NEW YORK — It’s not often that a director has a new movie coming out competing with a second movie that he also has directed. If anyone can do it, multi-Oscar winner Steven Spielberg can with the epic “War Horse,” competing with the motion capture animated feature “The Adventures of Tintin.”
One is based on a series of Belgian comic strips, the other on a novel and play on Broadway on the use of horses during World War I.
Q: As you’ve done in “Saving Private Ryan” and “Schindler’s List,” you are telling a specific story of war while also educating us about a time that most people have very little familiarity.
A: Well, this isn’t really a war movie and it really isn’t the literal story of World War I. World War I is the setting that provides tremendous drama and survivor mentality in all these soldiers and also the horses that were actually used in the war. Four and a half million horses were killed in the First World War. It was a very senseless war; “the war to end all wars,” as it was called, and it was just the beginning of the horrors of the 20th century. The First World War wasn’t the relevant focus for me in the movie, though. The relevant focus for me in this story was a story about the connection that animals can make between people. It’s about the connection between an animal and a person. This animal, Joey, brings people together from different sides of the war, but also about the hope that Joey brings into everybody’s life during a very hopeless time in our global history.
Q: They say that it can be difficult working with animals in a movie. Was that the case here?
A: It was quite easy, for the most part. We matched the horses with their regular riders when we could so it made it a little easier to get the horses to do what we needed them to do. Joey, the main horse in the story, was played by several horses but one of them was a real actor. He really performed his part, even in some scenes when we weren’t expecting anything. There were so many scenes where the camera was rolling and the horse would suddenly have some kind of innate, intuitive understanding of what was going on. The horses just threw themselves into some of these sequences and did things we didn’t ever imagine they would be doing. There were all sorts of improvisations. So the horses made material contributions to their own story. I knew I shouldn’t have given them scripts to read.
Q: I heard about an incident that took place in which you fell into a deep hole filled with water when you were filming one of the battle scenes. What’s that like for an Academy Award-winning director?
A: Well, it’s pretty much like any other day except I fell through a 6-foot hole of water. I didn’t know it was right in front of me. It had rained the night before and we had dug deep holes to put explosive charges into for the filming. Even though we put orange cones around the holes to warn people, the rain had washed them away and they were filled with 6 feet of water. I was walking around the next morning and just fell in. … I was 6 feet under, literally.
Q: This movie reminds me of our love for horses. I want to go back and watch episodes of Mr. Ed. What do you think are the great horse movies of all time?
A: Well, I loved Mr. Ed, too, but wasn’t so influenced by it that I gave Joey dialogue, but I was very influenced by films like “National Velvet,” “Black Stallion” and “Seabiscuit.” They were all terrific.
Travel expenses paid for by DreamWorks and WGN-TV. Watch my interviews 4 to 9 a.m. Monday through Friday on WGN-Ch. 9 Morning News. My radio show airs 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720 and wgnradio.com. You also may go to wgntv.com/deanslist.
