-By Harry Haun

In the cinema realm, “War” and “Horse” are two words most associated with director John Ford, who liked to dirt-kick his career by saying “I make westerns.” But Steven Spielberg’s War Horse is a horse of a different color—at least somewhat.

“Certainly, John Ford factors into not just my work, not just War Horse—a lot of us who study film and love film really admire John Ford,” Spielberg conceded when quizzed at the film’s New York press conference. “Yet I didn’t consciously create a tome to John Ford with War Horse.”

Rather, it was the original locale that led him. “I simply went to England, looked at the locations, became very emotionally involved in how important the land and the sky were going to be,” Spielberg recalls. This would be the rustic English countryside around Dartmoor, Devon, where Michael Morpurgo set his 1982 children’s book about a farm boy, Albert Narracott, who follows his heroic workhorse, Joey, into the fury of World War I, where the horse manages to touch lives on both sides of the battlefield.

Spielberg and his ace cameraman, Janusz Kaminski—significantly, perhaps, both have Oscars for Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan—came up with a mutual vision, a ravishing realism akin to crossing John Ford with David Lean.

“We knew, because it was such an epic story, the land is a character. It determines whether the crop you bring in is going to be a success…whether you’re going to lose your farm or not to foreclosure. It’s so important to these poor farmers.

“The land makes another statement. In France, during the First World War on this zone—‘No Man’s Land,’ it was called—it just seemed as through I was going to use wider lenses. Rather than shoot everything in close-up, I was going to fall back and let the land tell the story. John Ford did that a lot with his movies in Monument Valley—with all his westerns—but so did other directors like David Lean and Akira Kurosawa, with films celebrating the land that they were shooting their pictures on.

“So it wasn’t really about John Ford. It was more about an opportunity that availed itself to me because of how spectacular these locations were.”

Another thing the film isn’t, despite its bombast, is a war movie. Spielberg invites other possibilities: “I consider it to be a character story. I consider it to be a love story between a horse and a young man—also a story of great hope and great connection that this horse makes to every character, both German and British, as the horse travels almost as an odyssey to his own life through his own experiences surviving the war. The war is a backdrop that allows us to create drama, but war isn’t the reason I told the story. World War I isn’t why I made this movie.”

Nor, initially, was Morpurgo’s short novel, which was lost in the bookshelves of the young-adult department until 2007, when Nick Stafford wrote a prestigious, prize-winning stage adaptation where puppeteers magically passed for horses—this, after Morpurgo and Simon Channing-Williams had toiled for five years on a screenplay. Once Spielberg entered the picture, the screenplay was assigned to Billy Elliot’s Lee Hall and Four Weddings and a Funeral’s Richard Curtis.

When Spielberg world-premiered the DreamWorks picture on Dec. 4, he properly acknowledged his inspiration by doing it at Avery Fisher Hall in the Lincoln Center complex next door to where the Tony-winning stage version was at that very moment playing.
Kathleen Kennedy, co-founder of Amblin Entertainment and a longtime Spielberg producer, was first to see the picture potential when she took her two daughters to the play in London. “I have to say, because of all the years I’ve worked with Steven, what I’ve noticed about his movies—when I’m in the cutting room or on the dubbing stages—is you can turn the sound off and watch these movies and know what’s going on because he so effectively, with Janusz, uses the camera to tell the story.

“That,” Kennedy continues, “was something that spoke in volumes when I saw the play—that it felt like a story that, in Steven’s hands, would so effectively [let him use] the camera to evoke all sorts of emotional reactions without necessarily having to say anything. There was something so powerful about the relationship between the boy and his horse that it was a perfect story for a director like Steven to tell.”

Which doesn’t mean Spielberg is cashing in on War Horse’s children’s-book pedigree and going for the young market. “I don’t really think of discriminating against one audience in favor of another,” he says. “Certainly, if I make a movie like Saving Private Ryan that has an R rating, I don’t expect young people to attend—but a movie like this is intended for everyone. I really didn’t discriminate.

“I didn’t say, ‘This is going to enlighten a young audience, bring them back to an era where the machine and the implements of warfare supplanted the horse—the great paradigm shift where the horse was rendered more as a beast of burden and less of an implement of warfare after that. Those are lessons that we all learned researching War Horse, but that’s not the reason I told the story either.”

The reason is: “Sometimes, stories just connect with me, and when they really connect with me with such intensity, I have to make the movie. I have to direct the movie—not produce it, direct it. I hope I can bring a lot of people along with me. I just don’t ever say ‘This is for this audience, and not that audience as well.’”

