Cowboys & Indians / January 2010 / Morgan Freeman talks to C&I about horsemanship, his love of the West, and his newest film

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Morgan Freeman talks to C&I about horsemanship, his love of the West, and his newest film

He came on the movie scene in 1980 as a crazed inmate in Brubaker and has played just about everything since, from the chauffeur in Driving Miss Daisy and a redeemed convict in The Shawshank Redemption to Ned Logan in Unforgiven and God in Bruce Almighty. With his calm demeanor and distinctive voice, it seems there’s no role for the strong, reserved type that Morgan Freeman can’t nail. He did it in the Dark Knight as Bruce Wayne’s loyal business manager Lucius Fox and in The Bucket List as the blue-collar sage Carter Chambers. Now he’s bringing his famous gravitas to the role of revered former South African president Nelson Mandela in Invictus. Finishing an interview about the film with a European fashion magazine, he quickly changes gears — and hats, now donning a Stetson — and turns his attention to his lifelong role of horse lover.

A voracious reader, the Academy Award-winning actor grew up devouring Zane Grey and Bret Harte novels and watching classic westerns starring such actors as Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott — “all those guys who were playing cowboys back in the 1950s.” During the hot Mississippi summers of his childhood, Freeman would go to the Saturday matinees to watch Gene Autry, Ken Maynard, Roy Rogers, and about any actor who rode a horse on the big screen. Without a horse of his own to ride, he straddled a broomstick steed and sported toy six-shooters until he was too old to pretend anymore.

He first rode a real horse as a child in the farm fields near his Mississippi home. After the day’s work was done, he volunteered to ride the mare, a large plow horse, back to the barn. Jumping up onto her ample back, bare feet and legs sticking out straight on either side of her, he rode along the road. He finally managed to get the tired mare into a trot, but her gait was so rough that he promptly bounced right off and onto the dirt. Freeman couldn’t get himself back up on the horse, so the two walked the rest of the way back to the barn together.

Fast-forward a decade to when he was 19 and riding in the Alpine area of San Diego, where his roommate’s family owned a riding stable. The friend fancied himself a hotshot rider and let Freeman ride the more gentle Socks, a beautiful black horse with white socks. “He was a great horse and taught me a lot about riding, especially about being confident in the saddle,” Freeman says. “So I thought that I could ride and was doing it right, as he responded so well to me.

“I didn’t realize that I wasn’t doing it right until I traveled to England more than three decades later to film Robin Hood [Prince of Thieves with Kevin Costner] and met the film’s horse-master, Tony Lee. He watched me trying to ride in formation where I was sitting on this really wonderful black Andalusian named Fury, who had been the star of the English version of Black Beauty. Fury knew who he was, what he was, and just what to do. We were riding along, but that horse kept trying to run off. Tony said, ‘You’re squeezing on the leg, which tells him to ride out. You’re giving him two different sets of instructions, so just relax; press your heels down and out.’ I did, and Fury settled right down.”

Lee’s instruction really paid off. As the manly Moor Azeem, Freeman jumps onto the back of his fiery steed, riding tandem no less, to escape from the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham’s posse. Freeman had established himself in the saddle, and Fury became his set horse for all of the flat riding that he did in Robin Hood. To this day, Freeman remembers the beautiful Andalusian as an amazingly self-aware animal. “When we did a photo shoot for the movie,” Freeman recalls, “I was sitting on a stool in front of a backdrop, and Fury came in behind me, stood perfectly still, and looked at the camera.”

But then Lee put him on a jumper named Spike for several scenes in which the actor had to cross barriers on his way to Sherwood Forest. Unfortunately Freeman’s body position wasn’t right, and when Spike jumped, off came the actor, hitting the ground with a loud crack. Everyone on the set came running out full of concern, but Freeman was fine: “I was only 50-some years old then,” he quips. Lee worked with Freeman throughout the months they were filming in England; by the time Freeman returned to the States, he had learned how to expertly sit on a horse and was able to ride with confidence and assurance.

After Freeman finished Robin Hood, he moved home to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to be closer to his ailing parents. It was there that he started acquiring his own horses. His beloved Sable, the first to arrive, is now 20 years old and is part of a small herd of quarter horses that roams Freeman’s 124-acre ranch.

