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Steven Spielberg, Michael Morpurgo and War Horse
Steven Spielberg recently visited the West End to watch War Horse at the New London Theatre. The director and producer has bought the film rights to the play and joined the cast and crew on stage to congratulate them on the award-winning show.
War Horse uses life-sized puppets to portray the story of a horse sent to the World War One battlefields, and according to the company manager, Spielberg was very impressed with the operators’ skill.
Company manager Charles Evans said: “For every actor, Steven Spielberg is a very important employer. He hugely enjoyed it. He was very surprised by the skill of the puppeteers.”
“I loved it. I thought it was great,” remarked Spielberg to reporters.
War Horse’s author, Michael Morpurgo was interviewed by The Daily Telegraph last week in an interview in which he was asked what would constitute his perfect weekend. His answers were as eloquent as ever and they spoke touchingly of the inspiration and source behind the award-winning children’s book.
“Weekends are wonderful for what I call dreamtime. That’s the time when my ideas for stories come to me. I don’t have a working week from Monday to Friday, but at weekends I don’t feel the obligation to be at my desk,” remarked the children’s author, who went on to talk about the inspiration behind War Horse.
“There’s a lovely pub in the village called the Duke of York. My wife, Clare, and I know all the regulars very well – we’ve been living in this part of Devon for 35 years. I’ll read the newspaper and have a half pint of bitter. This pub was important when I was writing War Horse. My late father-in-law left Clare a picture when he died. It was a very frightening and alarming painting, not the sort you’d want to hang on a wall. It showed horses during the First World War charging into barbed wire fences. It haunted me and I happened to know a regular at the Duke of York who had been in the trenches. We sat down one day and he told me that he was in the Devon Yeomanry and then came out with this wonderful phrase: "I was there with horses." I asked him and another old soldier about it. It was an extraordinary moment because I didn’t know them at all. They were so matter-of-fact about it all, although one of them did get quite tearful when he started talking about friends who’d died in the trenches and what had happened to the horses. They must have told me things that they’d never told anyone before, but I think you can do that with a stranger.”
When asked to list his favourite things, this is what he came back with:
- Listening to Beethoven – loud
- Chatting around the dinner table with friends
- Mowing the lawn – you get a great sense of achievement when you look back at what you’ve done
- Drinking Châteauneuf-du-Pape
- Enjoying life, rather than worrying about it
Michael Morpurgo was honoured with an MBE in 1999, the OBE in 2006 and was Children’s Laureate from 2003 until 2005. He is also a patron of countless charities, and in 1976 began, with his wife, the Farms For City Children charity which aims to relieve the experience of poverty in inner cities and urban areas by giving children the opportunity to live and work on a real farm for a week. He has received critical acclaim for many of his books, nationally and internationally and counts Ted Hughes, Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson as his favourite authors.
Posted: February 5th, 2010
Author: Lee
Categories: Michael Morpurgo
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