Q: Were those real snakes?
A: Oh, they were very real. Not only were they real snakes but they were real poisonous rattlesnakes as well as snakes that looked like rattlesnakes but arent poisonous and dont have rattles, like a gopher snake. Its funny, I ended up having to cast some of our snakes. The way I was made to do it was that the snake handler, whos this wonderful Australian guy who had these buckets of snakes, had me over to his snake area and showed me his various rattlesnakes and then my task was to find a non-poisonous snake who could double one of the rattlesnakes. Basically you wanted a rattlesnake that had a non-poisonous stand-in. The other thing was that for the snake that actually ends up biting Preacher Billy, we needed a non-poisonous version for Joe Mazzello the actor to handle which he was doing in the scene, thats a real snake hes holding, just not a real snake with a poison sac. The actual snake that does the biting is biting a prop arm and [it] is a genuine rattlesnake and the handler recommended to me that we find a non-poisonous double for his most aggressive rattlesnake because that was the one he could guarantee would bite the prop arm. And it did. No actors allowed to hold the actual poisonous snake, so the snake that Joe holds is the double and then you film an insert of the snake biting the prop arm and that was just a comedy routine because everyone had to stand behind this Plexiglass but the snake handler is there holding the poisonous rattlesnake which has been milked but is still very poisonous. Hes just holding that in his hands and basically when the camera starts rolling, hes got to take his hands away, because his hands cant be in the shot. So all of a sudden, this rattlesnake is free in the middle of everybody. It was insane, although he seemed quite sanguine about the whole thing. I was a little nervous because I expected the snake handler to have these sort of pieces of snake wisdom This is how you ensure it never bites you and for the rattlesnakes who, by the way, the other snakes, you can have a bunch of snakes in the scene with the non-poisonous snakes, like they crawl all over each other and they do their thing. But the rattlesnakes you cant have them around any of the other snakes because there is the possibility that they just decide they dont like one of them and will just kill them. Thats not good. And when he would take the lids off the buckets of the non-poisonous snakes, he would unscrew the lids. But with the rattlesnake buckets, he would unscrew the top almost all the way and then he would do the last little turn and jerk his hand away with the lid, and my reaction was, This is the guy whos protecting me, [whos] here to see that I dont get bitten and his big strategy is, Move away real fast. That did not fill me with confidence.
