had reached a sell-by date for me personally. So I was at home. We were living in West Surrey at that time, a place called Chobham. We had horses and we had dogs. And I guess for a few years there, we were living the life. But like all good things, you have to have a plan because that's not going to last forever, you know? And so we were very aware of our horses and our dogs and our being. And that was enough for us. And then one day, Kathy asked me, I think Marley, who was a great dog of ours, a border collie, a tricolor border collie, just a great dog. He was very attractive looking. And Kathy said, you know, I'd love to get Marley in a television commercial.

13:59So I made a few calls. So were there agencies out there at that point? There were. There were one or two embryonic ones. But I made a call to someone I knew vaguely in an ad agency. It turned out that a while after that, they were going to have an audition, a casting, for a Mars paddle dog. Sure enough, he got the gig. He got the gig. Kathy was into training. I less so, but I was happy to be there watching and so forth. I was still kind of music in my head because you do go very music-centric over those years. But I did enjoy writing and I did enjoy being out just like I was when I was a kid. So I was going back to my childhood, really.

14:46And I noticed you used the word, how did you pivot? It wasn't a conscious pivot. What it was was a realization. Wow. So she did this television commercial. She did it and it was very good. and she was very good and Marley was very good and she started to get asked by the same director who had hit a vein in the pet food market and he was shooting a lot of television commercials right and so he said well could you the next one will be it'll be a golden retriever so another one happened another one happened and it wasn't a business but we suddenly realized gee this could be a business. We could write our own diary.

15:34We could develop it. We could be dedicated to it. And we decided in our terms, not in terms of everybody perhaps, but in our terms, we were going to be the best in the business. Commercials were king in those days. They had unlimited budgets. Unbelievable budgets. How much is, this is back in the 80s. They used to shoot all over the world. How much does a television commercial cost? This is in the mid-80s. Oh, a million pounds. In the mid-80s, right? That's about six million pounds worth of buying power now. And so we decided if we're going to build a business, we've got to find like-minded people who are great at what they do, but also are people we would like.

16:22because great animals always live with great people. It's just a universal law because they're into it. They are caring. They are shrewd. They are clever. Their animals are clever. So we started to go up and down the length and breadth of the UK, met people who had, you know, rather eccentric people, who had private zoos, who were horsey people, who were interested in obedience, training with dogs. All the gambits, even there was a guy, a specialist back in the day, who was an entomologist, who his life was spiders. And he would know all about spiders. So if we had something that we had to film with a spider, he would be my guy that I would call and I'd employ to be part of that spider project.

17:16I'm not all things to all people, But what I am is someone who can kind of logistically look at a problem or a requirement and break it down. You are going to have to give me an example of something with spiders now. Yeah, I mean, normally it's something like a drama. It's normally, you know, there's someone in the house and they're looking out the window. And as they're looking out the window, the camera pulls back and a spider walks along. Like a big house spider. Right? Okay? And it looks so real. And it is real. And so this chap, he had pet spiders that he would study and bring out. You have to have a spider that is happy to be in a big matchbox that you'll take from your home, from your habitat that you've created for that spider.

18:09He was able to take his spider out in a big matchbox, bring it to the set. and you know the first ad would say is the spider guy here right it would be that where where's the spider guy does anybody see the spider he's at the catering and and so well they're always at the catering right they're stuffing themselves right um and of course everybody is waiting for this to be a disaster right how are we going to get this shot okay we'll go through the motions right? Bloody animals. That was the context back in the day. So John would come in. Okay, we're going to shoot this now. So da-da-da, Mary is going to look out the window.

18:51We're going to track in, our dolly in. We're going to slightly tilt down. We're going to see what she's looking at. And then we're going to pull back slightly. And she's still in they're a bit loose and dirty, but you can still see her. That's when I want the spider to go like this, right? And of course the first AD and the director Like rolling their eyes. Yeah. And the expression was you get what you get. You know, whatever works for you, whatever happens. Yeah, exactly. So because of that relationship with that spider, John was able to lift out the spider, put it out, and of course the spider would want to find out where he is, so he's walking around.

19:44Of course, they turned on the shot, and they're turning, right? That was great. Do you want to just check that back? Are we good on that? Yeah, I haven't, it's all sharp. So it was kind of, that's an indication of you've got to work with experts. I'm an expert with certain animals and a real expert with large stock cattle particularly well also everyone on that shoot is being paid a lot of money you know they want it to take 10 minutes they don't want it to take three hours so they it's very easy for that to happen so so we built we built over time a reputation for kind of um at least aspiring to get it right not just turning up a lot of people turned up.

