How do you train a mouse to do tricks?
You don't.You train many, many mice to do parts of tricks, and then you put it all together on film.
Michael Jeter should know: He played Delacroix, the "Green Mile" inmate who adopts a mouse, trains it and names it Mr. Jingles. Jeter worked for hours and hours and hours with the mice.
"It was actually a team of mice, bred for the film," Jeter said. "They were the direct descendants of the mice that were bred for 'Mouse Hunt,' bred by the same (mouse) wranglers."
They breed the line of mice so that they'll look alike and be more or less the same age, Jeter explained. Then each mouse is trained to do a specific task.
"One mouse is trained to go across your shoulders," Jeter said. "One mouse is trained just to sit, one mouse will spin around, one mouse will sit and kiss you on the cheek. They're really quite remarkable."
Jeter spent a lot of time with the mice, but he didn't mind. "The process, more than anything else, just requires patience," he said, "because they really learn their job through repetition, and it's all reward training.
"So they'll start here (pointing to his shoulder), and the reward will be put here (pointing to his neck), and so they'll go that far. And then what they'll do is they'll urinate on you because that's how they mark their trail. The thing you have to not mind, working with mice, is that you go home at night with a lot of mouse (urine) on you. My cat would be intrigued; she'd be waiting for me to come in, and then she'd stalk me up the stairs to the shower."
Jeter said, before shooting started, the production hoped to get 70 percent of the mouse action from live mice, and 30 percent would be done with computer graphic imagery, or CGI.
"In the end, we were able to get 99 percent of the action from the real mice, and there's only one instance in the movie where we used CGI."
Which scene, you ask? We'll let it be a surprise -- but, as Jeter assured us, "No mouse was harmed during the making of this movie."
At the end of the shoot, Jeter had grown attached to one little mouse named Hula. "She was adorable," he said. The wranglers offered to let him adopt her.
"But I have that cat," he said. "And I also have a terrier. So I figured any mouse I'd adopt, I'd be sentencing to the Green Mile."