Music, Style & Culture

Steven Spielberg - Part 2: The Filming Of War Horse

While in London, the legend tells us about his equine and human cast.

We've recovered long enough from breathing the same air as Hollywood legend Steven Spielberg to bring you the second half of the London press conference for War Horse.

Spielberg was in town with his regular producer Kathleen Kennedy to discuss the lush adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's emotional novel. In a lengthy chat with press (some of which as slavering and awestruck as DIY Film), the man who brought us Saving Private Ryan talked about filming a very different war movie, his equine stars and his human leading man and heart of the film, newcomer Jeremy Irvine. Read part one here.

War Horse is released in UK cinemas 13th January. Read our review here.

Scarcely has the British landscape looked so good on film - what was your first reaction was to both Devon and Castle Combe locations?
Spielberg: Oh, Castle Combe looks like Hollywood built it! It doesn't look real, but it's beautiful - it's very authentic and very old. The Devon location has some of the most natural wonders in all of England, with the tors that are so beautiful, that are built up in a most unusual way. I've only seen something like this one other time and that was in New Zealand, where there are also tors, and large areas of high desert. There's nothing like the landscapes of Devon, we couldn't believe it. You know, the original script didn't have the budget that allowed us to go to Devon, and we stretched the budget a bit to afford to go there and it was worth every penny.
Kennedy: Everybody told us that when you get down to Devon and Cornwall you run the risk of rain. We had the most beautiful days, grey skies, fog that came in. When we left the farmhouse, literally a week later it rained every day so hard, the entire area flooded. We were blessed - somebody was looking out for us.
Spielberg: The question I'm asked quite often is how much people loved the digital skies that we have obviously painted on, all through the movie. There's not a single sky that we put in through special effects. The skies that you see in the movie are the skies that we experienced; the sunsets of the movie are the sunsets that we experienced.
Kennedy: I don't think I've been on a movie where the whole crew stops working because they're staring out at the landscape. That sunset at the end of the movie, I give huge credit to Steven, as it wasn't exactly the way it was written, but it appeared and he instantly knew how he was going to frame it.
Spielberg: But it took three days to shoot it, because I had this idea based on a spectacular sunset, how to do it with the fence posts, and then all of a sudden I only got five shots, because the sun goes down awfully fast in Devon! So we had to come back again and again to get matching skies to make the whole sequence work.

Your film is gloriously old fashioned - were you dipping into childhood memories of heroes like John Ford?
Spielberg: Yes of course, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, David Lean, Lewis Milestone, Victor Fleming, Michael Curtiz - my heroes. Many more than that too, it goes beyond just American directors. But what I was looking to do, I think part of it was the inspiration of your country. This could only have been shot in England - this is the most British film I've ever made. I once thought that Empire of the Sun was a British film but I think I disqualified that after I heard the reaction last night at the Odeon on Leicester Square. I realised that I had made my first British film with War Horse, through and through. Yet at the same time, the works of John Ford - How Green is My Valley, The Quiet Man - very evocative. He made beautiful landscapes, and he included the land as part of his storytelling, and how could you not include Devon and Dartmoor, and how could you not include Luton Hoo and the Duke of Wellington estate where we shot so much of the picture. The land serves as a character and in a sense that's what the old directors did, they went and they just featured the land they were standing on. It's kinda fun when you get to put a wide-angled lens on it, not just shot close-ups for an entire movie.



How many horses and horse trainers did you use?
Spielberg: Only one horse trainer, Bobby Lovgren, and he had a staff of beautiful horse whisperers that worked with him, from Spain and Australia and the UK and America and Ireland. There were eight horses, but principally only two horses that I worked with all the time, Abraham and Finder, and they play the main Joeys. Other horses were special horses; horses that knew how to run without a rider, horses who knew how to back out, certain horses that are trained just to do one performance moment. But I pretty much always see Joey as essentially one horse. Of course, I hope that you see Joey as one horse, that's the idea of movies, but I really see Joey as two horses. The ones that give the most improvisation in the movie!
Kennedy: The equine department was always arriving first and leaving last. All those people had to get there at three or four in the morning to get the horses ready.