20:26A lot of actors turn up. They don't know their lines. They're not prepared. They're fluffing. But the people who are really good, all of which you'll probably know their names, is because they don't do that. They arrive. They are so... It's all about preparation, isn't it? Yeah. They're so relaxed. They're in the moment. They're present. There's 10 ways they can deliver that line. None of them have been fluffed, but the intonation can vary slightly here or there, or the intention of what it might mean on camera. So similarly with horses, similarly with dogs, with all the kind of companion domesticated, and domesticated, I would say in that case, spider.

21:13If they're calm, relaxed, like a good trainer should be, not intimidated by 250 people around them. That's how it began. And then we were asked to do a Lloyd's Bank horse commercial. I see. That's one of the most famous ones, isn't it? So that was one of your first. Yeah. One of our first. Okay. So at that point, what was your vision? Or did you not even really have a vision? Were you just going from one to another? Our vision was to create a business that we would run, that's us, that would be very successful in its own terms. It's a very boutique, very, it's like a craft. We have a saying in here, can I, constant and never-ending improvement.

21:55Now, for some people, that's quite confronting because they're the same person they were when they were 16 or the same person they were when they were mid-20s. Well, actually, the whole process is learning. And people who are exemplary, I watched Anthony Hopkins. We did a job sometime about two years ago, after lockdown, I think. And I had to put 26 Fox Terriers around him. And for him to be delivering lines and being in his character, right? There's no mystery why these people have become so successful. It's because they're passionate about what they do and they are consistently learning. And they never gave up learning.

22:45So we did the first, we did a Lloydsbank commercial. So Kathy comes from a horse background. So she knew about horses. So she went looking for a horse that would fit the brief. It's just one horse at this point, was it? Yes. Yes, and it was what was known as a triccano, which is kind of like a German equivalent of a thoroughbred. There was a very famous stables down in the New Forest, a very famous Olympic coach down there, who had a lovely stables and lots of good clients and all of that. And so we went down and we found a horse and we came to terms with the owner, how we would do this and costs and all of that.

23:28And then we presented that to the production company. And because we do the homework, it's not just any old horse. No. It's that horse, that temperament, the backstory of that horse. And also to have a horse that can be trained loose, you know, that's not having a rider on it or being led or that's a totally different ballgame. Yeah. In order to work with a horse like that loose, you have a big infrastructure. So I had maybe 10 outriders all mounted, all on little pocket rockets, you know, little cobs or half-bred horses that are really goy. Polo-pony type things. Yeah, that type, you know, very, very goy.

24:14So they're outside the periphery, but they're there. and from point A to point B, which could be half a mile, on a beautiful coast, beautiful sand, all safe and secure, all walked. And we do all that. And we charge for all that. There's a lot of prep time. Right. So there's maybe eight, ten riders, eight, ten horses. Oh, yes, and the hero horses. And yes, and all the transportation. And they all came two days early. I was going to say, you'd rehearse something like that Oh yeah, absolutely For us, but also for the horse to get a sense of their geography Be comfortable where they are Totally, totally And so you had a situation where the hero horse The head collar would be slipped And all he was doing was going down to his companion Down at the other end He'd run down each time And then would be fed some treats from a bucket.

25:15And then if there was any possibility that he was thinking, oh, I think I'll go for the weekend somewhere now. The outriders were around so they could always... What about, because they were by the sea as well, weren't they? They didn't go in the water. Oh, they did. But only kind of splashing. Didn't get spooked. No, no, no. No, no. And also we're looking for horses that have something about them. Well, we would say something about them. They're not spooky. They're balshy. You want something that has, like stars. You want that kind of snappy confidence, sometimes hard to deal with. You're wanting a spirited kind of personality.

25:56You can always bring it down a little, and you can kind of work with it and finesse it. But if it's spooky and retiring and scared, you're on a non-starter. Well, it's like people. I'm thinking of people I employ. Exactly. It's the same thing. It is. Now, I'm going to give you a parallel because this interview and your questions kind of sparked a thought because I hadn't really articulated, but I really understand it. The emotional space that animals had as a child, the emotional space that music had as a teenager and through my 20s. And then when I came back, we were with our animals and that emotional space was addressed.

26:42I didn't really go anywhere. I just went away for five years. I've been with animals over 60 years. I was in the Boomtown Rats and in music five years. Five years out of 60. So that kind of occurred to me that I hadn't really articulated before.

27:09Tell us about some of the other shoots and productions that you've worked on, some of the more memorable ones. Normally in people's career, whatever they do, you know, if they're a window cleaner and all of a sudden they get the contract for the biggest building down the road, there's at some point where something happens. So we'd done early on, 84, early 84. We had done, by that time, we'd done TV commercials. Our name was around Soho. Oh, yes, promotion, the importance of promotion. This is back in the day when there wasn't any social media. No, and you had the most important and the most valuable promotion, which is referral and word of mouth.

