It’s a lot of gestures and body movement. But when you’re on the ground - and not just off the ground but far away, out of camera shot - how do you let a horse know what you want it to do? In horseback riding, a rider will give commands by squeezing or lengthening the reins and altering the position of his legs. We’ll submit them to smoke screens, popping sounds - basically try to show them a lot of different things and take them to as many locations as we can before we actually shoot anything. We’ll do something like make a loud noise in the distance and then slowly bring it closer and closer. How do you get horses comfortable with gunshot and cannon sounds?
#REAL WAR HORSE MOVIE#
For a movie like War Horse, where we have to train very young foals and 2-year-olds that haven’t been anywhere, that’s where my knowledge of horsemanship comes in. Any jumping or rodeo experience will give horses some exposure too, so that when we train them they aren’t starting from scratch. We pick seasoned show horses or horses that have been exposed to crowds before horses that have been in parades make good subjects. Before you start training, how do you know whether or not a horse will be good for a movie? Horses are animals of flight - they scare so easily. TIME talked to the film’s head horse trainer, Bobby Lovgren, about his work on War Horse, why young foals make the most difficult subjects to train and how he persuaded a horse to jump over a tank. Real horses performed nearly every single stunt in the movie - except for the dangerous scenes, like the ones in which Joey ensnares himself in barbed wire or falls into a trench, which had to be fudged with the help of CGI. Joey the horse charges in battle, pulls cannons up a muddy hill and even finds himself lost in the infamously dangerous trenches of no-man’s-land. But it’s set during one of the darkest, most violent periods in human history: World War I. Follow Horse is the story of the unbreakable bond between a young man and his horse.
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