“Sable is another one of those ‘one-off’ horses,” Freeman says fondly. “I walk into the pasture and he won’t come up to me, he just won’t do it. But once he’s in tack, we go out and we ride, and when I get off of him and put the reins around Sable’s neck, he’ll follow me everywhere.”

Like most of us who have raised equines based on the more modern philosophy that horses should be trained with trust and kindness, not through intimidation, Freeman is sure that Sable is not so trusting because he was “broken” and treated unkindly by his previous owner. In his own horse training, Freeman focuses on understanding the horse.

“I had a Palomino, whose name was Trigger, of course [Morgan assures me that he did not name him], and I was trying to load him into a trailer to take him to the vet. He would not go into that trailer, just would not do it. There was no way to coax him into it. Then it occurred to me he had never been the first one to go into a trailer. So I put Sable in first, and Trigger ran in after him. It just took a little bit of horse sense to get it right.”

Another of Freeman’s favorite horses is Junebug, a big pacer. “He’s been on the ranch for almost a decade,” Freeman says. “He was just 4 months old when I got him, and there is a huge difference in temperament when you raise a horse from almost birth. Junebug has no fear and has an incredibly trusting nature.”

While Freeman was living in Clarksdale, he would ride on his ranch for two hours every day, rotating through his seven horses. He says he loved this time of his life, and he started feeling like a real horseman — going out into the woods and bush-popping for hours at a time. He even had a life-or-death situation when Sable’s bridle broke and the horse started to run home. Sable crossed a highway and managed to circumvent an 8-foot fence, but he couldn’t get into the ranch gate because he was running so fast and didn’t want to stop. They finally came to a lower gate that Sable could jump, but there was a tree stump in front of it — Sable suddenly slowed down and Morgan went over his head. Both horse and rider were shaken up, but neither was seriously hurt.

Just two years later Freeman got the opportunity to do more film riding in Unforgiven opposite Clint Eastwood, when he saddled up with a big and docile sorrel-colored roan. “He was a good movie horse,” says Freeman. “For the movies you don’t want a horse that is going to do too much in the way of dancing because it’s hard to keep them in frame. This big roan was really, really quiet but very responsive. He was truly the acting horse, and you couldn’t ride him except on camera, so I had a big, lighter-colored roan named Jake who was used by the wranglers and that I rode at other times.”

When he wasn’t working, Freeman spent time riding with the film’s wranglers, taking care of the cattle, and feeding the horses. “We filmed Unforgiven in and around Alberta, Canada, and when the movie was finished shooting I stayed on with the guy who was the head wrangler and had a big ranch there,” Freeman says. “I stayed there for a week or more, pulling the shoes off all the horses that we used in the movie before moving them out to pasture. It was really cold, hard work, but I always wanted to be a cowboy.”

Freeman’s
 latest role is
 playing anti-apartheid activist and former South African president Nelson Mandela in Invictus, which was coproduced under the banner of his production company, Revelations Entertainment, and directed by Clint Eastwood (the film opens in theaters in December 2009). Adapted from John Carlin’s book Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation, the film is set just after the fall of apartheid, soon after Mandela was elected president. The film is set at the 1995 Rugby World Cup, hosted by South Africa, and explores how Mandela rallied blacks and whites to come together for this sporting event after decades of violence and mistrust.

The project fell into Freeman’s lap almost three years ago. While Carlin was writing Playing the Enemy, he visited Mississippi to do research on an article he was writing on poverty in the South. Carlin was referred to Freeman’s business partner Bill Luckett as a possible resource for the story. “As luck and providence causes these things to happen, Bill and John bumped into each other on the Mississippi highway — not literally, of course,” Freeman says. “John called Bill and told him that he was in Oxford and on his way to Clarksdale near where my ranch is located. Bill had left Memphis heading to Clarksdale, and I was just leaving Los Angeles traveling back there as well.”

The three converged at the local airport, and that night Carlin told them the story of the famous rugby match in South Africa. “Around the same time an agent contacted my producing partner, Lori McCreary, with the book treatment that John had sent to me. We agreed that we wanted to try to get this made, and through our friend, producer Mace Neufeld, [we] hired Tony Peckman to write the script. He delivered an absolutely amazing screenplay, so Lori and I decided to send it to Clint and asked him if he would be interested in directing the project. He said ‘yes’ after reading it. We took it to Warner Bros., which houses both of our production companies, and they said ‘yes’ as well.”