27:50Yeah, and also an A5 envelope with an A5 card. Yeah, that you sent through the post. I don't know how many thousands I sent through the post. I would have boxes of Manila A5 envelopes, and we literally littered Soho because all the production companies were in Soho. All the ad agencies were in Soho. And so Kathy said, in her genius, we need an image on a card that says something to creative people. Okay? we need a promo card that goes out and they're going to keep it it's going to go on the wall it can't be binned so it has to be special Kathy I was at home Kathy said I'm going to go into town I'm going to go to various photo libraries and then she rang me from payphone she says I have it we can license it and we can use it for everything we want because it's so specialized it's not as if it's it was a piece of artwork and it was a painting and you know what it was it was a painting of a pig but the pig wasn't you know head there tail there wasn't that kind of pig with feet and feet it was that kind of pig a painting of a pig with a green field and beautiful landscape in the background and lovely big ears and a lovely snout that almost felt wet painted by a chap called David Cheetham.

29:26And eventually we brought out the image. Because it wasn't a photograph, it wasn't of a particular pig, it was of a very clever pig who clearly, the backstory in the photograph or the backstory in the painting was, this is a pig somewhat of a cut above all pigs. Because he's standing there looking at you, and the eyeline was that. And you're looking in the background. Well, he's obviously not in a pigsty about to be eaten. This guy has some kind of, what do they say, a word they use now, agency. Some kind of control over what their lives are. And it all said that in the painting. The reason why it said it in the painting was because the painter put it there.

30:13He had a vision. So anyway, we get the cards. We got 3 ,000 cards. And this was quite expensive back in the day. 3 ,000 full-colour cards with copy on the back. And then you had the 3 ,000 manila envelopes. And then you had the postage. There wasn't any franking machine. It was me with a little bit of... Foam. Yeah, a little bit of foam and doing it like that. Did all that, right? So they went out. Within a week, we were getting phone calls. and I knew Cathy had found the right image for our company. When I was watching the South Bank show, there was a painter called Francis Bacon, a very famous, bizarre, surrealist kind of painter, very, they would call it now Gothic.

31:10And his painting sold for millions, millions, because he was one of the great artists of the 20th century. so he's being interviewed by Melvin Bragg on the South Bank show on ITV on a Sunday night and I'm watching it because I'm interested in all this kind of stuff and there in the background is our card literally the card not just the image the card with our name on it that would have cost you a fortune to product place that there yeah but the image yeah and you know what it said to me well F me If Francis Bacon thinks that's a great image and being who he is and he puts it up on his studio wall because it probably makes him smile or has some emotional kind of connection that he didn't bin it, that's the card for us.

32:04So this was in his studio on his wall. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Right? And that's like saying, you know, I don't know who the, you send, I don't know, to send a card to Taylor Swift and they do an interview with Taylor Swift. She's got it on a bedroom wall or something. Yeah, you know, you've made a connection. So anyway, that's what we did. And we did that consistently for years. Every year I'd send out three or four thousand cards. And that was what you did. So we were probably ahead of the game. I come from music. I've been involved in architecture. I came from a wealthy background.

32:46Cathy came from a very comfortable background, horsey, da-da-da. I had done music videos. I knew where the camera was. I knew what lens they were using, all of that stuff. So there was an amalgamation of knowledge that somehow coalesced into what we could bring to the business, which was unique to us. because our background, who we were as people, and our commitment to learning, constant, never-ending improvement, was unique.

33:25Ultimately, the reason you did well was because you did a brilliant job on every job that you did and therefore you brought up your reputation. And that's something I think, you know, you can throw all the money at marketing you want if you haven't got the substance and the knowledge. And, you know, every job has got to be great. We still don't take every job we're off. No. Because, first of all, you see, our clients don't need to know the backstory here. But our work shows what we do, okay? And how we treat people, how we're respectful of people, and how we absolutely insist on respect. If you're a customer or a client of ours and you don't respect us, well, thank you.

34:07We're busy that week. One of the great things in life, if you can afford to say no, because when you're going in the early days, you won't be able to afford to say no. And you won't discern when it should be a no or no. You learn those things. So not every job went brilliantly well, but we learned as we went. Yeah. And so the gig that really kicked it in for us was we did a film called A Private Function, where there was a pig in it. And it was Maggie Smith, Michael Palin, Richard Griffiths, who went on to the Harry Poppers. Loads of faces who were kind of stars and became stars, you know, world famous.

