In this film, when Frank is really floundering after he's seen all the atrocities at Wounded Knee, it's his horse that literally picks him up, isn't it? In a way, the horse is his teacher.
Yeah, you see that repeatedly in the story, I mean it was an element of the script that in some sense the horse Hidalgo, the mustang in this story, this little horse that could, err...so to speak, that he works as Frank Hopkins' conscience, in a way. But it happened a lot more than what was in the script, and the performance by the main horse that played Hidalgo, this horse TJ, was so present and in a sense he gave such a great performance, that he functioned much more as Frank's conscience than we had expected. I mean he's a horse that's unique, especially for a stallion, in that he's able to stay calm on a movie set with or without other horses around. His patience and his awareness is remarkable. He, on and off the set, he seemed to have opinions about everything, he had a reaction to everything. We saw it early on and thought it was just coincidence, where he would react, with a look or a sound, some sort of way he would comment on what the people were talking about or doing in any given scene, and he would take over a scene and the director would say "Well, that was lucky, we got that on film, let's carry on and make sure we pay attention to the horse," and made a joke about it. But TJ kept doing it, over and over again, so we always filmed him and you see a lot of that on film. It really works...it's not a trick, obviously, it's not a special effect. It's merely the horse being himself and being very interesting, fortunately.

And you're known for going to great lengths to authenticate your roles. How much time off set did you spend with TJ, the horse.
Well, quite a bit. I'd take him back, put him away. Obviously before the filming started I spent tons of time with him. I liked him a lot. I really did get to be just like the characters of Frank and Hidalgo. TJ and I became very good friends. I became as good friends with him as I did with any of the other actors in our production.

Tell me about how you see the character of Frank T Hopkins.
I think that for an American movie, especially a big studio movie, that is in many ways an old-fashioned classically-told Hollywood adventure story, this character is unusual, in that here you have an American protagonist who goes to a third-world country and, instead of what you usually get - which is at the very least that the American character is trying to inform or educate other people, show them the American way of doing things - this character goes in invitation to that region and is more-or-less welcome, not welcome by everybody but has been invited, and he arrives in a place where he doesn't really understand much of anything - how could he have had any knowledge of this, Arabia in 1890, when he's a guy from Wyoming and South Dakota. He doesn't understand the language, he doesn't understand much about the customs. He appreciates their horses, but he doesn't... their points of view, everything, seems so different. But rather than reject it out of hand or resist it, he sort of just minds his own business, but shows a certain amount of curiosity about the "otherness" and because of that attitude he ends up inevitably learning about their culture and in that process also learns something about himself that he wasn't aware of. His character is improved by the experience, and he takes what he’s learned home with him. That’s unusual and I think, in a gentle way, kind of subversive, and very welcome as far as I’m concerned in a big movie like this.

In a way, a lot of the initial reactions you got to give to this new culture that’s totally alien to you spring from coming from being a cowboy who’s half-Lakotan himself, and you found a very surprising source of information on the true attitudes and stances of cowboys in Rex, your trainer, didn’t you?
I did, yeah, and it’s not just the Arabs that are strange to Hopkins, it’s also the English people that he meets on the ship on the way over. Their way of not only speaking but their points of view about many things, just their way is very different, very foreign to him. But Rex Peterson, who is in actual fact a cowboy from Western Nebraska, which is very close to where the real person, Frank T Hopkins that I play, is from, he was helpful in many ways, obviously because he’s one of the most respected horse trainers for movies in the world, if not the most. He’s an excellent horseman, an excellent teacher of horses and riders, but also the way he speaks, his way of interacting with horses and people, was good for me to study for this character, I suppose. And like Hopkins and like other cowboys that I’ve met in the process of preparing this role and working on it, I found that they were generally open-minded and they always made up for whatever they didn’t understand or what they met with that was different, or opposed to their point of view with a certain sense of humour and a curiosity which I think is really healthy. And in fact as much as people have commented on the fact that Arab Muslim culture and Native American Lakota culture is given a fair shake in this story, cowboys are too. A lot of people around the world, and in the United States and Canada as well, have come to think that the cowboy archetype, the cowboys themselves, are not so positive sometimes, that that kind of individualism stems from preventing others having their individual experience when in fact the opposite is true of most cowboys I know.

