SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from HBO‘s docuseries Monsters of God.
Eric Goode is no stranger to eclectic interview subjects. The director behind Chimp Crazy and Tiger King is even quite familiar with interviewees who are willing to look past the law. And yet, his latest docuseries Monsters of God might just have brought him face-to-face with his most daunting subjects yet.
The five-part HBO series explores the dark world of reptile smuggling around the world and, particularly, into the United States. The trade took off around the 1960s and has since ballooned into entire enterprises — both legal and illegal. Naturally, Goode was more interested in understanding the latter.
To do so, he sought out some of the world’s most notorious reptile traffickers. Michael Van Nostrand. Tom Crutchfield. Mario Tabraue. Anson Wong. Those names may not mean much to a layperson, but all have, at times, been sentenced to years in prison for international animal smuggling.
“I remember driving with Anson Wong, and he said something about his driver. The driver had done something he didn’t like, and he was dead now,” Goode told Deadline. “He mentioned, in a very casual way, how someone was now dead. I realized, ‘Okay, this guy is a serious guy, potentially.'”
After giving audiences the lay of the land in the first two episodes, Goode begins to dive deep into the criminal enterprises that have been born from this world in Episode 3 of Monsters of God, which aired Thursday night.
In the interview below, Goode sheds light on the years-long journey toward telling this particular story (which involves his former collaborator and recent Oscar nominee Josh Safdie), courting people who don’t necessarily want to be found, and promoting “consciousness” on all sides when it comes to protecting animals from illegal trade.
DEADLINE: I was curious about your journey to uncovering this story and being confronted with it for the first time, and how you got to this point with the documentary?
ERIC GOODE: I probably said it a few times out there in the world, but be careful what you give your kids. My parents gave me a tortoise when I was 6, and I never got rid of the fascination with reptiles from that point on. I grew up catching snakes, lizards, horned toads, horned lizards and turtles. I was fascinated with reptiles at a very young age, and I’ve had that interest ever since. It was indelible. As I got older, my mother, in high school, would say, ‘Eric, you can’t play God.’ I would keep them in my bedroom, and she never really liked that. She said, ‘You got to let them out, let them go. The animals should be in the wild, not in cages.’ That resonated with me as I got older. There was a certain point when I realized reptiles were very endangered, especially turtles and tortoises. I started an organization called The Turtle Conservancy when I realized just how endangered they were. It’s sort of neck-and-neck with primates as the most endangered group of vertebrates on the planet.
Eventually, I started traveling around the world. People would say, ‘Eric, you gotta film in Madagascar and Sulawesi,’ and I filmed badly. Then, I started realizing I needed a real film crew. I eventually started filming better with the Safdie brothers, who became real filmmakers later. Josh Safdie was up for an Oscar this year [for Marty Supreme]. It wasn’t until the book The Lizard King came out in 2008, when I tried to buy the rights to that book from Bryan Christy, the author, that I really became serious about doing a documentary about the reptile world. A few years later, I had Fisher Stevens, who’s also an Oscar-winning director and producer, read The Lizard King. I met with him at this very building in New York City and asked if we could adapt it into a documentary. He basically said, ‘How can you do it without getting killed?’ That was a bit discouraging. Nevertheless, I started filming seriously in 2014 with Josh Safdie in the beginning to make what ultimately became Monsters of God. So it took many years. Tiger King and Chimp Crazy got in the way. I spent a lot of time in your home state of Florida on all those projects. That’s the long story of how it all started.
DEADLINE: How do you find these people and convince them to be so forthcoming, particularly with their criminal dealings? Some of them come across as though maybe they were just so forthcoming to begin with.
ERIC GOODE: That’s a really good question, and it’s a difficult answer because everyone’s different. With all of these documentaries that I do, and probably many documentaries out there, it’s: How do you gain access? How do you gain access to drug lords? How do you gain access to human traffickers? How do you get access to whomever? It’s always about the access and how you navigate that. That is certainly the number one most important thing to making these documentaries: How can you get in with the smugglers? How do you get in with law enforcement? How do you get in with the big zoos? How do you get in with all these sides? They’re all very guarded, frankly, for different reasons. The collectors, smugglers and reptile dealers in this case are extremely guarded because they don’t want their animals stolen, and they’re very valuable. They don’t want people to know where they are. They don’t want law enforcement coming because they may have something illegal. They don’t want animal rights groups coming, and they don’t want journalists coming because journalists are going to write a bad story about them.
