When Robert Redford first called me about wanting to make the movie, he asked me if I wanted to write the screenplay. It wasn't exactly an offer and I think he must have been greatly relieved when I said I didn't. The truth is, I simply felt too close to the material to be sufficiently ruthless with it in the way that a screen adaptation usually requires. Also I didn't relish the idea of being fired after a couple of drafts, which is what normally happens. So I wasn't involved in the making of the movie. My family and I were in Montana during the summer the movie was being shot and Robert Redford kindly invited us to the set for a day which was fun. We met Kristin and Scarlet who were wonderful in the movie. But basically Robert Redford did his own thing, just got on and made the movie. He was very courteous and would occasionally call me and tell me what was going on. When I first saw the movie in LA in the spring of 1998 I was blown away by the opening scene and liked the first half very much. When the action moves to Montana, the horse work, I thought, was stunning. And the setting and landscape look gorgeous. I was less keen on the second half of the movie. I thought it got a little lost. But then, being the writer of the book, I'm probably the least well qualified person on earth to judge. I can still see the movie and enjoy it. The Horse Whisperer Illustrated Companion The grandeur of the American West. The breathtaking beauty of one of the earth's magnificent creatures. The emotional intensity of man, woman, and child caught up in a spellbinding human drama. The Horse Whisperer has captured the hearts and imaginations of millions with its nearly magical blending of landscape, horses, and people. Now this photo-filled companion lets you experience the magic of the incredible movie-making event that is The Horse Whisperer. Inside you'll find exclusive information about Robert Redford's discovery of the novel and his determination to make it into a film...a breathtaking photographic history of the American West...the challenges of training the film's courageous horses...plus personal insight from the film's major stars, fascinating information on costume, production design, and over 100 lush photographs make this extraordinary book a keepsake volume to treasue--and a riveting behind-the-scenes look at the movie, the phenomenon, the legend. DTP, Trade Paperback, $19.95/$27.95(Can), ISBN: 0-440-50840-1 Foreword by Robert Redford We live in an age of information domination. Much of it perhaps is not needed or necessary. It may be an old-fashioned notion, but I would prefer to call personal discovery the most defining mark of a project. For that reason, I shrink from the idea of explaining too much with the hope that the film will speak best for itself. Apart from that, here are a few issues that provoke me and have abided my interest most of my life: the real West versus the mythological West of film and fashion fiction. The real West today is mostly real estate entrepreneurship and a declining lifestyle related to ranching and family life. The old West was always inhabited by a large population of homesteaders and outlaws and held hostage by a few hundred barons. I like what's left of nature and its seasons--the sweet smell of October as leaves of summer die and the air is still. The quiet fall of snow and its quilting of the frost-hardened landscape. The raw, bone-breaking winds that gather speed across what is left of the open plains. The distant and lonely sound of the midnight truck on the highway. The flush of new color in spring and sounds of water and stock as it all comes to life. I love the stories told by those that live and work there, will die there and know it. The hard-lived, often brutally treated anecdotes around the corral fence or campfire that mitigates against the reality of fate in such a wide open and unpredictable space. The rituals of hat, leather and rope that define the aristocracy that remains. And the remains themselves--those few ranches that are not prefaced with the phrase "view sites" or "estates." Those dusty, rutted dirt roads not yet paved. The waters that still flow freely undisturbed by the "know better" hounds of industry. The air so pure, it seems out of place. Aside from that, this story struck me as being just that--a good story with interesting characters in growth and conflict, about a new approach to the age-old connection between man and beast. One that involves trust and compassion. The circle seemed to complete itself with the idea that that approach need not be exclusive to animals alone. --Robert Redford Excerpt from the text by Gretel Ehrlich There is a fundamental need in all of us to move out from under tyrannies, whether political, emotional, or economic, imposed from the outside or from within. We have to eat and breathe; we have to make peace with ourselves and society. The western frontier was a physical answer to the need for space. It represented what Wallace Stegner called "a geography of hope." The Horse Whisperer, filmed on location in Montana, draws directly on this "geography of hope" as it tells the story of the healing of a young girl, her family, and a broken horse. The West's breaks and draws, dry gulches, hanging alpine lakes, red-walled mesas, towering cirques, strings of cottonwoods following streams roaring out of the mountains, still carry with them the possibility of a fresh start and a path toward basic sanity. The West was once described as "a place of great breathing." Its open spaces, both real and metaphorical, are essential to life itself. In The Log of a Cowboy, written in 1902, a foreman gave this advice to the young men on their first day trailing cattle from Texas to Montana: "Boys, the secret of trailing cattle is never to let your herd know that they are under restraint." The West was once wide enough to move trail herds that way. Cowboys could string out a bunch of cattle farther than the eye could see, and keep going that way for five months without hitting a single strand of barbed wire. It was also a place where a man or woman could move out from under the conventional orthodoxies of thought, shedding oppressions and falsehoods--all those dictatorships of the soul--and set about breathing in fresh air. Liberation, as that Texas foreman understood a hundred years ago, is not a single geographical point on a map but a pact agreed upon, an internal tension between discipline and chaos, because that's the only way freedom can occur. Yet to ride a good horse behind a herd of cattle at dawn at the beginning of summer in the high country can go a long way in showing us the way to this state of mind; to live in a community where you are judged on how ardently you pitch in, how willing you are to get the work done with patience and respect, how easily you can laugh at yourself--that is what living in the West can be. There are no more frontiers. But there is still a West. You can find it on the map and run your finger down its eastern edge: in the North Dakota grasslands on both sides of the Little Missouri River where Theodore Roosevelt ranched between 1884 and 1886; the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Sand Hills of western Nebraska, the Flint Hills of western Kansas--still unplowed and rich in native prairie grasses--and slicing down through Oklahoma's panhandle into the hill country of Texas. Sweeping west from there are the rich grasslands of southern Arizona and New Mexico, and arid mountains where black panthers still roam; then up the Rocky Mountain cordillera that begins in Durango, Mexico, and stretches far north into Alberta and the Northwest Territories. Great sweeping plains fan out to the east from the Rockies, and on the west side of the Continental Divide, range after range of mountains lie down and flatten out into great basins, then are gathered up again--as if a big hand were grabbing and pulling the land back into peaks--all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Henry David Thoreau once remarked that he wished his neighbors were wilder. He would have loved the West, because even in its current subdivided, eviscerated state, it still has great pockets of wild lands and a feral exuberance that cannot be restrained; vestiges of the West's former freedoms still inspire, still work on the tired mind as a healing balm. The view from most western ranches goes for at least a hundred miles. Because of the vast landscape we've inherited, Americans, especially westerners, are prone to loneliness. The nearest neighbor may be ten or twenty miles away, and town fifty or a hundred miles--a bend in the road with a bar, a half-stocked grocery store, a gas pump, and nothing more. Living well on a ranch is the art of making do. The cowboy's life has stood for the achievements of individual humans, grasses, sun, and animals, not masses of humans the machine. Living on a ranch, undisciplined needs are curbed; it's a place not only for renewal but for invention: ranchers are frugal--they make what they need, cook the foods they long for, entertain themselves with storytelling, dances, pack trips, cookouts, or just plain howling with the coyotes. To understand this place, wherever it is--north or south, desert or alpine, sand hills or rock faces--you have to put in some time. A ranch is not a plaything to be purchased like a car or visited only when the weather is good. Rural life demands and engenders constancy: land is time; time is metered out in snowfall, wind, drought, floods, and blizzards. Rewards come only to those who stay through all the seasons. That means every day, all day, because there are no shortcuts to intimacy.