34:51And so there was a pig in the story. And we were asked to do it because the producer, a guy called Mark Chivas of the BBC, he'd heard our name from someone in London. So he rang up and he said, my name is Mark Chivas, very, very kind of an Oxbridge kind of guy. And he said, I have a film, it's called Private Function. It's going to have this in it and there's a pig in it. And I said, okay. So they sent us the script. And so we prepared for that. we had three litter sisters and the film was three months you know big well relatively big it was being funded by George Harrison from the Beatles I remember saying to Mark Chivas we'll only do this because there are three litter sisters we're going to be training the three litter sisters and there'll be one will be good for such and such a piece of action the other one will be such and such other one for such and such but you then have the opportunity to create a character by the actual attributes that each bring to it, because they are interchangeable to camera.

35:57It was our first project where we understood the principle of interchangeability to create an animal character, because sometimes they're vertically, sometimes they're vertically different animals. So we did that movie, and as part of the deal which was quite unique we put a price to it that would assure the three pigs, we call them three Bettys, middle Betty big Betty and little Betty and George Harrison signed off on many thousands of pounds to assure that they would live on a farm a private estate in a woodland for the rest of their days until they had to go to the big factory in the sky. But they lived into their teens.

36:51Yeah. And you put that in place. I put that in place because we weren't going to film with the pig and then someone eat the pig. And that was in 1984. So that's who we were. Now, that wasn't kind of, how would you say, that wasn't common currency back then. But because of our background, because of our chutzpah, because of the things we were interested in, we were able to make that stick. Because producer Mark Chivas, he's gone now, but even big-time producer, big-time producer, he realized, okay, so that's a deal-breaker? Yeah, absolutely a deal-breaker. Fine, leave it with me. And then came back signed off.

37:33Yeah. And that's really important, isn't it? I mean, how do you make sure that animal welfare and safety is prioritized now? And has that changed? Well, it has because now it's so much easier. We were like a broken record player. And what about this? What about that? Because when we started in this business, animals were organized by the prop department. Table, chair, pig, right? Well, we didn't think of it like that. their tables and chairs. They should be in their own trailer with the star. Yeah, well, yeah, in a sense, in a sense. But more that they are treated with some kind of humanity, right?

38:15They have a consciousness. They have an awareness. They have a sense of safety, sense of understanding, sense of their universe, however limited. And they all have their own personality. Yeah, because of that. That's their personality. Same with dogs, same with spiders. Same with all of them. They're all beings. We are a very arrogant species because we're predators. We're an apex predator species. Us, polar bears, great white sharks. That's where, because we've figured out how to kill the other two. So we're the apex predator, right? Now, animals don't, they have a certain kind of understanding of where they fit.

39:01And the one thing that's really helped us to be brilliant at what we do, and I'll say it ourselves, is we're present with the animal. Or the trainers that we work with are present with the animal. They're not blaming the animal for their inability to figure it out. They're not passing the parcel. Okay? So personality, animal and human is very important in our work. We've done the new Ron Atkinson for Netflix. He did one about three years ago called Man vs. Bee. Ron Atkinson is a genius, pure and simple. He is dedicated to constant improvement in his work. that's why he's a global phenomenon we get the scripts and the scripts make you laugh out loud because the writing is so good we had to choose a dog and we were we were looking at the dogs and we had a we had castings here we have castings here and the dog in that case is very much part and parcel it's not kind of old school you know walkies it's not that it's kind of figuring out who they are as a personality and what they bring to it by themselves.

40:23It's like great casting actors. They, 99%, well, 95 % directors will say, it's in the casting. You know, I'm casting someone who brings that in the door. We do the same. We're not reinventing the wheel. We're just copying what they do. And so we had to choose a dog, this particular dog, a Border Terrier. He had all of that, but very interestingly, his owner and trainer had trained him to have the normal kind of sit-stay, down-stay, speak-on-command. The normal kind of ABCs we would term them as. But in that personality, right? And he was very, very possessive of anything. You gave him something, it's his now.

41:10You gave him a shoe, it's his shoe now. You're not having the shoe back. You could drag him down to Leatherhead's railway station. He ain't letting go. Exactly, right? Exactly. So there's a lot of gags. See, the gags with the star of this and the dog there, it's written. We're now going to shoot scene five, and scene five is daddy, daddy, daddy, da. And the dog has to be that person. because you'll have a director, you'll have a star, you'll have a producer, and it's not just in the background walking along. This is intrinsic. And to do that as the owner slash trainer of that animal, that's a big commitment.

42:01I mean, that's got to be their thing. Because I think we have this with people that want their children to be models. It's a little bit the same. They come in, yeah, we want that. Well, I can't do that because I work full time. I can't do that. And it's like, well, then you can't do it. That's right. Yeah. Tick. Thank you very much for coming in. Exactly that. You need as much passion for, in your case there, from the mum for the child to do well in this. And I'll support him or her best I can. And I'm committed. And what we need to do. Right. Same with trainers and owners of dogs, for instance.

