Jon Favreau on His First Documentary, National Geographic’s ‘Lion’: Not Knowing Whether the Lead Character Would Survive Was ‘Harrowing’

When renowned wildlife producer Mike Gunton approached “The Lion King” director Jon Favreau about collaborating on a documentary, the director, who had never made a doc, immediately said yes.

It was 2022, and Gunton, an executive producer at BBC Studios Natural History Unit, wanted to “supersize” his “Dynasties” series about vulnerable or endangered species, and make a multipart doc focused on one species. At the time Favreau and Gunton were working together on the first season of “Prehistoric Planet,” a natural-history show that tells the last days of the dinosaur using CGI.

“It wasn’t like I wanted to do a documentary,” said Favreau. “It was more that I really enjoyed working with Mike and his team. They went from my world — the digital world and then I went to their world, which was the documentary.”

Over the course of four years, Favreau and Gunton worked with a production team that included producers, researchers, editors and cinematographers Simon Blakeney and Sophie Darlington to create National Geographic’s “Lion.”

“Mike had the ambition of following a single pride of lions in a way that had never been done before, and it meant hanging up all the tools that I was comfortable with, like CGI, and going completely analog,” said Favreau. “We made a rule that we were not going to do any digital augmentation, not paint things out, and not manipulate the footage.”