Steven Spielberg’s War Horse is now on Blu-ray (Disney Home Ent.), where it absolutely shines in HD for its old-fashioned virtues, combining elements of John Ford with Gone with the Wind and Paths of Glory. Spielberg’s joyous experience making The Adventures of Tintin seems to have carried over to this love story about a boy and his horse in the trenches of World War I.
“The reason I made the movie, beyond the fact that the play moved me so deeply when I saw it in the West End of London, was that here we have an animal that brings human beings together,” Spielberg told me last year, “at least in a détente of sorts, and the idea that an animal has the power to be able to bring these two warring sides together for a brief respite. And I also felt that it was very, very important to show the lengths to which a young man will travel in order to retrieve an animal that has meant so much to him and his family, that has basically saved the lives of his family by saving their farm, and that there had to be a happy conclusion.”
War Horse even brought out a warm, sentimental side to cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. His imagery has never been so elegiac, as in the early Quiet Man-like moments. Even the détente-like moment with the barbed wire in “No Man’s Land” is memorable for its transcendent humanity.
War Horse was also the latest in a personal journey for production designer Rick Carter, who’s made a series of war-themed films since 9/11 (mostly with Spielberg). He calls it “the nature of conscience and the Goya-esque disasters of war.” According to Carter, “some of them are light and have a joyous, wish-fulfillment to them. But there’s also a darkness that has to be overcome and so [Spielberg's] touching quite a wide range of movies, and, as I get older, I admire that.”
Their latest journey into the nature of conscience is Lincoln. I can’t wait to delve into how they built a movie around the extraordinary Daniel Day Lewis.