42:39We get calls, quite a lot of calls here, where they'll say, I have a dog. People tell me, going down the street. That's great. Save the children, yeah. Same. And that's why we're in the business of modeling, right? Yeah. And so we kind of choose people. We go and find people who are, that American expression, the right stuff. they're passionate about what they do and they want to be involved you're not just going to be involved in like something you're going to be with this star up close and personal with one of our trainers so the owner and trainer this is an opportunity you're going to be telling your grandchildren this story right so it's an opportunity here and they get it the people who are really committed get it that it's a privilege first of all to get a job like that and it's an opportunity and it comes with a little bit of responsibility at your side.

43:44Animal welfare when we started was very much us saying yes, no. And before that presumably they'd just find an animal somehow and use a friend's dog or whatever. And it would either work or not and they'd make it work. They'd kind of shoot round it. So I find myself the odd occasion sitting down with big time producers and directors and I'll have 10 minutes. Get the animal guy in, right? And we'd sit down. And I know where they're coming from. And, you know, it's a different culture. I get it. I'm not going to give them the whole backstory. Sorry, I'd like to tell you where I'm coming from, right?

44:20You're getting it, but they're not. But here's one that stops them in their tracks. The director will say, okay, the dog jumps down over the such and such, and then he crash lands on the car, and then he jumps off the car, and then he gets knocked down by the such and such and da da da right and then he looks at me to see how I'm going to respond to this and now he's looking at me to see whether I've swallowed what I'm going to say next and here's the kicker I hear you you know in the movie where the guy got stabbed and they kind of go like that right he didn't really get stabbed they were making a movie and they broke down the scene.

45:06So if you want us to be involved, we're going to have to break down the scene. I want a storyboard. I want a storyboard from frame one to end frame. I want to see where the joins are. And if that's not going to happen, I can't help you because we've got to figure out clever ways of making reality appear to be reality when actually it isn't. We're making a movie. And so I get them. So in my case. It's almost like working out a stunt transition. It's exactly that. It's exactly that. But what it does is, I guess, from my perspective, it gets them on side from the point of view, Jesus, this guy knows what he's about.

45:47This guy knows our business. This guy knows about stuff we know. Right? He ain't just the animal guy. I can be the animal guy. And they get it. And they go, okay, cool. so let's uh let's have another little uh meeting um in a week we're a bit we're a bit early in pre-production yet it's normally like early on they'll say to their assistant uh keep in touch with jerry daddy daddy da so we can we can make sure you get the first draft of that any comments and stuff on what the transitions would be where the camera moves are and so if it's something like that, we become a valuable person.

46:28I can only speak how we kind of handled it. It was a personal affront to me and to Cathy that animals were props back in the day. They were considered props. Oh, and you look, you see some of the old Westerns and things with horses and you just think, oh, I can't even imagine how. That's how the American Humane was established. The American Humane Society in the States was like the RSPCA, and they said, we can't be having this in films. And they got into discussions with the big studios, and they started to regulate this. And then later on, no animals were armed in the making of this film, and they'd have that stamp, and they began to regulate it.

47:11However, over here, we were still in a time where good judgment and humanity told you what was appropriate and what wasn't appropriate. So we didn't say, animal welfare, we're the animal welfare, please. Here's our tick check box. We weren't that. We were just, this is how we do our work. Now, if someone else comes in and they're a bit different, who knows? I'm not in the room. And sometimes directors, producers, what they really want is a yes. in someone else's case what they're wanting perhaps a little bit of reluctance to turn it into a yes because they want the gig yes I see what you mean yeah are you prepared to take your blouse down a little bit because they want the gig yeah and that's why you've got intimacy coordinators now because directors and producers in the film industry would would there wasn't any kind of structure to it So around the early 90s, we were fairly instrumental in getting vets on TV commercial shoots.

48:16And you'll have newbie kind of young producers, what the hell, I can go down to the pet shop and... Yeah, but you're making a television commercial that's going to be broadcast on terrestrial television that's controlled by Clearcast. You're just a producer. Procter and Gamble have a reputation. and they require nothing to bring them into disrepute by the actions of their subcontractors. And you're just one subcontractor of maybe 400 in London that make commercials. And I'll say this, and sometimes it'll be too much for them. And sometimes they'll go, gotcha. And normally the people who say gotcha become very successful because they're prepared to learn and they're not stuck in who they were when they were 16 years of age.

