We rehearsed the races on foot in somewhat comical fashion 
Gary Ross started out as a novelist, before enjoying more success as a screenwriter. His first hit was the Tom Hanks comedy Big in 1988, followed four years later by the acclaimed White House comedy Dave (with Kevin Kline). He made his directorial debut on Pleasantville in 1998, and has now belatedly followed that with horseracing drama Seabiscuit.
You got the idea for this film by reading a magazine article...
About five years ago I saw this article by Laura Hillenbrand that pretty much was a microcosm of everything that ended up being the book. So, I was exposed to this material before anyone else was, and it was just as thrilling and exciting as the book ended up being. I think it's now the largest selling sports book in history or something, but when I called up Laura I found out that there were like six other studios trying to get the rights to it. To Laura's credit, it wasn't really a highest bidder situation for her - she really wanted someone who'd be faithful to the story and we discussed that extensively.
Without the success of the book, it probably would have been a difficult pitch, don't you think?
Yeah. Actually it was hard to greenlight the film, and the fact that there are three financing entities really speaks to that. You know, this is not typical summer fare. It doesn't have a high body count, there aren't a lot of shell casings in it, we don't blow anything up, it's not a sequel, it was never a comic book. But there were a lot of movies like that which failed, and this was a huge success in the United States, so I think that sometimes what's considers the safe choice is not necessarily the safe choice.
It must have been a very dangerous film to shoot...
Any time you do a movie like this, safety is the first thing you think of. Horseracing already has the highest mortality rate of any sport in the world per capita to the people who do it. If you crash in Nascar you still have a roll bar, and a cage, and a lot of protection. It's built to crash, but if you fall off a racehorse we all know what can happen, so it's tremendously dangerous. Your jockey is riding along at 45mph and there's bumping and jostling, and everyone's tightly packed. Then if you add a camera on a crane inches from somebody's head in the middle of all that, it's going to make that even more dangerous. So obviously safety is one of the first things we thought about. In terms of Tobey's safety and his training, we discussed it extensively.
How exactly did you handle the choreography in the race scenes?
Every movie has its unique set of challenges, so you have to become a quasi expert and do a tremendous amount of research. Chris McCarron, one of the best jockeys in the world, had just retired and worked full-time with us on the movie. He became Tobey's mentor and taught him how to ride, and he helped me choreograph all the races. We used real jockeys, not stunt people, because no stunt person could ride well enough to pull this off. In a race-riding situation, riding long, whether in a western or an English saddle, and riding short in a race saddle, could not be more different. I mean, they're balanced on their big toes and two little pieces of metal hovering over a racehorse at 45mph, flying around curves and getting bumped by other horses. It's an extreme sport, so we had to choreograph these races with an amazing amount of specificity.
Each race was like its own character, in a way. I'd have a meeting with all the people involved, and I had all these little Velcro horses I would use to explain where all the horses and the cameras would be at all times. From that we developed a playbook, like a football playbook so everyone could see and memorise their parts. We also rehearsed the races on foot in somewhat comical fashion, running down the track as if we were on horseback.
Seabiscuit is released in UK cinemas on Friday 31st October 2003.
