'Mia and the White Lion' trivia and fun facts
300 children
'Mia and the White Lion' recount the friendship between a child and a wild animal, a relationship that was provoked by the production that cast more than 300 children in South Africa before finding Daniah De Villiers who embodies Mia. Daniah De Villiers spent three days with Thor, the lion, for three years, while the filming took place in four blocks during this period. After all this time in the bush, the girl had to leave the lion and resume a normal life, which was a real tear. She returns however to see Thor regularly. For Kevin Richardson, the most complicated thing was finding parents crazy enough to let their child participate in such an adventure.
Real story
The idea of 'Mia and the White Lion' came to Gilles de Maistre while he was making a television documentary on the unique friendship between children and wild animals around the world. In South Africa, he meets a boy whose parents had a lion farm. Under the guise of preserving them, they actually resold them for hunting in pens.
Teenage lion
Filming was normal until the lion was a year and a half old. There, the team has folded in cages because lions go through 2 years a period that can be likened to adolescence.
Three years growing up together
Upon getting the idea for the film, co-writer/director Gilles de Maistre asked specialist Kevin Richardson about the possibility of filming a child with a lion. He was told that it would be impossible, as the only way for the lion not to harm the child would be that they grow up together, a three year process for a lion and much too long for a film shoot. Undeterred, de Maistre found Daniah De Villiers a young, South African girl already familiar with lions to grow up with the titular white lion cub, and shot the film over two and half years, from May 2015 to December 2017, with the other actors regularly flying in to shoot their scenes.