Muriel Bec is not only the woman who plays animals in cinema. In Sologne, she embarked on an extraordinary adventure: sharing with the public her intimacy with the wild.
In her life, even if she will never say it with these words, Muriel Bec has tamed everything: adversity, death, beasts… And as if her fabulous destiny were not enough, she had to enriched with a new adventure, in Sologne, Sury-aux-Bois (Loiret).
Meeting in animal land is an indefinable place. This is where she lives, surrounded by her dozens of familiar and wild animals, from rabbits to elephants. You probably know them all: they are movie stars who have been in so many movies!
And all this without stressing them: they don’t need to hit the road. Sury, Muriel Bec has built a studio and it is the cameras that come to shoot their images there.
Until the day the confinement blocked the machine. It was then that Muriel Bec took the time to reflect on the meaning of what she was doing: bringing in film crews or the public, it’s the same, isn’t it?
So she did everything so that her No. ark could accommodate small groups of curious people to share this intimacy with her animals, including sleeping on the spot. In a few months, lodges have been built which allow you to live very close to the wolves.
His latest project is mind-boggling: a space where humans can sleep with his panthers, just separated by a bay window!
Where does this special relationship with animals come from?
By watching them. And I also learned to respect the animal thanks to hunting, about which one says everything and anything. I hunt, with my dog, but that does not mean that killing is an end. Hunting is approach, predation, alert senses and there is nothing wrong with that. Just as one can raise chickens with love and eat them. But now: a, we can’t hear it anymore. We no longer want to see this world where we lived with the seasons, where we went to snails, where we had them disgorged in a washing machine… All of this was full of respect. We only took what we were going to consume and we lost nothing of what had been hunted. Everything that could be eaten was. We were far from the commercial hunts in parks with 150 wild boars or the release of cocottes in pigeon shooting mode. There, there is enough to scream: it is indefensible.
Contact with wild animals awakens our Nanderthal nature?
This is what fascinates. When I’m in contact with my panthers, I’m in front of a superpredator, but as long as I’m fair and know how to think before they think, it’s fine. I learned to use my senses and my brain differently and it’s so natural that I don’t feel like I’m doing anything exceptional.
Have you found your balance with the cinema?
Yes! I’m constantly having adventures and it’s in my nature: I can’t live in the repetitive, even if there is a lot of repetitiveness in the relationship with the animal. You have to watch over him 24 hours a day and it’s do or die! If you look at the life of the old peasants, those who had their cows, their hens, their pigs, they broke their backs, they hurt all over, but they didn’t ask themselves the question of their state of health. They got up at 6am. I find myself in this world as I find myself in that of the cinema, which is an environment of passionate people. No one counts their hours.
Is it by rediscovering our share of animality that we become truly human?
Yes, and above all because we relearn our senses, the sensitivity that is in each of us. People tell me they’re impressed with my ability to read the animal, but there’s no magic in it! I also took years to learn to read from the man!
Do you feel like you are working?
Nope! The day I realized that you spend three quarters of your life working, I said to myself that I had to do only what I love. It’s also my heritage: my father committed suicide at 48, my mother died in a car accident at 45… We’re moving forward.
Eating dead rats is spiritual food?
The “not enough”, we can either flee it, or learn everything from it. We build ourselves. I believe in positive thinking. The big difference between animals and humans is that humans are afraid of death, whereas animals build their lives without even thinking about it. Of the two, who is right, who is true, who is right? My luck is to have been able to go even further in my reading of the animal with those who are wild. This is what allowed me to learn how to control my hypersensitivity.
The savage allows us to tame ourselves?
Completely! It allows us to learn humility, patience, the measure of time in a world ravaged by immediacy. You have to know how to say stop. Stop for two minutes.
Who doesn’t love beasts doesn’t love people?
But yes! It’s true. And just because we deeply love animals doesn’t mean we have to deny humans. On the contrary. For years, my brain was boiling over in my relationship to humans. I deeply love my colleagues. There is a part of animality in the human that we deny too much. We are getting lost.
Reading the animal also changes the understanding of the relationship between males and females in humans?
Yes! When people ask me why in my wolves there is only one female for several males, I explain to them that if there were more females it would be a mess! In the same way, loyalty in humans is something that makes me howl with laughter. This is hypocrisy! The male, basically, in all species, it is formatted to sow, to transmit its genetics.
By repressing its savage nature, humanity has lost its meaning?
I think so. This is the message that I try to convey with my animals in all these films. Like with my book (animal, published in June by Kero editions). It was time to write it. The major evolution in man is language. Words have extraordinary strength and power.
Do we tie animals with ropes and men with words?
Language is our genius and yet it has prevented us and still prevents us from returning to our senses. The relationship with the wild animal opens drawers at the bottom of oneself of which one does not even suspect the existence.
organic express
>Muriel Bec was born on October 23, 1965. She spent most of her childhood in nature observing animals; At the age of 7, she found and tamed a crow which followed her everywhere, then a magpie, orphaned wild ducks… At 10, she taught her dog to close doors, play dead, carry objects.
> At 18, she left to study theology in the United States. Back in France, she meets by chance an animal trainer for the cinema. She then discovers that this activity brings together everything she loves: osmosis with animals, cinema, adventures, lack of routine, human encounters, technical challenges…
>Today, a recognized specialist in animal training for the audiovisual world for thirty years, she displays her list of more than 1,000 audiovisual products.
Learn more about
rdventerreanimale.fr