The 'Brutal' Filming of 'The Legend of Ochi' Involved Bear Attacks, a 7-Man Puppet and Rescuing a Nearly Dead Dog (Exclusive)

Finn Wolfhard & Helena Zengel on the Time She Rescued a Dog on the Set of 'The Legend of Ochi' (6:44)

It's an old Hollywood adage to "never work with children or animals," but for Isaiah Saxon's feature film directorial debut, The Legend of Ochi , he opted not to heed that warning.

"Trying to make a visually ambitious fantasy-adventure movie on a very modest independent budget that has puppetry and suit performers and child actors and animals in rugged winter conditions. It's just everything hard at once," he tells Parade exclusively. "It was a brutal shoot, like really, really hard."

The film, which was shot on location in the remote heights of the Carpathian Mountains in Romania, is set in a fantastical world where humans live alongside reclusive, primate-like creatures called Ochi. While Maxim ( Willem Dafoe) leads a band of young boys, including Finn Wolfhard's Petro, to hunt the Ochi, Maxim's daughter Yuri ( Helena Zengel) befriends a baby Ochi against the wishes of her father.

While the film is visually stunning, and the cast, by all accounts, enjoyed the adventure of shooting it, nearly every aspect of filming The Legend of Ochi was "brutal," as the director said.

To start, Saxon wanted to set the film in a fictional land named Carpathia, which he describes as "a mysterious, mountainous, woodland environment."

"When you're thinking about where to do that, you know you're not going to put it in Colorado or France or the Alps," he says, sharing his thought process for location scouting. "You're looking for mystery and transportation to another place. My dad's side of the family is from Ukraine, and I had been pretty interested in the Carpathian Mountains. These old cultures there were still intact. It's the wellspring of mystery and myth. It's the home of Dracula, and it's the place with the most primeval forest in all of Europe, where the most wolves and bears and lynxes are."

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Emily Watson, who appears as a mysterious woman named Dasha in the film, describes the location as "quite extreme" but also "a really incredible adventure."

"We were basically up a mountain where no human should be," she says, "and there were bears around us, eating the set at night."

Wolfhard, who describes the shoot as an "expedition adventure," remembers that "a bear ripped apart one of the houses, and so in order to get them to stay away from the set, they would play music at night, like rave music."

"When we were on the second location in the mountains," Zengel chimes in, "they even had electric fences around the houses so the bears wouldn't go inside where we were literally sleeping."

Wolfhard says that filming so far away from civilization felt like "we took a time machine back to these old lodges" while Zengel says that there wasn't much to do there aside from hiking and eating noodle soup.

"I just ate schnitzel for like two months straight," Wolfhard laughs. "I think the last three or two weeks I was there, I was in Bucharest, which is a big city in Romania. There was a taco place, which was weirdly amazing. You never expect tacos to be good in Bucharest, but I literally almost cried, because it was like, "Oh, I've been eating boiled sausage and schnitzel for three weeks straight, and now I finally am eating something else. It was the craziest feeling ever."

In addition to the animals (eating the set) and children (eating noodle soup), Saxon also had to contend with an extremely complicated baby Ochi puppet that required seven puppeteers to operate it at times. The choice to use a puppet rather than creating the tiny creature with CGI, however, was due more to cost than aesthetics.

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"It's not about any nostalgia towards movies I saw as a kid," Saxon is quick to point out. "To do a world-class CG character, like a Planet of the Apes character? Now we're in $100 million-movie territory. This is a $10 million movie. This way of using animatronics and puppetry, it's both more affordable, and just so grounded and believable."

Acting on the side of the mountain in the cold across from a team of puppeteers certainly isn't easy though.

"It was a lot of coordination," Zengel says about filming scenes with the Ochi puppet. "Six puppeteers around the Ochi had to make it move in the right way and be coordinated. At the same time, I had to act and pretend like they're not there, and I'm just talking to the Ochi. It was very concentrated, intense work."

One advantage of acting opposite a puppet, however, is that you can at least see the puppet. While the Demogorgon on the first season of Stranger Things used practical effects, Wolfhard has had to act opposite a lot of CGI creatures between Stranger Things , Ghostbusters and It .

"You have to imagine less," Wolfhard says, comparing the puppet to the tennis ball stand-in for a monster to be added later with visual effects. "You just can react more. With a tennis ball, it's like, 'Okay, this is not a tennis ball.' All you're thinking about is that it's not a tennis ball."

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The puppet wasn't the only practical effect to contend with. Watson's character has a wooden hand, which actually fit over Watson's real hand.

"They took a cast of my hand, and then made a rigid glove that went over," she says. "It was complicated, and I remember it kept dysfunctioning."

"It was at the last minute too, and it was a tough one to get right," Saxon adds.

Meanwhile, Dafoe's character's armor presented its own problems. "The armor he wears was too small. It would cut his skin," remembers Zengel.

"It was super small because he didn't get to do a fitting," Wolfhard adds, "so it would chafe."

"He would have to do it over and over again, and he was walking around like this," Zengel says miming a rigid walk.

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To add insult to injury, Dafoe, whom Saxon, Zengel and Wolfhard all were intimidated to work with but ended up adoring, was stranded at the airport upon arrival in Romania thanks to the commandeering of his shuttle to assist Zengel rescue a dog that had been hit by a car.

"It was this whole drama. The whole production was involved," recounts Zengel of the ordeal that started while she was out on one of her walks.

"She found the dog on the side of the road," says Wolfhard. "She put the dog over her shoulders. This is a big dog too, and she was 13 at the time. She walked it all the way back to the lodge we were staying at. It was jetted to surgery in a nearby town."

"I was calling the production, and I was like, 'I need someone to take this dog to a clinic.'" she remembers. "So they got the driver who was supposed to drive Willem from the airport to this lodge to get the dog, and [Dafoe] needed to wait longer."

"I just love the idea of Willem waiting at the airport," Wolfhard laughs.

"Just like, 'Where's the driver?'" Zengel adds. "Oh, it's with Helena's new dog. He's gonna come later."

While The Legend of Ochi set may have been a rough one for the cast, it certainly was a step-up for one person: Kiwi, Zengel's adopted dog.

"We took the dog home to Berlin in the end," Zengel says, and Kiwi joined the crew in a five-star hotel in Bucharest after its operation. "We want to write a book, 'From Street Dog to Five-Star Hotel.'