It was the most dangerous movie ever made.

Cinematographer Jan de Bont was shooting a scene with a lioness when she tore the top of his head off. It took around 120 stitches to put his scalp back on. Then he went back to work.

The injury suffered by de Bont, who would go on to direct Speed and Twister, was one of roughly seventy that occurred during the filming of ROAR (1981).

For about eleven years, actress Tippi Hedren and her husband, Exorcist producer Noel Marshall, lived on a California ranch with as many as 150 lions, tigers, leopards, and elephants, and slowly made a movie with them. They spent $17 million, most of it their own. The cats roamed free, and the wounds were real.

The whole family acted in the film, including Hedren's teenage daughter, Melanie Griffith, who was mauled by a lioness and needed facial reconstructive surgery.

Hedren had already survived The Birds, where Hitchcock had live gulls thrown at her for days. Then she chose to spend a decade on an animal-attack movie that was entirely real, and entirely her own idea.

Roar flopped and never opened in American theaters.

Hedren turned the wreckage into the Shambala Preserve and a life spent protecting the animals that had nearly killed her family.

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Because of its poor filmmaking quality and notorious safety reputation, American distributors completely rejected Roar, leaving it without a North American theatrical release. It was only distributed internationally in 1981 - primarily in markets like Germany and Japan - where it grossed only $2 million.