American Cinematographer - January 2012 - 50

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Animal Instincts

After England goes to war with Germany, Albert is forced to part ways with Joey when his father sells the horse to a British officer.

cabling and preparation.” Then there was the rain, which came both at the whim of Mother Nature and on demand, especially for the combat scenes. At one point during a battle, Joey escapes into No Man’s Land, a 480-yard stretch along the Western Front that was full of barbed wire and trenches. “No Man’s Land was a vast field that became a horrible, muddy, violent place,” says Dubin. “It was so hard to work in there. Everybody wore black rain gear, so you could never tell who anybody was. At the end of the day, they’d turn on the power hoses and spray us down.” Topping it all off was the challenge of building so many scenes around a horse. The main character, Joey, was
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played by five of them. There was an equine hair-and-makeup department, and each horse had its own trainer. (The head trainer was Bobby Lovgren.) “Each horse had its own specialty: one laid down, another bucked up, one plowed, and another was good at turning his head to look backward on cue,” says Kaminski. Such actions were vital to suggesting Joey’s thoughts and emotions — as was the animal’s eyelight during close-ups. “Truly, when you look at a horse, there are no emotions in its eyes,” says Kaminski. “They don’t blink, they don’t smile and they don’t get sad. They just get tired.” Given that Joey is the central character — and a hero — the filmmakAmerican Cinematographer

ers tried to make the horse stand out from its environment. “We were glorifying Joey a little through lighting and composition,” says Kaminski. “We were always trying to place the light so that his coat would reflect it, and so it would create glints in his eyes.” To get a horse to act, a trainer had to be in the animal’s line of sight, and sometimes two trainers were necessary — if, for instance, the horse had to look in one direction, and then in the other. For scenes involving several horses, that added up to lots of trainers. “The trick was to put a trainer in the horse’s sight but not in the frame,” says Dubin. “For a close-up, that’s easy. But for wide shots, which Steven likes, we had trainers hiding all over the place — behind bales of hay in the barn, up in the rafters, everywhere.” The filmmakers worked with a previs team from The Third Floor to plot out the movie’s most complicated action scenes, but Spielberg’s collaborators observe that his mastery of cinematic storytelling is due as much to his own instinct as it is to such preparation. “Steven can walk onto a set with very little pre-planning and know exactly how he wants to shoot it and how many shots he needs,” says Dubin. “His eyes immediately turn into a 21mm lens.” ➣

American Cinematographer - January 2012

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