Invictus is the third collaboration between Freeman and Eastwood. Freeman costarred with Eastwood in his 1992 classic western Unforgiven, which garnered four Oscars, including those for Best Picture and Best Director. More than a decade later, he portrayed Eddie “Scrap Iron” Dupris, a washed-up boxer, in the Eastwood-directed Million Dollar Baby, winning his first Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. The story of a female boxer who gets her chance for success in the ring also received Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress.

Invictus represents the first time that the talented team has worked together in a production partnership. “Morgan and I were both really excited when Clint decided to direct the project,” says McCreary. “We then started working with Malpaso Productions, Clint’s company and a very well-oiled machine. Robert Lorenz, his producing partner, got a budget together, and we started to work with the real people in the film, spending a lot of time in South Africa. This is not an autobiography, but the story captures Mandela’s spirit and ability to bring his country together during a one-year period of time through this rugby tournament.”

The film’s producers include Eastwood, McCreary, Lorenz, and Neufeld, with Freeman serving as an executive producer. The title Invictus was inspired by a poem of the same name by British author William Ernest Henley, who wrote it while recovering in a hospital from tuberculosis of the bone. The closing lines of the short but emotional piece conclude that in spite of gruesome circumstances, “I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.” Mandela frequently read the work to himself in prison, and it gave him hope during his excruciating years of incarceration.

 “When we were in South Africa, we still hadn’t decided on a title for the film, and everyone there knew it as ‘The Untitled Mandela Project,’ ” McCreary says. “It was Clint who ultimately made us see how the poem really reflected Mandela’s life. There is no one better to play one of our world’s heroes than Morgan, and I think that it was very brave of him to take on this challenging role. We hope Invictus will remind the folks in South Africa about a really great time in their history.”

An active environmentalist, Freeman enjoys  exploring the great outdoors not only on horseback, but also by air and by sea. One of his passions is flying his own plane, and he is especially drawn to the deserts that cover much of the West.

“Settlers drawn by the Gold Rush must have had great trepidation back in the 1800s when traveling west across the desert and moving into Oregon and California, knowing that all that dry and empty land was there to cross,” he says. “When I fly over such vast open spaces at 37,000 feet, I can see a long, long way, and there is nothing down there — no water, no vegetation. It’s unbelievable to me.”

Another passion is sailing — Freeman became obsessed with water adventure after reading Moby Dick. Getting his own sailboat in 1971, he sailed to Nova Scotia and four years later to Bermuda, encountering his first major survival-threatening storm at sea. He was sailing a 30-footer solo, but he likens the experience to heading out on horseback, exploring new frontiers. “Sailing and riding have a lot in common,” Freeman says. “If you go off somewhere on your horse, you both have to depend on each other, which is the same as going out to sea and depending on your boat. In both situations you have to take care of each other. If you fall off your boat, it’s not going to sink. And if you fall off your horse, he will survive — you may not.”

Freeman has done much more than survive. In December 2008, he was the recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors for a lifetime of contributions to American film and culture, a lifetime that started with broomstick horses and Saturday afternoon westerns. He has gone on to play heroes and villains, comic book characters and historical figures, prisoners and presidents. But he is getting a little tired of being known as Mr. Gravitas: He’s already played God twice. So he is making a concerted pitch for Mr. Eclectic, beginning with his 2008 return to Broadway in David Mamet’s play The Country Girl, in which he played a stage actor past his prime struggling with insecurity and alcohol. And now that he has finally gotten to play Mandela (he tried once before with the film version of Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, which never made it to the big screen), one of his next roles will be opposite Bruce Willis and Helen Mirren in Red, an espionage thriller based on the WildStorm/DC Comic about a former black-ops CIA agent. In the film, which is set for release in late 2010, Freeman plays Joe, the CIA boss who orders the execution of Willis’ renegade character.

“I like being eclectic, the more varied the better, the wider the range, “ Freeman once told The Washington Post. “A good story and an interesting character is all I am looking for.”

And, of course, some really good horses.

Issue: January 2010

Filed under: Art-Entertainment, Film, TV