Grinding gray tanks and rapid-fire Gatling guns blew the cavalry charge right out of the box of international warfare. Millions of horses—Spielberg says four or five million—raced into extinction and became instantly obsolete. “I hope this movie makes people appreciate the innate and natural intelligence of horses,” says the director, “and I hope it brings an awareness to the plight of horses, both after World War I and today, in a very sad turn of events where the slaughtering of horses is being permitted for food as a renewed export industry.”

To play the primary part of Albert, whose love for the red foal his farmer-father drunkenly purchases leads him into battle, Spielberg opted for a fresh face over someone with a portfolio of distinguished parts from other films: Jeremy Irvine, a 20-year-old Briton from a small country village not unlike Albert’s.

There were other invisible arrows pointing to Irvine: He had been a fan of the book since the age of 10 when his mother first read it to him, and two of his great-grandfathers had fought in World War I—one with a horse named Elizabeth he bought from the army for 28 pounds (the same sum Albert has when he tries to buy Joey from the army).

Spielberg’s track record for turning unknowns into stars—Drew Barrymore in E.T. and Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun come quickly to mind—helps him be fearless in his casting. “I’m a veteran of foolhardy casting choices,” he admits rather happily. “I’ve risked everything on new people who I really believe in—so, for me, I have no risk-aversion. I don’t feel any anxiety any longer in casting someone who has to completely carry a movie if they’ve never done a movie before. If I think that they’ve got it, then I can work with what they bring to me.

“Jeremy had it. Jeremy had a gift. He’s affable. He made a tremendous connection with these animals, even though he didn’t ride until he made War Horse with us—but there was something about the spirit of his naiveté, being sort of a young actor in training but never having been given the break. It reminded me of Joey. He never acted before either, so I had Jeremy who had never acted before, I had a horse that had never been in a movie before, and I figured, ‘What the heck, put them together.’ And yet Jeremy had great intuition. He had a great intuitive heart. He has a great personality. I just knew that this was raw material I could work with.

“He was instantly adopted by the other cast members, who were vastly experienced—Emily Watson and Tom Hiddleston and Peter Mullan—they really took him under their wing and made him feel like he was one of them. I also knew that was going to happen with Christian Bale and with other actors who have never really done movies before that we’ve all worked with. When you put in an actor who really has had a lot of screen time, they tend to take these young hatchlings under their wings and nurture them along, so I had a lot of help.”

In Entertainment Weekly, Spielberg used a Yiddish word—shpilkes—to describe his nervousness on the set, but this reportedly goes largely undetected by those working with him, even if they could pronounce it. “I always hide my nervousness because everybody else is nervous,” he confesses a little sheepishly. “Why impose my burden on them? They’ve got their own problems to solve—memorizing their lines, how to play the scene that day—so I don’t expose my process to anybody else because it’s hard making movies, but I need to stay nervous. If I don’t stay nervous, I’m not going to direct anymore because nervousness keeps me honest. I don’t rely on confidence to tell my stories. I just literally show up on the set and hope there’s a little bit of mojo stirring around in there that day. Some days, there’s not—and those are really hard days, but the days that there is, it’s better for me to come to the set with an open mind and an open heart than to come with everything figured out like I’d just built the iPad and tested it and test-marketed it, and I know it’s going to work. I don’t know what’s going to work until it works.

“I also don’t know what’s not going to work until it fails. I just don’t know. This is how I’ve directed all my life, and that little bit of nervousness that I bring to the set every day keeps me honest and keeps me from thinking I have all the answers.

“That’s why I think I’m a great collaborative director. I rely on the people around me—Janusz and Kathy and, in this case, Richard Curtis, and Rick Carter the production designer, my costume designer Joanna Johnston, my editor Michael Kahn. It’s a great team I have, and it takes a lot of burden off me because I’m exposed and open to all of their collaborative notions as well. It’s why I stick with the same people on every movie.”

Spielberg’s longest team-player is composer John Williams, who has been with him since he conducted “The Eyes of Texas” in The Sugarland Express in 1974.

They still make beautiful music together 37 years later. “John’s beautiful score,” says Spielberg, “was a direct result of his reaction to the film, which is the way he works. He has a musical intuition greater than any composer I know—maybe like the classical composers like Stravinsky and Prokofiev and Debussy. He’s of that era, except he’s writing for the movies. He’s not writing opera, [but] he writes symphonies. He had a profound reaction to the movie that he saw, and he just went away for six weeks and called me on the phone. His office is right next to mine—we’ve had adjoining offices now for almost 25 years—and he said, ‘Come over. I want to play you a few sketches’—he calls them sketches. And I came over to his piano, and he played me four different sketches, and I cried four different times.”