‘Cocaine Bear’ visual effects supervisor Robin Hollander on the film’s title star: ‘She just loves her coke’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

The Elizabeth Banks horror comedy “Cocaine Bear” features an incredible ensemble cast that includes Keri Russell, Alden Ehrenreich, O’Shea Jackson, Margot Martindale and the late Ray Liotta. But the real star of the film is its title character, a cocaine-addicted bear nicknamed Cokie by the production team.

The task of creating the addled Ursidae fell to Robin Hollander, the film’s visual effects supervisor, and his team.  

“Cokie is the title character and that was the one thing that Liz sort of said from the word go: she needs to look real. She needs to be believable. But at the same time, we need to have a character down to a tee,” Hollander tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview as part of our Meet the Experts: Visual Effects panel. 

Released in February, “Cocaine Bear” was a box office hit that captured the zeitgeist due to its premise. The film was based on actual events that took place in the 1980s when a black bear fatally overdosed on cocaine that had been dumped in the Tennessee woods by drug smugglers. Onscreen, however, things were changed to play up the comedy of the story: instead of dying, the bear thrived and became an unstoppable force that refused to allow anyone to take away her narcotic of choice.

“So she’s not bloodthirsty, she just loves her coke. And if she runs out of coke – or if you get between her and her coke, or her and her cubs – that’s when bad things happen,” Hollander explains. “So that was sort of the brief that we had from the get-go. And then I think we just had a really fun time exploring what makes a real bear and then what makes a real cokehead. And how do you combine the two? It couldn’t be too human, it couldn’t be too animalistic or too NatGeo doc-style. That’s why we had a lot of fun.”

Hollander has worked on several major projects, including “Eternals,” “Jumanji: The Next Level,” and “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgame.” So he’s got a lot of practice in terms of rendering giant creatures via computer effects and making sure those digital monsters feel as real as possible to the average viewer. In making “Cocaine Bear,” Hollander says, a key to its success was finding the right weight for the film’s star.

“To me, the hallmark of CG when it’s not quite right is the lack of weight. There can be creatures rampaging through a shot and your mind is telling you that it looks real – and in a still frame you might go, that’s a real thing – but then in motion, you know something about it is not right,” Hollander says.

But something unique to the project was the added challenge of creating a bear that does cocaine. Throughout the film, Cokie inhales or eats the substance, and the drug is often found on her fur or snout. 

“I petitioned for the budget to go up so that we could do some accurate reference shots, but it was mostly flour and flour on animals,” Hollander jokes. Instead, he used his actual pets, a small dog and a larger dog, as stand-ins for Cokie – covering the animals in flour or putting coconut oil on their snouts to see how the pets would flick it off. 

“There was a bit of fun and trial and error to sort of trying to get the granularity of the cocaine right,” he says. “If it was too chunky, it doesn’t quite look right, if it’s too thin, it also doesn’t look right.” 

“Cocaine Bear” from Universal is available to stream and rent now.

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