This is one of the unique things about me and my particular approach in attempting to produce a movie. I decided to make an ultra low budget western, mainly because I liked the script I had written, I dig westerns, but also as a way to set our film apart from others in the same budget range. And for a western you need horses and mules and what not. Unlike, I assume, most wannabe filmmakers I had easy access to a ready to go mule team.

My uncle owns mules and has worked them his whole life. When I was young his team was Buck and Honker (Honker is still alive as of this writing, he’s like 40 years old or maybe close to 50), but for the last 20 years or so his main team was Kate and Molly. Way back during my planning of the production, before I started writing the script, I knew I could count on my uncle Glenn and his team. The mules were used to events; they rode in parades and carried brides to their weddings so cameras and a crew of people wouldn’t phase them at all.

Round about 3 months before we were to shoot the movie my uncle woke up one morning walked outside and found one of the mules unexpectedly dead. Now this is a cherished animal that has been on the farm for roughly 20 years, it was a sad occurrence and a very real loss. But I can’t lie, upon hearing the news there was a part of me that immediately thought about the impact on the movie. We were deep into pre-production and there wasn’t any moving our schedule and Glenn and his team were integral to large chunks of the film. He had Sadie, a sort of mule waiting on the proverbial bench, but we were gonna need actors to be able to handle the reins with the team and Glenn wasn’t all that trusting in what she was capable of. Basically we needed a new mule or horse team to draw our buckboard.

But being out in the country as we are and Glenn having worked mules for so long he knew of other folk who also have a team or two. And so he reached out to a friend of his, Roger. Now Roger and his team also go to event pulls and are used to crowds and a fair bit of noise and commotion. On the first day though there was a bit of question mark on if the team would preform as needed, staying on their marks, not trampling the camera, responding as well to the actors behind the reins as they do for the man who hitches them up everyday. Thankfully they did. And for a week of cold nights and some nearly as cold days Roger, Glenn and a few other ‘wranglers’ (the common term for animal handlers on a film set) were out there with our city crew doing something none of us ever really thought we’d do on the farm back in the days when Buck and Honker were hooked to the doubletree.

A number of times I’d ask or Raubyn, the DP, would ask Roger if the mules could do one thing or another, Roger would make a joke about the team running off wild with our lead actors trapped in the buckboard, we’d laugh not exactly certain if it wasn’t a possibility, and then we’d set up and pull off most shots without any issues.

For me this was another example of my people, country folk (not just my family), coming out and helping when they didn’t have to. Now for Roger it was a new experience, hell it was new for all of us, he’d never worked on a movie before. We even put him in costume a few times and he was a stand in wagon driver for a couple of our actors. Bottom line is he was doing me and the rest of the people explicitly involved in the movie a favor. And in doing so it brought a great deal of value to the look and scope of the film. A good deal of film making is trickery, making something look grander than it is or making fake things seem real. For a western it would be hard to fake the feel without at least a few animals. So i relied on my uncle, and through him Roger for the mules. For the horse I had a different person to reach out to, I’ll detail them next week.