49:03Not all of them are trying, not all of them. We're getting back to children again because they have to have a license, obviously, to work. Animals are licensed now. The producers will say, well, I don't need to do that. I can just use a friend of a friend. They still need to be licensed. Well, no one's going to know. Okay, same thing. Who is your client? Your insurance won't cover if anything happens on set. Just do it. It doesn't cost anything. It's a hassle. But it doesn't cost anything. And we do all of that. So licensing for children has been around a very long time. Yes, it has not. But licensing for animals in media hasn't.

49:36But now it's covered under the Animal Activities Licensing. Right. So tell me about that. Okay. So that came in in 2018. That's a batch of legislation that recognizes a lot of what I've been saying about animals intrinsically. That they are sentient. That they understand their surroundings. That they can be fearful. That they can feel pain. All of the things we kind of intrinsically know, but that's enshrined in the 2018 Act of Parliament. And so that formalized the concept. Now, like everything that comes in, it takes time for producers, and I'm talking about commercials, producers, stills, you know, the more competitive stratas, dare I say.

50:34They try to look for ways of kind of making the budget work. And making the budget work means not paying or paying as little as they can get away with. Have you seen budget shrink? Or are they still there for the very big productions? Commercials, they've shrunk big time. Because you're no longer, you know, as you quite rightly put it, when you made a commercial in the 80s, you had one channel to market, which was television. So you made your commercial as fantastic as possible because everyone's watching the commercials in between the breaks. They weren't flicking across. Well, that was the phone, wasn't it?

51:11Yeah, and they weren't flicking across because there wasn't like 10 stations they could flick to. They're basically watching this thing. And some of the commercials were like watching a movie. Well, ITV and Channel 4 were there too, weren't they? Absolutely. Now they can capture niche markets on Facebook, Instagram, any number, YouTube, any number of platforms that I can find and use a sniper rather than a machine gun. Right? And of course, what happened was in the noughties And in the early teens of this century, quite a number of production people, they moved into massive brands. And what happened was, instead of a production company having, you know, three or four star directors, some of those star directors went to the States.

52:01So the landscape changed, and it's now at a point where I think very, very good young directors, male or female, have shot YouTubers, Instagrammers, TikToks. They can shoot on a phone, but they can learn their visual vocabulary on a phone. And then all it is is transferring that to a 35mm camera digitally. But they've learned to educate their eyes. These people, they're willing to work hard for not a lot because they're building their muscle and they're building their careers. The people who are very established in those different departments, all of a sudden they're not getting paid as much as they were and they're thinking, well, I'm thinking of leaving the business.

52:53You know, that conversation occurs because a new generation comes in who are lean and hungry and are willing to put in the hours. And of course, if you have that as a production base for commercials and for content, content is the new TV advertising. It took a long time for people to get that, but that's what's so. And so you have a situation where content is king. It is highly targetable. and provided the idea, the creative idea, to get a response from the viewer, whatever that response requirement is, provided the idea is creative and well executed, it can be done relatively cheaply. I used to work for a photographer called Ken Griffiths.

53:41He was a car photographer. That was his specialty. He only shot on a 10.8 camera so that the transparencies were 10.8. So they're very high quality. And he only shot on a 100-year-old Gaddafi camera. Rebuilt on wooden sticks, the kind of thing you would see in a historical thing. That's how it happened. Now, this is an iPhone 12, which I have been reluctant to upgrade because I like it a lot. and it has a decent kind of resolution on it. I shoot stuff in here that I send to some of our clients that really answer some questions for them in terms of visually and behaviorally if it's a dog. And that's a phone.

54:39Yeah. So that's why the business has shrunk. Yeah. Because similarly in music, when I was a young guy, if you wanted to make a demo in a decent studio, it was£600 a day to go into a studio. And if you wanted to make an album, a decent album studio, it was a grander day. I mean, you were in debt for the rest of your life almost. Now you can have a dinky little laptop and you can make a fantastic album.

55:12What does make a good animal for this kind of work? Precisely the following If it's a dog one that's been out and about from puppyhood after their shots so they're out and about, they go to the local mall or they go to the local supermarket not supermarket, but walk around the mall or go to the garden centre garden centre is good for dog training because there's lots of stuff happening, people with noise and stuff. And of course, you can sidle up to people and they don't know what you're doing, but you're training in a way, behaviorally training. So you need a dog that's very, very solid mentally, confident, capable of relaxation, being relaxed, been well prepared as a puppy and young dog, seen a lot, traveled on buses, maybe traveled on the train.

56:01All of those things expand their consciousness of the world. It's like children who've traveled early. They understand the world more. They're not kind of like, it's all a bit kind of scary, this. They're comfortable in the environment. Absolutely. Yeah. So that's how they become comfortable. So a person, just because a dog looks a particular way, it's the look, yes. The personality, yes. The experience, yes. The knowledge around the dog, yes. All of those have to be there. to work at the level we work. And how would someone go about getting an agent? They'll ring up. They'll look up on the internet, animal agencies, and they'll find lots of, it's a bit like me finding a builder or a roofer, you know.

