‘The Python Hunt’ stakes out the snakes in Florida’s annual $10,000 contest

Turns out that there’s a little Florida Man in all of us, aching to be set free. A new documentary, “The Python Hunt,” begins a nationwide theatrical rollout this weekend, tracking the adventures of several would-be snake wranglers down in the Everglades. They’re competing in the annual Florida Python Challenge, with a $10,000 grand prize going to the hunter who kills the most Burmese pythons. This invasive species and apex predator has decimated the swampland’s native wildlife, but ecological tragedy becomes a life-altering opportunity for this idiosyncratic crew, drawn to the mystery and murk of the primordial habitat. The hunters range from Miss Anne, a newly widowed octogenarian possessed with an uncommon bloodlust, to a West Coast schoolteacher named Richard, seeking a more spiritual communion with nature with the assistance of some magic mushrooms. Various character arcs thread together in the eyes and pen of Toby Benoit, a sage-like guide who began writing about wildlife after a 1997 cottonmouth bite cost him part of his left foot. His narration chimes like poetry as he describes “the newly waning moon just beginning its ascent into the blackened sky peeked above the distant cypress trees, casting its pale light across the river of grass.”

Broward County native Xander Robin, a graduate of Florida State University’s film school, brought his lifelong obsession with reptiles to his direction of the project, as well as an easy touch with the film’s outsized personalities and their elusive, slithering dreams. Flamingo hopped on a recent Zoom call to chat with Robin and Benoit about their exploits.

SO XANDER, WHAT DRAGGED YOU INTO THE SWAMP?

Xander Robin: I’d really wanted to make my second feature in Florida, where I grew up. And I wanted to make films in the reptile world. I had written a whole film about the exotic reptile trade, and I was struggling to get that one off the ground. My producer [Lance Oppenheim] mentioned to me the python competition … so the summer before we made this film, I joined a competition. We know now that the Python Challenge is probably the worst time to go look for snakes, especially pythons, because there’s so many cars out there. But I was like, “What is going on out here?” It just seems such a cinematic scenario, almost like a Christopher Guest film, like “Best in Show.” These different interesting people coming to get rid of the snakes. This all led me to Toby. Harleigh Shaw, who cast [HBO Max’s] “Neighbors,” became our casting director. She found Toby through his writings for the Hernando Sun and Toby told us he was bringing a group of several people. We weren’t sure exactly who these people were, but one of those people ended up being Miss Anne, and we had such a compelling little narrative for the 10 days, because we were looking for people that might be different at the end of the 10 days from the beginning. And so Miss Anne got to experience what I was experiencing my first summer. The news said the Everglades are overflowing with pythons, how come I’m not seeing anything?

Toby Benoit:  It’s the toughest time of the year to try to hunt them. They’re not stupid. You don’t become an apex predator without some level of intelligence. Any given night of the year there’s maybe three or four trucks out, going up, down the back roads and levees looking for them. But then the competition there’s 300-400 vehicles out there every night. They know to stay away from the road.

TOBY, WHERE DO YOUR CLIENTS COME FROM?

TB: They see the TV shows, and they get this misconception that you’re going to catch five or six a night. That’s not the truth of it. It takes a lot of long, long hours and perseverance to come across them. I’ve gone as many as seven days with nothing, but then on day number eight turn around and catch five in one night. There’s really no reason to it. You’ve just got to keep looking.

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It’s the toughest time of the year to try to hunt them. They’re not stupid. You don’t become an apex predator without some level of intelligence. -Toby Benoit

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WHAT IS THE FASCINATION?

TB: They’re definitely after the adventure. Most people have an unreasonable fear of snakes. It starts back in biblical times. One seduced Eve to eat the apple. They’ve always been demonized throughout fiction. A lot of them find it so adventurous to try to overcome that fear and actually capture their own Burmese python.

XR: It’s like an adrenaline thing. Some people we’ve met, they become obsessed with catching venomous snakes, handling them for the adrenaline of it all. A lot of these people, either they were in the military, and they want to scratch that itch that they got in combat, or maybe they were drug users, and they’re now sober, and they need that high of catching [a snake].

TB: It’s the same reason people go bungee jumping or skydiving. It’s an opportunity to overcome their own mortality.

XANDER, DID YOU HAVE ANY PARTICULAR GROUND RULES FOR THE SHOOT?

XR: When we were doing the hunts, we were hoping that the cinematographers were trying to create an interesting scene, and we were trying to understand all the subjects as characters, but we also really hoped not to totally distract them from the hunt experience, because we still wanted them to catch a snake. If they didn’t catch a snake, it became hard justify having them fully in the film. It’s sort of heartbreaking. You film with so many different people that were so interesting. We’re cutting it together and it’s like, “Does this storyline really have a payoff?” It’s tough.

THE FILM SHOWS A LOT OF EMPATHY.

XR: We wanted to give everyone a sense of dignity and importance … to have it feel like more than a hobby, like life or death. I feel like there’s an optimism and they’re all trying to better the Everglades.

TOBY, WHAT FOR YOU IS THE ALLURE OF THE EVERGLADES AND THE WILD PARTS OF FLORIDA YOU WRITE ABOUT SO ELOQUENTLY?

TB: Just the wilderness itself. It’s dwindling. The Everglades is one of the least developed parts of our state. You see things down there you just don’t see anywhere else. I love the orchids when they’re blooming. The sunsets and the sunrises are incredible over the sawgrass. Have a few beers at sunset and unwind. Everybody’s very accepting of each other. I haven’t had any conflicts with any of the natives in the region. I used to work down in the ‘Glades back in the ‘90s. When I was working for the Seminole Tribe guiding hog hunts, everywhere I went was wildlife. There were herds of deer. There were raccoons, possums, rabbits, otters all over. When I went back in 2017 I had heard about the pythons and the devastation they were wreaking on local ecosystems, but I had no idea it was that bad. It was a ghost town. It rips the heart right out of me to see what it is now, and it’s about 100 percent attributable to the snakes. … That really lit a fire under me to start doing my part. It’s in such a small, small measure, like trying to go to Mexico with a Dixie cup for goodness sake.

YOU’VE GOT ALL THESE FOLKS WHO ARE GUNG-HO, BUT ALSO INCLUDE A CRITIQUE OF THE WHOLE THING AS A KIND OF STUNT.

XR: It felt important to me to include some of that, because it was a lot more than Jimbo [one of the film’s subjects] just saying that. I wanted to make sure the critique was more like, “We’re all agreeing that 99 percent of the small game population is missing, right?” I wanted to honor all the subjects of the film by not having a declared takeaway. It was a tough dance to figure out. It clearly is a publicity stunt, the Python Challenge. And the stated principle is also to raise awareness. I don’t think they think the Python Challenge is the way they’re really trying to remove the pythons.

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For more on conservation in the Everglades, click here.

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