Gary Ross: The Final Stretch

Back in the '30s, Hollywood stars gathered to watch the great thoroughbred Seabiscuit fly down the stretch at Santa Anita. Now director Gary Ross reteams with his Pleasantville star Tobey Maguire to bring Hollywood back to racing in this summer's Seabiscuit.

Clark Gable and Carol Lombard, Jimmy Stewart, Bing Crosby. Almost any Golden Age Hollywood star you can name probably spent glamorous afternoons out at Santa Anita Park in the days when racing was a national obsession. And when an unlikely, homely little horse named Seabiscuit suddenly started winning with an unlikely loser of a jockey on his back, Hollywood cheered the underdog along with the rest of Depression-era America. It was a story that might have been dreamt up by a starry-eyed screenwriter if it hadn't happened for real. Sixty-plus years later, Hollywood has taken a renewed interest in thoroughbred racing as the blockbuster bestseller Seabiscuit: An American Legend comes to the screen with one of our freshest and most gifted young actors on the marquee. Thoroughbred enthusiast and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Gary Ross had cast Tobey Maguire as his star in his directorial debut, Pleasantville, so he already knew how the role of Seabiscuit's jockey should be cast by the time he finished the first draft of the screenplay he would direct.

As naturally cinematic as thoroughbred racing may be, it's not a subject present-day Hollywood often takes to, but the sport itself is once again becoming a glamorous showbiz pastime. The passionate popular response to author Laura Hillenbrand's masterfully suspenseful tale of an equine hero has actually bumped up attendance at tracks around the country, and if Ross has done the book justice, Hollywood may well find that there are still throngs of rabid fans who are willing to cheer courage in the final stretch.

Michael Fleming: Though Seabiscuit is the center of the action in the movie, the main character is really his jockey, Red Pollard. Were you thinking of Tobey when you first bought the rights?

Gary Ross: No. I owned them for a long time. But early on in the first draft, I thought of Tobey.

Q: Did you share that with him right away?

A: Yes, why be coy? I called him and said, I'm writing this part for you. If you pass, I'm screwed, because I don't think anyone else can play it. God, I hope you do it.

Q: By this time, he'd become a big star off Spider-Man. How did he respond?

A: He said he couldn't wait to read the script. He called me the day Spider-Man opened, when I was at the Kentucky Derby last year, to tell me he'd just finished the book. He loved it.

Q: Why is it you had such passion for a story about a horse?

A: I bought it when Laura Hillenbrand had only written a proposal based on a magazine article she'd written for American Heritage. I'm a big fan of the sport, but I could see already this was not just about a horse. Seabiscuit was a folk hero, a galvanizing force in the Depression, an underdog that inspired people. This was an ugly little horse with knobby knees, a loser. And they felt like losers. If he could come back, they could come back.

Q: There was quite a horse race in Hollywood for the rights to the book, wasn't there?

A: As this bidding war was going on, I had a special point of reference that made a difference. I talked to Laura for a couple hours, mostly about when Secretariat won the Belmont in 1973 for the Triple Crown. Secretariat won by half a racetrack, and she and I agreed that was probably the greatest athletic event in the history of sport. We talked about how years later when Secretariat died, they found out he had a 16-pound heart. The average racehorse has an eight-pound heart, and Secretariat had a double-recessive trait that created a larger engine and more horsepower. So Laura knew this was more than a passing fancy for me and that she'd be in good hands. I think that's why she sold it to me.

Q: Was Tobey Maguire worried about the physical demands of the role? One of the things the book stresses is how dangerous riding a thoroughbred is.

A: He had concerns about being a believable jockey. I told him we had the great jockey Chris McCarron who'd teach him to ride, and that I'd developed this thing called an Equicizer.

Q: What is that?

A: It's the mechanical horse that we shot him on. I saw it while passing through the jockey's room at Santa Anita and asked, what's that? They said it was an exercise bike for jockeys--it's spring-loaded to duplicate the exact motion of riding. I figured that if I could mechanize one of those and put it on a truck with a camera platform, I could drive Tobey around the track and shoot him with the grandstand and the crowd whizzing by, in a totally safe environment where he couldn't fall. I'd be able to get the camera right next to his face. I had this thing built and it worked. There is another horse movie, which I won't mention, that wanted to borrow it because they weren't able to shoot closeups and they realized in the editing process that it was a big problem.

Q: That sounds to me like Hidalgo, Viggo Mortensen's first big movie after filming the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Did you share your Equicizer?

A: No, it was busy.

Q: Is that the sign of a little rivalry between horse movies?

A: It's a sign that I am proud I figured it out. This thing worked like a charm. I had to put Tobey in a horse race, and this was a safe way to do it.

Q: There was buzz a while back about Tobey's health and whether he could continue as Spider-Man. The rumor was he might have strained his back making Seabiscuit. Was there any hard riding, any fall?

A: Any talk about Tobey getting hurt is just bogus. He never sustained any injury. All the riding on the track was done on this contraption, because I would never put him in that position. It's too dangerous a sport.

Q: You've cast Tobey twice now. What did you see at the beginning?

A: There's just that thing where you see an actor who's special. Directors don't have a real high amount of practical skills. We can't operate the camera, we don't build the sets. We play our hunches. I saw in this kid something very complicated, focused, intelligent. And he's a way more accomplished actor now than he was the first time that I worked with him.

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