56:50You know, it's kind of what's out there, right? So you need to do your research. Yeah, I need to do your research. The same as you would with any agent. I guess there are some more unscrupulous ones out there. Well, how would we put them? We don't charge. we've never charged to be on our books. No, which is the same with any good agent. Because you know you're good. Yeah. And people come to you. You make your money from the commission for jobs that you get. And the work. Yes. And the work. The work is everything. So it's the same with an animal agent then. Yeah. So there are one or two agencies that charge.

57:22And I do feel that's probably part of the business model. So do your research. Do your research. Talk to the agency. Talk to the agency. Look at all the work they've done. Talk to the agency and come see them.

57:41In the big stuff, you know, the Amazons and the Apples and the Netflix and Hulas and those guys, they have a level of professionalism within, because all of the people working in production companies working for the big paymasters, the global streamers. they have systems so we're now in the film business so they have a whole infrastructure and they employ the production companies who brought them great ideas for stories or they might have a story that they've been presented with and we'll go to such and such production company who has a track record and they're good at what they do I did six seasons of The Crown horses, corgis Oh dear, corgis, of course.

58:32It's all scripted. Yeah, and I think people will see animals on screen and just assume that they were there. Absolutely. And that's the right response. Yeah, yeah. Because it's real, right? So something like that, they have that ability to do their best work in all departments. What are some of your other more recent? We've just done a series called Alice and Steve, I think. Yeah, what did you do for that? There's a dog character. Right. And the dog is a real character. It's even on the, you know, it's got a number on the call sheet. Right. Killing Eve you did, didn't you? We did Killing Eve. We did Heartstopper.

59:09We did. You know Heartstopper? Yeah. Yeah, we did the first. And we've just done work on the special that they've shot now, like a film special. We did a thing called Icebreaker. We've done a lot on Grace. Do you know Grace, that detective series? The Roots Maneuver. It's a new movie. It's coming out. early next year, I think. I did a lot of work on that. And if you're shooting outside the UK, will you find animals in? We don't now. I used to. I used to. Years ago, I mentioned earlier in the discussion, I did a lot of work with cattle. And a cow, I could bring in a cow in here and the cow would stand there and then the cow would be happy.

59:49But there would have been two weeks prep to do that. Every day, the cow would get to know me. I'd bring you food. give the cow put on a head collar and leave her over eventually like a horse like a pony walk along take it off cow isn't going anywhere because we're now bonded we're friends so I can bring that in here but not tomorrow morning and that's where the cost is it's the prep so I used to do a lot of just by the by I used to do a lot of commercials in Europe for dairy brands I would go to Ireland for Kerrygold Irish butter I'd go to Germany Italy for Olivia, olive oil, but they'd have a little bit of cows in there as well.

1:00:30I've been, I've shot a cat in Cyprus and the day shoot, it's relatively expensive to what they're, because they're seeing cows everywhere. Why is it so expensive? So you were there for two weeks before that, prepping. That's what's expensive. Whereas anyone looking at that commercial would just think, oh, they're just shot in a field of cows. Whereas no, you've placed the cows. Yes. I would explain and they'd say, how much? And I'd say, well, if you look at the time involved, and also I'm out of the game. Otherwise you're going to chuck a load of cattle in a field and spend five times more time with the whole crew there trying to film exactly what you want.

1:01:11But you're not going to get it. You're not going to get it, no. So it makes sense if you actually look at the whole picture. Yeah. So in top line advertising, they know that. Even the directors of producers, they know that. And now with the rise of CGI and AI, that's going to affect that. It does, yeah. Absolutely. What do you think the future looks like for real animals on screen? It's a good question. If there was a poll, and there have been polls around this subject, whether people are concerned about the animals they see in advertising and in films. In terms of a background concern about the safety and welfare of the animals, about 60 % have that concern.

1:01:55Where the CG kicks in immediately nowadays is wild animals. So in advertising, we had a very interesting few times where we've said, have you thought of, you know, a script has come in. And we look at it and we say, yeah, this can be done and it can be safe and sound. However, have you or has your ad agency given any thought to the perception of this? Like, for instance, we don't dye sheep. You want a sheep purple? Do it in post. We're not doing it. Okay.

1:02:37And there are whole areas where perception is just as important as reality when portraying animals. And I would be the first to, because we're on the front line and we see this, we look at a script and we go, you know what? Well, first of all, it's not for us. Why is it not for us? Why is it not for you, the person will say. Well, we think it's kind of inappropriate. How do you mean inappropriate? Because they're thinking the selling message. They're thinking the gig to make it. They're thinking the money from their client. They're not thinking the perception. They're not thinking anything else.