There were quite a few people who were never willing to talk — people we tried to get. There were others we just had to be incredibly patient with. It was very helpful for me being a reptile guy. It made it easier for me to gain access. I’m also part of the zoo community, and I’ve worked with law enforcement at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for many decades, so I had a head start because of my position in the world. But it was still hard to gain access to all of these different sides of the story.
DEADLINE: What do you think makes the people involved in this world seemingly so susceptible to criminal dealings? What is it about their personalities, or who these people are, that creates a correlation between their personalities and their willingness to go off the deep end?
ERIC GOODE: You can point a finger at the smugglers or the reptile dealers and say they’re the ones who are crazy, the ones who need the dopamine rush — the high, if you will — of bringing in something and outsmarting the feds. But it is true that that is a high. ‘I got it through security at Miami Airport, and I got it in, and it’s worth $100,000.’ But there’s also a similar pathology and high that comes from going deep undercover for the animal cops and eventually catching their prize, which might be Anson Wong, Michael Van Nostrand or Tommy Crutchfield. It’s a similar pathology. ‘I’m after the bad guy.’
The reptile dealers are after the rarest reptile that’s worth a lot of money, and the zoos are after the coolest collection so they have a better reptile house than the next zoo. The collector — the guy like me who loves to have a cool reptile he’s never seen before — gets a total rush from getting this thing I’ve never seen before. The psychology and pathology are similar all around, not just with the reptile smuggler. For many of the reptile smugglers, like Anson Wong, Hank Molt or Tommy Crutchfield, it was the challenge, like the film Catch Me If You Can with Leonardo DiCaprio. It was: Can I outsmart the feds? Can I circumvent the laws? Can I get the rarest reptile? I’ll never forget asking Anson Wong, ‘Can you get a panda bear?’ And he says, ‘Yeah, I can get a panda bear.’ Panda bears are worth millions of dollars. If someone smuggles a panda bear out of China or shoots a panda bear, it’s an immediate death sentence. But he loved the challenge.
DEADLINE: How did you square the fact that everyone involved clearly cares about reptiles to some degree with the things that are harder to justify about these criminal enterprises, such as the danger to the animals and some of the abuse that is going on?
ERIC GOODE: There’s a dark side to all of this when it comes to wildlife smuggling. The bird-smuggling world — there was a famous case in Florida with a guy named Tony Silva. He did, I don’t know, eight years in prison for smuggling hyacinth macaws and different parrots into Florida, into the United States, in the ’90s [editor’s note: Silva served the majority of an 82-month sentence]. The mortality with bird smuggling is very high. The mortality with most wildlife is very high. You bring in 20 parrots, 10 of them die, five of them are on their last leg, and maybe three of them survive. Reptiles tend to travel and move more easily because they can live without food and water. They don’t scream and make noise like parrots or some mammals. People say they’re ‘wildlife with handles’ because reptiles can move through airports and on ships and sit in a box or suitcase for a very long period of time. Nevertheless, there’s a lot of mortality.
In the grocery store business, in the produce area, you call it spoilage when fruit or apples rot. You throw them aside. In this case, it’s living creatures that are dying. A lot of animals die once they get here. People buy them at reptile expos or exotic pet shops. They buy a snake, a gecko or a bearded dragon, and it dies in six months, and then they go out and buy another one. It’s kind of like a broken toy: It breaks, and the mommy goes and buys them another one. A lot of these animals don’t live long in this country. They’re what we call ‘disposable pets,’ which is a tragedy. We don’t do that with our pet dog. I don’t want you to think for a minute that — yes, some of these people really know a lot about reptiles and care about them, but they don’t really think about the collateral damage.
DEADLINE: What was your reaction to some of the more shocking things your interview subjects said throughout this process? I am thinking specifically about when you ask Dale Morant if he could take Mike Van Nostrand, and he says ‘they drop real quick when you take out the knees.‘
ERIC GOODE: Dale Morant was living in his car in a Walmart parking lot and doing a lot of oxycodone or other sedatives. He wasn’t in the best shape. A number of these people could probably be very dangerous under certain circumstances. I remember driving with Anson Wong, and he said something about his driver. The driver had done something he didn’t like, and he was dead now. He mentioned, in a very casual way, how someone was now dead. I realized, ‘Okay, this guy is a serious guy, potentially.’ Mario Tabraue is a serious guy. He was sentenced to 100 years in prison and got out early because he made a deal with the government. He must have known something really important. There were many moments that were really quite shocking. It’s hard for me to recall them all right now. There were just so many of them.
