"The original title of the film was "Zoo Boy" and I was so afraid it would be horrible," Schneider recalled. "I was just like, 'what if the whole time I am just humping objects?'-- which I do in "The Animal"-- but it took us awhile to figure it all out. For instance, do I climb the wall like a spider in the first five pages of the film? Well then we have nowhere to go. "
Schneider, who made a name for himself co-starring in Adam Sandler's "The Waterboy" and "Big Daddy" before starring in his own feature-length film "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo," ended up watching numerous animal films to help develop the idea of "Zoo Boy" into "The Animal." Schneider said though that the only good that came out of watching hours of animal footage was the fact that he received most of the videos for free.
"I would mention that I was watching animal films for a new movie I was co-writing and I got all these titles sent to me for free. I ended up watching "When Animals Attack," films on throwing Frisbees to your dog, anything that came in the mail, but nothing helped out. Eventually I was just like, 'Man, we gotta write something.'"
Schneider and Brady ended up taking eight days to write the script to "Zoo Boy" before scratching it and starting all over again. Ten months later, the script to "The Animal" was born.
"It was relentless," Schneider said. "I wanted "The Animal" to be different than "Deuce Bigalow" in the sense that I wanted it to be a great story. That was the key-- to write a film that still made sense even when the jokes were gone. This alone ended up making the film four times the film "Deuce Bigalow" was."
"The Animal," which is the second film released by Revolution Studios-- the same studio behind Sony's recent sex-comedy "Tomcats" and the upcoming "America's Sweethearts"-- originally focused on Schneider's character as a rich, dot-comer "before the crash." In its final version though, Schneider finds himself in the shoes of a police evidence file clerk who becomes the cop he's always dreamt of becoming when his animal instincts-- mainly the fact he can sniff out drugs like a dog-- go into full effect. While the film only takes about twenty minutes or so to get to this plot-turning point, in its original cut "The Animal" took much longer to get to the heart of the story.
