Tiger King director explains bizarre way he discovered Joe Exotic while investigating reptile smugglers
The director of hit documentary Tiger King has opened up about how he ended up meeting charismatic Joe Exotic.
Tiger King hit Netflix at the perfect time, just as the Covid-19 pandemic sent the world into lockdown, and suddenly all anyone had to do was sit at home watching TV, and the story of Joe Exotic, the tiger-breeding amateur zookeeper with a long-standing feud who ran for president, took the world by storm.
But director Eric Goode revealed that he very nearly ended up making a very different series altogether, even telling the Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard podcast that he 'just fell into it'.
Things could have been very different, with Goode telling the podcast hosts Dax Shepard and Monica Padman that he had actually been looking to make a documentary about the illicit trade in reptiles.
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"I was talking with Fisher [Stevens, Tiger King executive producer] about doing something on the reptile world, and there was a book called The Lizard King written by a friend of mine Bryan Christy, and I said Fisher read this book, it's a great story," he said.
The Lizard King looks into the world of reptile smuggling and the people who carry it out.
But the director went on to say that there was one issue that came up when they were discussing the possibility of a documentary inspired by the book.
"He said 'I read the book it's really good, but how do you make this documentary without getting killed?'," said Goode. "That kind of discouraged me because there's a lot of scary people in this story."
The reptile project ended up in a trial run with CNN, Goode explained, saying: "I was discouraged, that was in like 2012, and then Fisher did a film with Leonardo DiCaprio called Before the Flood about climate change.
"He was trying to sell it to CNN and CNN passed, and then Fisher goes well you know my friend Eric Goode has this footage of this weird guy Joe Exotic, and blah blah blah. And then I did a CNN pilot."
But Joe Exotic had not been the first priority, he said, going on to recall how he ended up instead looking into the world of big cats instead of reptiles, and that was with an unusual and unsettling encounter.
"I just started filming reptile people in the beginning," he explained.
"12 years ago we started filming in South Florida, we were filming some reptile people," he said. "And one day a guy drove in with a snow leopard in his van, and we were like, wait a minute, you can just buy a snow leopard? So that got me focussed on big cats, I got off reptiles, the CNN thing didn't work."
Summing up how he ended up making the hugely successful series, he said: "I got into Tiger King accidentally because I just fell into it. I was really doing a story about reptiles, Tiger King got in the way."
In something of an understatement, he added: "Joe was a lot of fun."
Topics: Tiger King, Celebrity, Netflix, Film and TV
Kit Roberts