Actor Russell Crowe has publicly praised Noah director Darren Aronofsky for deciding against using real animals for the Biblical epic.

The filmmaker was turned off the idea of working with animals again after hiring acting apes for 2006's The Fountain.

Aronofsky has admitted he was appalled by the conditions the primates lived in, so he chose to use computer-generated imagery (CGI) for Noah's menagerie.

Crowe admits he was a little disappointed at first, because he was looking forward to mingling with so many different types of animals on the New York set, but it didn't take him long to realise that Aronofsky had made the right move.

He explains, "I thought one of the reasons why Darren wanted me to do the role is because I'm kind of famously close to animals... and I love animals.

"So I get to the set and I'm kinda like, 'Cool, where's the animals?' and Darren's like, 'Oh, er, I'm not gonna use any'. And I went, 'What am I doing here then, man?' because I thought there was going to be some animal husbandry sort of aspect of it...

"But the decision, when you stand back from it, it's the most humane decision. And he's very much an animal lover himself, and he's a PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) activist and so to have live animals in that studio, in Williamsburg, day after day would have put them under a lot of pressure so it's kinda cool that he didn't actually (use real animals)."

Aronofsky's stance has already earned him the inaugural Humane Filmmaker Award from activists at the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), who have officially given their support to the Noah movie.