1:03:12No, what the audience are going to think. But the marketing director of the brand, they don't want any negative perception. No. Right? And actually with CGI and AI, yeah, you could do stuff that actually you wouldn't be able to do in reality. Totally. So you can do all of the difficult to do stuff, right? And you do that with dogs or cats or whatever. Unless it's very innocuous and simple and reflects simple real life, it will move to CGI at some point. Absolutely. Yeah. No problem with that.

1:03:51What's the strangest request you've ever had for an animal on set? Again, probably not the answer you would expect, but some years ago I got a call because I was talking about cattle and stuff. I'm the only guy who brought 50 head of cattle into Shepherds and Studios many years ago. Safe and sound. It was for an Electrolux American commercial back in the heyday where they had to get it in camera. The post-production didn't exist to the level they would have required reality. so that was an unusual one but because I've done a lot of work with cattle and safely and never, in 42 years we've never had an accident, I got a call one day from Los Angeles about 8 o 'clock in the evening, they were waking up I suppose and there was a producer from LA and he said I believe you work with cows or whatever, right, it was one of those I said yeah, I'm a cow guy and he said your name was given to me.

1:04:53I'm going to take your email and your phones and I'll send you an email about something we're doing in Ireland. And I said, okay, cool. And he said, it's one of those where it has to be done safely and securely. So it was an American actress called Amy Adams in Ireland called Leap Year. This is quite some years ago now. And Matthew Goode, an English actor, he was a romantic lead. So okay, so there's a scene where they're going along in a car, a herd of cattle, maybe 30, 40 cattle on a road by cliffs looking down on the sea, right? I said, I'll go over, I'll have a look at the location. If the location is in any way possible, I'll tell you, if it isn't, it's a non-starter, right?

1:05:42They brought me out to a place called Bray Head. It literally is a headland. And if you fall off, you're dead. right but for filmmaking it's beautiful to die for it's fantastic forgive the pun and so they brought me down to have a look and I said no and the productionist and I said why I said well all the cattle are now dead down there they're all dead your film is dead your star is dead everybody's dead now and he kind of stiffened a bit so I came back and I sent an email to L.A. I said they need to find another location you know if it's not that particular one no one in the cinema will know so what they found was a wonderful mountain road with land either side and a fantastic mountain range in the background in the Wicklow Hills, beautiful Irish.

1:06:47It all ticked the boxes for what they were wanting to portray without the carnage. All of my work has been about animals for the last 42 years, but really it's been about moments and it's been about people. A lot of great people I've met with their animals, a lot of great farming people particularly. I love farming people. So that's really the joy of it. you know and have you had a time where the animal completely sort of stole the scene from somebody yes and that can be I'll give you an example Raz our West Highland Terrier he got a gig with the Royal Shakespeare Company they rang up they were doing a limited run limited run just kind of in repertory repertory where they do a bit of this and then another one and another one it's not all the way through of uh the wizard of oz and they needed a toto and i thought well we could do that so how often are the performances we're doing three performances a week i thought well that's very relaxed and so we came to terms and stuff and i would go in and to do the performance and then my son who was at university at the time he uh he then did it because a bit of pocket money for him, which was nice for him.

1:08:02He stole the show. Everybody loved Toto. And of course we did the press night and all the press come in and you've got all the nationals the theatre critics and the headline over two pages was somewhere over the dog bowl.

1:08:27In modelling we think of models as people so this has been such an insightful conversation. Can you share a moment where maybe an animal was treated like a fashion model? Has there been sort of costumes and hair and makeup? Yeah, we did a commercial for M &S for Autumn and we had six poodles, standard poodles. Perfection. But yeah, they had the equivalent of hair and makeup. Absolutely they had. Because every time they were on camera, the director was And then a little bit of backcombing on this little top knot stuff. So the M &S Autumn 2023. Yeah, I think I can picture that. But yeah, the poodles were like they had their own hair and makeup.

1:09:13It was amazing. Just fantastic. I think what we've heard is, you know, just the work that goes in behind the scenes and the prep, you know, when we're just looking at a sort of 30-second commercial. As I say, not every commercial requires that amount of prep. No. But the ones that are clever and are visually clever, they're the ones that do.

1:09:40Gerry, thank you so much. It's been a great interview and thank you for talking so openly and candidly. Very good. No, it's been a delight. From charting with the Boomtown Rats to wrangling pigs, deer and squirrels on set, Geri's journey shows that sometimes the most unforgettable models aren't people at all. If you'd like to see more of Geri's work, head to A to Z Animals online. Until next time, thanks for listening.