Philip Glass was supposed to be a villain in Trophy, a documentary that originally was conceived as a take-down of the proliferation of big-game hunting.
Then directors Shaul Schwartz and Christina Clusiau visited the Safari Club International convention in Las Vegas, with more than 25,000 attendees — many of them like Glass, a Texas rancher whose lifelong ambition involves killing elusive elephants, lions, and rhinos.
“The industry just opened up to us. At that point, we understood that this was much more complicated than we originally thought,” Clusiau said during the recent Dallas International Film Festival. “We started to question whether it was so black-and-white.”
Besides Glass, the film’s primary subjects include John Hume, who operates a South African ranch where he breeds rhinos, then shoots them with tranquilizers to saw off their horns. He argues that doing so extends the lives of the creatures by making them worthless to potential poachers, yet his exact motives remain cloudy.
Then there’s Chris Moore, a conservation advocate in Zimbabwe whose efforts are subsidized by big-game hunters. His rationale is that it’s better to lose a few animals through controlled hunts than to allow species to become decimated by rampant poaching. As with Hume, he’s been both hailed and criticized.
The New York-based filmmakers continued their research by talking with outfitters and conservationists in Africa who had different perspectives on how wild-animal species should be protected or preserved.
They were more than a year into production when worldwide controversy erupted about the killing of Cecil the lion by a Minnesota dentist on a bowhunting safari in Zimbabwe. That began to restrict their access to some hesitant sources, one of which suggested they contact Glass.
“Philip was the one individual who, from the very beginning, wanted us to be a part of the story. He felt that he was always villainized in the hunting industry, but he wanted to share his experience and his truth and his platform. We really appreciated that,” Clusiau said. “He was the same on-camera and he was off-camera. It was a very harmonious relationship between Philip and us.”
After meeting him at an airport in Namibia, Clusiau and Schwartz (Narco Cultura) accompanied Glass as he pursued his prey for sport. And although they might not have shared his perspective on killing big game, they could sense his passion and sincerity.
“The elephant hunt was the hardest for both of us. It was quite emotional,” said Clusiau, who grew up in a hunting hotbed in northern Minnesota. “You don’t expect such a majestic creature to die like that.”
Clusiau said that although big-game hunters come from all over the world, about 70-80 percent of those who travel to South Africa these days are American. Part of the reason, she said, is a simple shift in the retail landscape.
“My theory is that it comes from this change in the industry, creating a market for people who want to hunt,” she said. “They sell the clothes. They sell the guns. They sell the hunts as a 10-day vacation to South Africa. It’s created this market that didn’t exist 30 or 40 years ago.”
The film raises intriguing questions about its other subjects, too. For example, are hunters actually preserving big-game species by providing money for conservation efforts? It depends on who you ask.
“In order to save the ecosystem, billions of dollars have to go into that, and hunting only provides a small amount,” Clusiau said. “It gets very complex, depending on the country. In some places, the number of animals has skyrocketed. But in other places, there’s too much poaching, not enough hunting, not enough conservation, and more corruption.”
