Spielberg’s animal instincts
NOT many young actors go from playing a tree on stage to being cast as the lead in Steven Spielberg’s latest blockbuster.
That’s what happened to then unknown British actor Jeremy Irvine, who plays Albert, the naive protagonist of War Horse, an epic, old-school adaptation of Michael Morpugo’s 1982 novel (and also an acclaimed stage play) about a young boy’s bond with his steed, Joey, and their separate experiences of fighting in World War I.
Kathleen Kennedy, Spielberg’s long-time producer, says the director knew Irvine was his man when the actor walked in for his audition.
“Well, he didn’t tell me,” says Irvine. “At no point did they even hint that I’d get this job. My agent would say after every audition, ‘this is great experience’, and that’s all it ever was.
“I hadn’t had much work for two years. I was doing things like a theatre show with no lines, where I was playing a tree. I was just out of drama school, spending a lot of time walking around London putting CVs through letterboxes. I wasn’t even getting call-backs for commercials.”
Irvine’s graduation to the big time was so fantastic that his agent informed him of the casting in an equally surreal manner. “My agent got me in, and I thought it was another audition,” Irvine says. “He set up a camera, pressed play, and I turned the page on this fake War Horse script he’d done up. I started reading, ‘Joey! Joey! Steven Spielberg wants me to play Albert’. I have that moment captured forever on DVD at home.”
Kennedy found War Horse while on holiday in London. She had brought her two daughters to see the stage show, which uses giant, human-operated wire-and-mesh puppets as horses.
The play has been a massive success for the National Theatre since its debut in 2007, and won five Tony awards after it transferred to Broadway last year.
For the movie, Spielberg has assembled a heady British talent, led by Peter Mullan and Emily Watson, and rising stars Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch.
“It’s a great day in any actor’s life when they get the call from Steven Spielberg,” says the softly-spoken Watson. “I’d met him once before. Saving Private Ryan was out the same year as Hilary and Jackie [for which Watson was Oscar-nominated as best actress in 1998].
“We met at a nominee’s luncheon for an awards ceremony, and Steven made a point of coming over, introducing himself, and saying ‘well done’. I was completely bowled over. He remembered me and thought of me for this, which is lovely.”
Watson says Spielberg’s set was “not at all ‘Hollywood’. It’s a huge unit and crew, but also a very quick, quiet crew who have worked with Steven for a long time, so it was a very easy experience.”
It’s a driven set, performance-focused, intimate. “He’s like a horse whisperer: he talks to you during a take. When you watch his films, like Jaws or ET, the acting is superb and feels very real and natural. That’s not an accident,” she says.
Hiddleston, who has had a great breakout year with turns in The Deep Blue Sea and Thor (a role he’ll reprise in the upcoming superhero extravaganza The Avengers), can hardly contain his giddy gushing when talking of working with Spielberg.
“He was the architect of my generation’s imaginations as children in terms of the movies he made,” Hiddleston says. “I remember I was 12 years old on the opening night of Jurassic Park. I’ve grown up with him, and you have all these expectations of who he is going to be. Then you meet him, and he’s so excessively kind and humble.”
Cumberbatch, arguably the most buzzed about British actor of the moment, thanks to his role in the BBC’s Sherlock, says: “Steven’s very approachable. You can go to look at the monitor and talk about a scene, and he’ll give you an anecdote from his massive biography. It feels like it’s a new experience for him every day on set.”
On the topic of the phenomenon that is Sherlock, Cumberbatch says: “It’s a very strange thing. You feel recognised. That sense of being on display when you’re not being asked to professionally is odd, though it’s part of the job.
“Work-wise, it has built some momentum, which means I’ve gotten the most fantastic opportunities, or at least, the doors have opened for me to prove myself for jobs at the next level.”
One such job is the role of the villain in JJ Abrams’ sequel to his rebooted Star Trek. “I can’t say anything about it,” he says. “I’m very excited and can’t wait to get over to LA to begin.”
What of the man without whom none of this War Horse-mania would be possible, author Michael Morpugo? The genial writer says he tried to make his own movie adaptation in the mid-1990s.
“A producer friend of mine, the late Simon Channing Williams, asked me to do a screenplay,” Morpugo says. “I wrote five or six versions of a script, and Simon tried for about six years to sell it. I don’t think my script was good enough, and he didn’t have the connections as a producer to make it happen.” Morpugo says that he wasn’t even convinced that the stage adaptation would ever happen, let alone a Hollywood film version. “When they told me they were going to make my story with puppets on a stage, I had no faith at all,” he says. “You wouldn’t, would you? I didn’t believe it until I saw the incredible work the National Theatre could do.
“When it came to the film, all my faith was in Spielberg. Here was my reasoning: anyone who could make a success of ET and Schindler’s List in the same lifetime could embrace the story of War Horse and make a success of it.”
The book is now 30 years old, but Morpugo still finds himself doing interviews for, and about, its offshoots and legacy.
Did he ever, in his wildest dreams, imagine it would turn out this way?
“I thought the book would be out of print a long time ago,” he says. “At its highest, it sold around 2,000 copies a year and was translated into three languages.
“Now it’s 35 languages and has spent five weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Am I happy about that? No. I’m furious, because all this time it should have been on the top of the New York Times bestseller list.”
He pauses to laugh. “I’m being silly,” he says. “It’s the same book but this story has a reach thanks to Spielberg. It’s now War Horse by Steven Spielberg. And I better get used to it.”
*War Horse is in cinemas now.
