Interview: Liz Mermin on Horses

Whoever first made the observation - some say Winston Churchill, others Ronald Reagan - there is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man, and a woman. On stage these noble beasts have inspired some highly successful plays, including Peter Schaffer's Equus, recently revived with Daniel Radcliffe, and War Horse, still living up to its name in the West End after over two years (panto horses probably don't count). In cinema, the legacy is more mixed; but not for nothing is the Western, arguably the greatest of film genres, also known as the horse opera. Horses, Liz Mermin's intensely strange documentary, is a fascinating addition to this stable.

"The history of civilisation has always been so tied up with horses," says the director, an American based in London whose production company, Gulliver, pays homage to Jonathan Swift's enlightened Houyhnhnms. "They have been domesticated for thousands of years - it's only since the Industrial Revolution that they've become less important but in so many parts of the world people still need horses. If you were someone who got along with and understood horses, you had an evolutionary advantage."

However, Horses fields its equine stars not as the bearers of mighty metaphors about the human condition but simply as stars in their own right. "I started out thinking it was going to be a frivolous film but I became very passionate about it. I wanted to ask, ‘What do we think about animals - and what do we think that animals think? Do horses really have any personality and intelligence? Could you make them into characters without being ridiculous and Disney-esque about it?'"



The answer would seem to be in the affirmative judging by Horses, which opens at the ICA tonight and will be screened in the BBC Storyville series this spring. It spends a year following three racehorses at the Toberona stable in County Wexford, and what a riveting and magnetic trio they turn out to be: Joncol, the quiet, powerful giant, inquisitive, pint-sized Ardalan and Cuan na Grai, a high-strung steed who, his groom says only half in jest, must be an escapee from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Unlike wildlife films such as The March of the Penguins, there is no patronising explanatory voice-over: Mermin aimed to tell the story from the horses' perspective, employing wide-angle lenses (as in the shot of Joncol, right) and stylised sound (each horse has his own music cues). "Ardalan instantly said, ‘What's this?' and stuck his noise in everything, while Cuan na Grai was terrified of the camera. What I found very moving was that, in the course of the year, he finally relaxed, which is exactly what happens when you film with people."

She shot 100 feet of film for every foot used in the final cut, an exceptionally high ratio by most directors' standards. "I ended up with dozens of hours of horses doing nothing in particular. My camera crew thought I was a bit nuts but I could stand there and look at them all day. I considered making a more experimental film without dialogue, that was about the sounds of the stable where you couldn't really hear what people were saying, and it didn't matter. And in fact we still do have sections of over three minutes without anyone talking, which is fairly radical for a television documentary. But in the end I loved the human characters and the way they talked about the horses, and I wanted to include that at well."

Whether or not Mermin is putting a positive spin on pressure from the BBC to make the film more conventional, it's also true that the trainer, Paul Nolan, and his grooms are marvellously colourful: the garish neckties favoured by Nolan at race meetings brighten up the grey and green Irish rainscapes no end, even if he does have to get one of his colleagues to knot them for him. And the horses seem to lead the life of Riley in their care: the menthol crystal inhalations for their sinus problems, the honey and garlic doses for energy and the yoghurt for bacterial infections would not look out of place in a luxury spa.



On the other hand, there's always the threat - when a horse falls, or when Nolan has to face the thunder-faced owners after yet another loss - that one of them might have to be put down. "I felt like I did when I was making my film about a beauty school on Afghanistan [The Beauty Academy of Kabul]: you're desperately thinking you don't want anything awful to happen to your subjects because you get to care for them," Mermin admits. "But in the back of your mind there's always the idea that if it did it would make a great film."

When Horses was premiered at the Sheffield Doc/Fest last November, the screening was picketed by animal rights and anti-racing activists. "I'm a realist," says Mermin (who is a vegetarian). "There aren't nice ways for these animals to live happily in nature. In an ideal world, horses would be galloping around eating grass, but we all have to earn our keep and that includes working animals. They are athletes and very expensive to maintain. Horse-racing is dangerous, but so are gymnastics and all sorts of sporting activities. But it's clear that, if these horses wanted to run away, they could do so."

The humans get put through their paces in the film, but there's no doubt on which side of the stable door its affections lie. Its gently humorous portrait of the racing community leaves you in mind of another celebrated equine quote, by W.C. Fields: "Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people."

Horses opens today at the ICA, The Mall. The documentary's official website