Tiger King director Eric Goode’s new project, Monsters of God, takes on the creepy, crawly reptile trade

“Oh, look at that,” Eric Goode said as a golden crested gecko crept down his arm. “See how beautiful that is.”

Goode, the documentarian behind Tiger King, was standing in the steamy basement of a pet store on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

He admired a milk snake, a corn snake, several leopard geckos, a spiny-tailed lizard, and an African spurred tortoise named Boy George who trundled past him and urinated on the floor.

Goode, who suggested visiting the store, paused at the case of a bearded dragon, noting that its forebears had been smuggled into America in the 1970s and ’80s.

“This lizard is a poster child of an illegal animal that became common,” he said.

The legal, quasi-legal and very much illegal trade in reptiles is the subject of Goode’s new five-part documentary series, Monsters of God, which premiered on HBO this month.

A former artist and a semi-retired nightclub, hotel and restaurant impresario, Goode, a boyish 68, has latterly become a documentarian whose projects centre on the fraught relationships between humans and animals.

Monsters of God forms a loose trilogy with Tiger King, on Netflix, the COVID-lockdown phenomenon from 2020, about the flamboyant, criminal rivalry between a roadside zoo operator and an animal sanctuary owner; and another HBO docuseries, Chimp Crazy, about a woman, Tonia Haddix, who illegally kept a chimpanzee that she treated like a child.

But for Goode, this project is his most personal. He has loved lizards and their scaly kin since childhood, and in 2003 he co-founded the Turtle Conservancy, which supports endangered turtle species. “My love of reptiles, that is always in the back of my mind,” he said.

After he returned the gecko to its enclosure, Goode discussed crime, ethics and his own reptile-collecting complicity. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: What’s your relationship to reptiles?

A: As a kid, I was lucky enough to live next to a beautiful creek (in California), and I would hike the creek and catch lizards and turtles and rattlesnakes and put them in my lunchbox. I just fell in love with reptiles. You could order them in the mail back in those days — I slept with this lizard called a tegu from South America.

The life I led in New York (starting in 1977) was very much about art and fashion, so I was closeted with my love affair of creepy, crawly, cold-blooded creatures.

Whenever I’d bring a girlfriend home to my loft, they’d be shocked. Around the mid-1990s I began to realise that I’d been somewhat selfish keeping these animals, and I became aware that many turtle species were threatened with extinction. So I started a conservancy.

Q: In your collecting days, did you ever buy anything that had been obtained illegally?

A: In the early days. I bought some star tortoises and wood turtles.

Most of this was before the Endangered Species Act (of 1973). I was naive about how these animals ended up in pet stores.

But I don’t think I ever bought anything that I knew was illegal.

Q: In Monsters of God, and in your other documentaries, you speak to people who have done illegal or extra-legal things. How do you get them to talk to you?

A: Listen, everyone is different. Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin (the subjects of Tiger King) were open books at first.

Then there are people like Mario Tabraue (a figure in Monsters of God), who was very difficult. I ultimately ambushed Mario.

We first filmed him with glasses that had a camera in them.

It was so stupid, and the footage didn’t even work.

Sometimes it’s about just getting your foot in the door and being fluent in the language.

Sometimes we had to wait years. Sometimes it required wining and dining. I struck out a lot.

Q: What is your code of ethics as a filmmaker?

A: I’m never aggressive. I think you need to be a gentleman; you need to be thoughtful and respectful when you walk into someone else’s world.

This is a very guarded world. So you have to take a very careful, slow, gentle approach. And some people, people that are really down and out, you compensate them for archival material, but it’s a taboo to talk about that.

Q: Tiger King focuses on two charismatic figures, Chimp Crazy on one. Here, it’s a whole clutch of people. Will that connect with audiences in the same way?

A: I have no idea if it’ll be anywhere as successful. Tiger King and Chimp Crazy were both stories that happened contemporaneously.

I had no idea Joe was going to try to kill Carole.

I had no idea Tonia was going kidnap a chimpanzee and keep him in her basement.

You could say that’s amazing from a film director’s perspective, but these were bad things that happened, so I don’t want to relish it.

In the case of Monsters of God, I wanted to tell the story of the history of the reptile trade. And reptiles aren’t chimps or tigers, which are more charismatic.

Q: Your three series have all been about animals. Are you comfortable with being the animal doc guy?

A: Yeah, because deep down, that’s an indelible part of my life. That’s the most pure, honest part of me.

Q: Do you feel responsibility for your human subjects?

A: Yeah, of course. A lot of people criticise me for exploitation, for using deception.

I just feel like the means justifies the end.

You can disagree, fair enough. It’s complicated.

Q: How do you balance the impulse to treat people humanely with telling a great story?

A: There’s sometimes a euphoria, a dopamine rush for these people. They’re on camera, they’re on HBO. That can change, and suddenly it sinks in, like, “Wait a minute, maybe I don’t like the way I was depicted.”

But I really have tried hard to thread that needle. In doing so, I had to basically bite the hand that feeds me, because the zoo community is not happy about this.

I’m part of that. So you could say I’m a crazy hypocrite or I’m doing something really destructive to myself. But I try to be honest with everyone, to tell a story that doesn’t just shine the light on one bad guy. We’re all kind of complicit.

I hope in the end there’s a way to make a difference, change minds, and yet try to have people that were a part of the story not just completely hate me or hate the project. We’ll see what happens.

Q: Do you have personal feelings about these people? Some of them have done very bad things.

A: I have to be careful what I say right now. My life’s been threatened over the years from some of the people in previous projects.

I have to take security in a few days to the Daytona Reptile Show because I’ve been warned by the people that are having me that I need to watch my back.

But it’s horrible what happens when animals are shipped, and you get a box and you open it, and half of them are dead, all of them dead.

I hope people recognise that we have to do better. The zoos can be better. I can be better. The animal trade can be more responsible.

People, when they see an animal at a cage in a pet store, a zoo, they don’t really realise how many animals died to get that one animal there.