Horse Whisperer Buck is Subject of Sundance Award-winning Doc

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Monday, 20 June 2011 02:55

Written by Brad Balfour

Raised in Montana and Idaho, the young Dan M. "Buck" Brannaman was a rodeo star as a child, but suffered such abuse from his dad that he and his brother landed in foster care. He responded to that experience of pain by developing a kind of empathetic state of mind that helps him with handling horses and his own personal survival.

The legendary horse whisperer considers himself lucky despite the hard life he endured as a kid. He found a calling that some might call mumbo jumbo, but to a vast number of horse owners, trainers and grooms, he expresses an uncanny skill at natural horsemanship.

That talent has made him the go-to guy for working with difficult horses, the inspiration for a feature film, The Horse Whisperer (directed and starring Robert Redford), and the subject of a Sundance Award winning documentary by first-time director Cindy Meehl (a former fashion designer) titled Buck, which came out this week.

In this exclusive interview, this unique individual explains to a degree both how he gets to that state of mind and how it can be applied to one's own life.

Q: You had a rough background in your youth.

BB: My childhood was pretty dark, and we touched on it some in the documentary. It goes a little bit more in depth in my book.

Q: Do you have different relationships with different kinds of horses or is it consistent throughout?

BB: As far as horses go, people will ask about one breed versus another. I have to tell you, I really don't have any prejudice one way or another. I treat every horse at face value, how he/she is as an individual.

That's the cool thing about horses -- they don't have prejudice. They don't care if you're tall or thin or if you're dark or if you're light, or if you're rich or you're poor, if you're handsome or not so handsome. They don't care about that. They care about how you make them feel, and if that's the only damn lesson that someone has learned from horses, they'd be way ahead of the game.

Q: Do different horses respond to different kinds of touch or tones?

BB: I often talk about presence. Some people who have worked stock dogs -- say, border collies -- say they will have a presence in working stock. There might be two dogs that are exactly the same size, but one dog will have quite a bit of presence. He'll walk into a pen of sheep and boy, they're all paying attention to him and honor him.

Then you might have a dog the same size without much presence that the sheep will chase him out of the pen. And that's true with horses and people as well, but the human theoretically is supposed to be the smart one.

Q: I doubt that.

BB: As a horseman you'd get a sense of what kind of presence you needed for the situation. You may have a horse that has been sort of spoiled and he's disrespectful, [so] that you may need to have the presence as if to appear to be 10 times your size. But then five minutes later, you might be dealing with a horse that's very timid and very fragile and very emotional that you might need to have the presence of being 1/10th your size.

It's for the human to be able to adjust that, and a lot of it is your posture and your body language and the way you move around the horse that gives him the message whether or not he should be threatened or not threatened by you.

Well, of course you're trying not to be threatening at all. But the way you present yourself on one, you might have to adjust it on another horse in order to be able to fit the situation.

My teachers used to tell me you need to learn to adjust to fit the situation. Don't just do what you've always done because it might not always work.

Q: That's true in the broadest sense, right?

BB: Yes, it is.

Q: That works when you have a conflict with people. Do you take a similar approach with horses?

BB: I do, particularly someone who might be difficult to be around. You'll get some people that sort of get caught up in a lifestyle, or they create conflict and they deal in conflict and they're making war with other people constantly.

Well then, they're sort of wired in a way that they set you up to kind of pull you in because they know how to deal with you in a real adversarial relationship. But I might think of it like this: I try to treat someone not how they are, but how I'd like them to be.

You've got to be careful not to get pulled into something and play the game they're always used to playing. So a lot of times you can sort of take them off their game by approaching them in a way that they're not used to.

Maybe they don't even deserved to be approached that way, but they might really appreciate it in the end that you maybe give them a little extra rope to work with.

Q: In making the film, were there moments where you applied your philosophy to the process of making the film?

BB; I have to say it really wasn't that difficult in the process with Cindy. Early on, I said, "The way we have to do this is, I'm not going to be your actor and I'm not going to stand on a mark for you to focus everything the way you want it, and I'm not going to rehearse it and I'm not going to do it over.

Because things happen in the moment in working with horses, and once that moment is passed, it's gone forever."

So I said, "You're going to have to be kind of clever and learn how to anticipate some of the cool things that happen with these horses so that you're in the right place at the right time."

It made it especially challenging, really, to be able to film something like that and have it work, because it's hard enough when you're doing a feature film and you can tell the actors exactly where they're supposed to stand and where they're supposed to do their business. She didn't have that luxury in doing this, and by golly, she did a good job.

Q: Especially when the horses aren't ones trained to perform, they're there to be themselves. So they're being themselves and that's what she's got to document, as opposed to when you do a movie like The Horse Whisperer.

BB: Exactly.

Q: Did you have to do anything to get the horses to stay or behave in a way that suited the camera situation?

BB: No. She just filmed life like it is for me. So other than having to pack an extra microphone on me, that was about the only inconvenience. I was glad to get that second microphone out of my pocket after two and a half years, but other than that, I didn't have anything different in my life, really.

I got used to those guys being around and got to be friends with them. So I missed them after they left, actually.

Q: How did you meet Cindy? Did she own the horses?

BB: I first met her years ago at a clinic here on the East Coast, and I don't even remember where. I want to say Pennsylvania.

Q: You go everywhere, don't you?

BB: Yeah. You name it, I go there. I didn't see her again for four or five years, and then she came to a clinic in Texas with her aunt, and there was kind of a little handful of ladies there and I knew the other ladies pretty well, so we spent a little bit of time together. We'd have dinner in the evenings after the clinic and they were kind of a pretty good bunch of gals, fun to be around, so we'd visit a little bit in the evenings.

And then she ended up going to a friend of mine's ranch in Montana -- McGuiness Meadows Ranch -- as a guest, and that's where she came up with the idea of doing this documentary.

To be honest with you, there were a few people over the years that asked me about doing a documentary, and I just said, "Fine, go ahead and do a documentary, but just leave me out of it."

As to why I said yes that day, I guess I just trusted her. We were friends by that point and I knew that she wouldn't do anything to disappoint me, that she really had a great intention.

Yet still it's a little risky letting someone tell the story of your life when you've devoted your life to trying to do something good. Someone could just tell the story wrong and wreck years of devotion. But thank goodness, she did me right.

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