Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls: Aspects of the Film

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Hairstylist PAULETTA LEWIS, working with Jim Carrey, was responsible for the now- infamous Ace hairdo, originally created for "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective." Lewis explains its origins: "I was working with him on "In Living Color" when he asked me to design his hair for a movie called 'Ace Ventura' The look he told me he wanted was like a cockatoo from the back and normal from the front. So I started going to pet stores, getting books on birds, and that's how the Ace 'do was born.

"Getting Jim's hair ready each day required lots of teasing, lots of backcombing, but not a lot of spray," Lewis explains. "People think it's a lot of spray, but it's not. It took me an hour every day. And at the end of the day he'd just wash it out."

On Location

The settings for "Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls" include a wide variety of terrains, from Himalayan mountaintops to densely forested jungle. For logistical reasons, however, the filmmakers preferred to keep the actual filming site of the movie primarily in the United States. After months of extensive scouting, they selected areas around San Antonio, Texas, and Charleston, South Carolina, as the two primary sites for the African setting, and Vancouver, British Columbia, for the Himalayan sequences.

A 15,000-acre ranch in Hondo, Texas, with open, grassy savannas and varied herds of animals (including zebra, impala, gazelle and antelope), doubled for the Wachati and Wachootoo villages. In South Carolina, The Botany Bay Plantation, a nature and game preserve, offered lush, dense, tropical vegetation, as well as rivers and a salt marsh with tall brown grass, all necessary to duplicate the jungle look. The Cherokee Plantation, complete with a Georgian manor house and manicured lawns, served as the exterior of the British Consulate in Bonai.

More Animals

As in "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective," animals are an integral part of "Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls." And once again, CATHY MORRISON, who runs Birds and Animals Unlimited, was responsible for providing and training all the animals used in the film. Binks, the white-throated capuchin monkey who reprises his role as Ace's companion, Spike, is the only animal actor to return from the original film. However, "Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls" utilized five times the number of animals seen in the previous film. And this time around, they're of the variety and type specific to Africa, including giraffes, elephants, zebras, lions, water buffalo, three kinds of antelope, ostriches, chimpanzees, a baboon and assorted birds. As Morrison says, "The animals in the first film had to fill an apartment. In 'Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls,' they had to fill Africa."

Ace finds a special ally in the form of Boba the elephant, played by a gentle pachyderm named Dixie. Her standout moment: coming to Ace's rescue as she leads a charge of all the animals in the most elaborate animal sequence of the film.

Still, once again, with all the animals in "Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls," the wildest creature in the animal world is its only human member, as Ace Ventura gets back into action, confounding his enemies, eluding his pursuers, and showing his fans how the true professional always gets his man... er, beast.