‘It is about survival in its rawest state’: Jojo Moyes on her favourite film ‘The Black Stallion’

Throughout our lifetimes we’ll read a great many books, watch a great many films and hear a great many songs, but most of us find our favourites early on. Best-selling novelist and screenwriter Jojo Moyes is no exception.

Moyes began her writing career as a journalist, enjoying a stint at The Independent before she published her first novel Sheltering Rain in 2002. Since then, Moyes has written a further 14 novels and a collection of short stories, which have sold more than 39 million copies worldwide and been translated into 46 languages. She is the author of Me Before You, which became a film starring Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin. Moyes lives in Essex with her three children, her rescue dogs and her horses. She is a keen horsewoman and that passion is reflected in her choice of favourite film, The Black Stallion.

“I was 10 years old when it was released,” Moyes says. “And at the height of my horse obsession (which has never really gone away).”

Based on a 1941 children’s novel of the same name by Walter Farley, The Black Stallion tells the story of 10-year-old Alec Ramsey, who finds himself shipwrecked on a desert island with only an Arabian stallion marooned by the same wreck for company. Alec forms a close bond with the horse and, when they are rescued, insists that the horse, which he has named “The Black” is brought home with him. Back in the USA Alec meets washed-up former horse trainer Henry Dailey, who teaches him to ride. Together, they determine to enter the stallion in a race against the fastest horses in the world.

The Black Stallion was Walter Farley’s first novel, begun when he was still at high school. Farley had loved horses since his 1920s childhood in Syracuse. He never owned one himself, but was lucky enough to have a horse-trainer uncle, who taught Farley everything he knew.

Farley published The Black Stallion in 1941, during his final year at university. It was an immediate success. Unfortunately, his plan to write a sequel was interrupted by the USA’s entry into Second World War. Farley joined the US Army, training with the Fourth Armored Division before he was assigned to “Yank”, the army’s weekly magazine. Once the war was over, Farley published The Black Stallion Returns. The Black Stallion series would go on to encompass some 20 books.

It wasn’t until 1979 that The Black Stallion was adapted for film, directed by Carroll Ballard and produced by Frances Ford Coppola, and starring Kelly Reno, Mickey Rooney and Teri Garr. Moyes describes it as “one of the most visually beautiful stories ever filmed,” but Walter Farley was unconvinced when he first heard that his novel was to be brought to the screen. He rightly predicted that it would not be an easy book to commit to film.

The Black Stallion lived up to the old adage about “never work with children or animals”. It took four horses to play the eponymous stallion. Champion show horse Cass Ole was the principal. An Arabian with white markings, who had won the King Saud Trophy at the American Horse Show Association, he had to be painted black. To further complicate matters, Cass Ole’s owners insisted that the stallion was not to take part in any scenes that might put him in danger. This included scenes of racing, swimming or fighting, which needless to say made up quite a bit of the film’s storyline, with its peril at sea and on the race-track.

Getting stand-in horses to take part in the swimming scenes was especially problematic. None of the four main horses was happy in the water, so extra horses had to be shipped in from the Camargue in France. The Camargue’s native horses spend their lives in water, living wild in the region’s wetlands and marshes. Only problem was, Camargue horses are always grey, thus Ballard and Coppola’s swimming stand-ins required more equine paint-jobs.

And Cass Ole wasn’t the only cast member who wasn’t confident in the water. Kelly Reno, the young star who played Alec Ramsey, had to learn to swim for the part. Fortunately, Reno was already able to ride.

As Moyes recalls, “I read a magazine article in the Sunday Times – I was a voracious reader as a child – about the making of the film. I still remember images of 11-year-old Kelly Reno galloping a black horse, bareback along a beach. He had no protective gear, no bridle, and was dressed in just pyjama bottoms. The article’s images were striking and talked about how many times he had fallen off during training. No child actor would be allowed to do that now.”

Despite the challenges Coppola and his team faced during the filming, The Black Stallion was a big critical success. It was nominated for a number of awards, including two Academy Awards and a Golden Globe for Best Original Score. That score was written by Carmine Coppola, who would go on to win the same award for Apocalypse Now.

Despite Walter Farley’s misgivings, the film gave his story a chance to enchant a new generation of children. It also sparked young Jojo Moyes’ creative ambitions. Moyes remembers: “I got my parents to take me and it just knocked me sideways. For a start, there is almost no dialogue in the first half of the film: the story is carried by the horse, the boy and the music. I suppose I identified with the lead, an only child whose life depends on the bond he builds with a wild horse. But the images were scorched into my imagination. It included one of the early uses of underwater filming, just the horse’s legs, and the boy’s, and it was balletic and beautiful and unlike anything I’d ever seen.”

For Moyes, the film’s impact endures undiminished, “I think one of the reasons I’ve returned to it again and again – I watch it at least once a year – is because it is about survival in its rawest state. Everything is stripped away in the first half of the film. The final 10 minutes are about a triumph of the spirit, both the child’s and the horse’s. I think it told me that anything is possible, but it also taught me about chasing your dreams, about interdependence, and also that love involves letting someone be who they need to be.

“It’s comfort viewing. But on a professional level I have got more from it the older I’ve got. As a screenwriter it contains so much brilliance, and is utterly unsentimental, but it also taught me about great direction. The final scene, a race scene, could have been sentimentally flooded by music, but [the director] chooses, in an echo of the first half, to strip away sound, and then slowly introduce a single note, increasing in volume, and allowing in the sound of the hysterical crowd. The scene is so much more powerful for it.

“I made my kids watch it repeatedly. I’m pretty sure they didn’t enjoy it more than any other film (we rarely love the things our parents want us to love). But I’ve shown friends, who have been initially wary, obviously assuming I’m going to make them watch a children’s film (or maybe a dodgy porn film) – and they’ve been blown away by it too. I don’t know why it isn’t considered a classic.”

In fact, it is. Officially so. In 2002, The Black Stallion was added to the list of “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” films held by the United States National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.