What was the most difficult scene to film?
Spielberg: Well the most difficult shots in the entire film is where the Geordie soldier and the German soldier are trying to free Joey, because it is very, very hard to get a horse to be in that position on the ground. You can get a horse to lie down but it's very difficult to get a horse to kneel down on its forelegs and its back legs - it wants to get right up. So we had very very little time to get those shots and to have the actors giving it their best, their best takes while Joey patiently waited the 15-20 seconds it took before Joey naturally wanted to get up. Any time Joey wanted to get up, he was allowed to get up, it's not like he was tied to the ground, he was allowed to get up, so the trainers kept him down it was very, very difficult to get him to stay down! The crew didn't move!

How did you portray the suffering of the horses without harming the animals?
Spielberg: Nothing was ever done to the horses to put them under any stress, that was very very important to all of us. But the important thing was Bobby Lovgren who trained all the horses. He was the one who guarded the horses, who kept them safe, who protected them, and if I had a crazy idea he would say I can do that safely or I can't do that safely. We also had Barbara from the Humane Society who was there every single shooting day. I said to Barbara "You've got the power over me. If you ever see an animal under any kind of duress you can say ‘Cut'". I gave her the chance to stop a take or even stop a take from even being taken, and so we had tremendous co-operation with the Humane Society.
Kennedy: Most of the trainers bring their own horses. They own them, so they're incredibly attached to them. That conversation becomes extremely personal. They know what each of their individual animals are capable of.
Spielberg: You have to understand that these horses were really really smart - horses are not given enough credit for being so smart. Topthorn was trained, and so was Joey at a certain point in the story, to walk with their heads down, which makes them look very ill. They didn't have to put weights around their necks, they didn't have to do anything like that, they were just trained to walk with their heads down.

Would you say in a more philosophical way that the horse in the film represents us, common man?
Spielberg: You've asked a wonderful question - it's something that I have thought about and talked about, and has been part of my thematic raison d'etre for being involved in War Horse. And you almost said what I have been saying over the last two years, which is that Joey represents common sense. That if more people had the common sense, the common horse sense, of Joey, we wouldn't be having wars. That was the real underpinning for this entire endeavour. Good question.



What made Jeremy Irvine stand out as an actor? Presumably you looked at lots of potential Alberts?
Spielberg: Hundreds. I looked at hundreds of potential Alberts, and what made Jeremy stand out was that ineffable quality that certain stars have, or exceptional people have that just stand out and rise above the rest. There were hundreds of very interesting actors and newcomers, and nobody had the heart or the spirit or the communication skills that Jeremy had. Even in silence, even in his videotape, his crude video tape test that we did through our casting director here in London, Gina Jay, every time I saw him - and he tested five times - he just got better and better and better. And I'm accustomed to working with actors who have no experience. I mean you can just look back into my career at E.T. and Drew Barrymore, and Christian Bale from Empire of the Sun had never made a movie before and very similar to the history and career that could be in store for Jeremy. So I really trust the authenticity of real people, and my job is get them to be themselves in front of the camera. Often what happens is that you get a newcomer in front of the camera they freeze up or they imitate actors and other performances that they've admired and they stop becoming themselves. So my job is the director is just to always return them to what I first saw in them, which is simply an uncensored human being. I didn't want Jeremy to be a character actor, I didn't want Jeremy to be someone he wasn't. I simply wanted him to be the person he is today and he did a wonderful job playing himself.

You're using two Danish actors in the film, Nicolas Bro and David Dencik - how did you come to cast them?
Spielberg: Susanne Bier helped me to cast Nicolas. She had done a movie for DreamWorks not too long ago called Things We Lost in the Fire, and she brought me to Nicolas. And the other actors I remember that wonderful movie The Reader, you know, that David Kross was in. So I see a lot of movies, and if I see someone I like, I write their name down. I wait for the end credits and I find out who was who and if I can't find them, I look the next day when I get into the office. I watch a lot of television, I see a lot of shows from overseas because so many shows - we have 600 channels of television in America, we need shows to fill those channels with good content! I watch a lot of TV, so I have a big, big casting list.

Filmbeat had their camera at the press conference - watch snippets below.