There are humorous scenes where they do show the restrictions of the cowboy, like when Omar Sharif is admiring your colt gun and you say "Well, God didn’t make all men equal, but the Colt 55 did," or something...
Yeah, Mr Colt did. It’s just sort of a joke he makes, but the Sheik, being a Muslim Arab, takes exception to that, certainly, and points it out right away, and it’s a subtle humorous thing, but even just as far as different points of view of things, and that interesting cowboy way, at the starting line for example, you have one rider who’s fairly noble and dignified and he comes over, the guy with the falcon on his arm, and he says something like, "Desert law compels me to tell you that you do not belong in this race, an infidel, and that your mongrel horse doesn’t belong here either, and Allah would not wish you to be here," and so forth, and as Hopkins I sort of take that in and I say "Well, good luck to you too," and that is typical of Hopkins’ attitude to it and some of the humour that you find in the movie. And of course those two riders, from going through this hard experience together, end up being friends really and not in a corny way, just through shared experience, which I think is true in life. If you spend time with anybody there’s going to be some overlap, and I think one of the values of this story and stories like this, just like Lord of the Rings does, in the end what you see is that we have...it tells you that it’s worthwhile finding out why we do in fact have more in common with others than not.

Like Omar Sharif’s character, Sheik Riyad, when he’s secretly reading the Buffalo Bill adventure stories. It was good to see him on the screen again...
He’s a very fine actor, he really is. Did you see that movie Monsieur Abrahim?

I haven’t seen it. I love him from the time of Laurence of Arabia, and for years I’ve been waiting to see him in something that would really be worthy of him.
Yeah, well, he’s great in both these recent movies, Monsieur Abrahim and as the Sheik in Hidalgo. One thing I liked, apart from for selfish reasons as an actor, all the questions I could ask him and all the stories he has to tell about his experiences in Laurence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, and in life as well, was his kind of acting I really like. It looks deceptively simple…

It seems very generous acting.
Well, it is and he’s…what he’s great at is finding technically a way to relax and to react to his environment and to the other people in the scene, which really is the foundation…I mean reacting is the foundation of any good acting really. And his kind of acting, he makes it look easy but it’s not, it’s very complicated, to get to that place, I think, and he’s really good at it. The performances that you usually see people praising and giving awards to are bigger, often involve a lot of screaming, crying, bizarre...like big behaviour, and this very subtle kind of performance that he gives in our movie and in Monsieur Abrahim I think are undervalued a lot of times, you know a lot of people say, "Oh yeah, Omar Sharif, he’s handsome, he’s charming, he’s a cinema legend, he’s a movie star," end of story. He’s a much better actor than that.

(sorry, I missed this bit!)...experts were quick to condemn Frank T Hopkins as a fantasist, but the screenwriter did base the story on oral history of Native American Indians, didn’t he?
Yeah, he did, and I know who the people are who have for the past couple of years been writing negative stuff about Hopkins and just about this movie in general, not only saying that it’s not true that he existed and that he rode horses and raced and all that, but something that’s completely unconnected to that, I mean you can have that debate if you like, and have an opinion, but they also have said that this movie is anti-Islam or something ,which is not true at all. Interestingly, people that started the controversy are themselves riders and big fans of Arabian horses so there are parallels between Lady Anne and the Arab characters in the story, and on that level it’s sort of funny, but what’s not funny to me is that in some way, in a slight way, it’s distracted from all the good things about this movie, and the oral tradition about this guy, and about Hidalgo and other horses he worked with is alive and well in many families in the American West, particularly on Indian Reservations, that’s where John Fusco the writer heard about this, not from a book, and that’s where I learned the most about it. It’s really interesting that you have a person that really in his physical traits he looks like a European American, very Anglo-Saxon looking person, and yet Blackfeet, Lakota, other tribes have an oral tradition that’s gone down through generations talking, variations on a theme, but always about Hopkins and Hidalgo and other horses and in some cases about the race that this movie shows. Why would people who have otherwise in general not been treated always very well by the European or Anglo-Saxon race, why would they relate a person like that to their culture and their horses? Families that are unconnected, why would they talk about Hopkins throughout the years? Why would I meet someone and they say "Oh, yeah, yeah, I know all about him. My grandmother told me about that." These people that have stirred up the controversy make no mention of that and in fact, in a sense, are being disrespectful of not only that tradition but also of those people, and I do take offence, maybe even more offence concerning that than I do the reputation of Hopkins himself.