DEADLINE: You have worked across Tiger King and Chimp Crazy, with interview subjects who are bound to say something shocking. What are you thinking on the other side of the camera when a subject drops a line that is likely to leave a viewer speechless?
ERIC GOODE: There are some really shocking moments. I’ll never forget when I found out Joe Exotic was trying to kill Carole Baskin. That was a light bulb going off in my head, and it was so shocking, because I had been filming him for quite a few years. When that revelation came to me, and I realized what was going on, it was shocking. It was mind-boggling when we found out that Tonia Haddix and Jim Hamlett had kidnapped this chimpanzee when we thought that it had actually died.
In the case of Monsters of God, it was more exciting and interesting when someone was just willing to talk to us, at a certain point. Sometimes it took years of courtship to get someone to talk. I should point out that a number of these people we interviewed for 30, 40 or 50 hours. When you synthesize that much time, you find that, out of those 30 or 40 hours, you eventually get some pretty good stuff. We interviewed and filmed over 200 subjects for Monsters of God. I don’t even know what percentage made it into the show, but so many people and things were really interesting, and we just couldn’t fit it all in. We had over 1,500 hours of footage to go through. It was collecting a lot of interviews, interviewing certain people for 30, 40 or 50 hours many, many times over the course of filming this project, which took over 14 years to complete, and filming people at different times. There was a lot of content, so of course you get some amazing nuggets in there.
DEADLINE: Who among the interview subjects who eventually appeared in the documentary was the most challenging to land for an interview?
ERIC GOODE: I would certainly say Mario Tabraue took a long time. He appears in Tiger King as well. Anson Wong took a long time, and I literally had to take a flight to Malaysia when COVID finally broke in Southeast Asia and I could actually go. I almost had to ambush him. I had no guarantee that he would talk to me, and it took multiple people to figure out how to even get to him. People were very scared of him in Malaysia. No fixers in Malaysia really wanted to pursue finding him for me. He’s certainly a known entity in Penang, and people weren’t really interested in having me go and interview him. I remember how scared they were to even go up to his compound. The Malaysian fixers we had in Penang wouldn’t go with me. He was a hard one. Some of the law enforcement was very hard. Jeremy McBride, my partner in crime on this project, worked hard on getting Larry Lovelace and George Morrison to talk. That took a lot of time and trust — earning the trust within law enforcement to talk with us. Even the big zoos are guarded, and rightfully so. Animal-rights groups have been problematic at times with the zoos. There was a woman, Jeannie, in the film who took us two or three years to get to talk. It was just patience, frankly.
DEADLINE: What do you want to leave people thinking about at the end of this documentary when it comes to this industry?
ERIC GOODE: It’s a really good question. Number one, obviously, is to dispel the myth about reptiles being evil or dangerous — this culture of vilifying snakes and crocodiles and things that we don’t understand. Hopefully, people will understand that they’re an important part of the ecosystem. They play an important role. Snakes are great rodent control, and they do all kinds of important things. Number two, I would say that all sides of this story can do better. Law enforcement sometimes has the best intentions. They create laws and elevate the endangered status of certain reptiles, but sometimes that actually works against them. When you go to Southeast Asia, which has one of the largest consumer parts of the world for reptiles as pets, they advertise those reptiles with those laws. They say ‘critically endangered.’ That only makes the reptile more valuable, and people want the reptile even more than they did before. The laws often have the best intentions, but unintended consequences come from these things.
We need to be smarter. U.S. Fish and Wildlife is understaffed. They try the best they can, but they need to be better. We need to be more strategic. The zoos need to evolve and be better. I need to be better, personally. I’ve evolved through the course of my life in my relationship with reptiles. The reptile dealers need to be more conscientious, and there needs to be more captive breeding. I’m not trying to suggest that no one can have a reptile. In every case, I did feel strongly that people should not keep primates in captivity, especially a chimpanzee in solitary confinement in their basement. I felt very strongly that that was incredibly inhumane and horrible, and I felt the same about having 200 tigers in Joe Exotic’s backyard. In this case, I’m not trying to say that no one can have a pet ball python, leopard gecko or bearded dragon, or be able to learn and live with a reptile if they live in the right part of the country and the reptile is taken care of. But we tend to look at them as disposable pets, not the way we look at our pet dog. I guess consciousness all the way around would be the answer to your question. Just that we all can be better, and a lot of the things that we think are the right things to do are not always the right things to do.
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