Cocaine Bear

Cocaine Bear tells the outrageous story of a black bear who goes on a rampage after ingesting vast quantities of abandoned cocaine. Unbelievably, it's inspired by a true story from 1985. Director Elizabeth Banks talks in her own words about bringing a darkly comedic horror thrill ride to life...

- By Ann Lee

Cocaine Bear is a horror comedy. There are a lot of horror tropes that we play with in the film. You know, it’s a bear high on cocaine attacking people! But it’s also a really fun character piece. It’s about a great group of people coming together who are very much in over their heads. Everybody is going after the drugs, and nobody realises that the bear got there first.

[Jimmy Warden’s script] was so unique, and I thought it really offered an opportunity for me to play on a genre that I hadn’t really considered before, and do something out of the box. My first reaction was ‘I gotta read the real story and understand how much of this is true’. Then I did a deep dive. I thought this bear was collateral damage [in] a broken war on drugs. I had a lot of empathy for it. I felt like this film could be the bear’s revenge story.

The bear’s fully CGI. We worked with Weta Digital out of New Zealand. It’s a very long process. We started with concept art, a ton of reference photos, videos of real black bears. We talked about the size and the markings on our bear, as we designed her. I really felt like the bear had to be photorealistic, and that if the audience didn’t believe the bear was really there, the whole movie was going to fall apart. I’ve had people ask me after they’ve seen it, how we got the bear to do certain things. And I’m like, “It wasn’t a real bear!”