When a film project that Nicholas Evans had been working on for two years suddenly collapsed in early 1994, the British screenwriter and producer probably could have gone back to television work and made his mortgage payments quite handily. Instead he bought an airplane ticket to Montana.
He spent the spring doing research about latter day “horse whisperers,” men with an extraordinary ability to heal deranged horses, returned home and began writing a novel.
He was halfway into it when his bank began to lean on him, talking about calling in the loans he had taken for the film project and possibly taking a second mortgage on his family’s home, so he showed his 200-page manuscript to a literary-agent friend for a reality check. His friend suggested shopping it around to Britain’s major publishing houses in the hopes of attracting an advance large enough to tide him over until he could finish it.
What followed is the stuff of dreams, fairy tales–and Hollywood movies.
At first the manuscript quietly circulated among the publishers, but on the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair last fall, a stampede began. American publishers twisted arms for a look at the manuscript. Scouts for Hollywood studios faxed copies of it to producers back in Tinseltown. A heated 48-hour bidding war among the film industry’s giants was followed by a hotly contested literary auction.
By the time the dust settled in November, Evans had sold the film rights to the “The Horse Whisperer” for $3 million to Hollywood Pictures and Robert Redford and the U.S. and Canadian publishing rights for $3.15 million to Dell, a record-breaking bid for a first-time novelist whose book was not even finished.
“I still can’t get my arms around really,” Evans is saying in the kind of Chicago hotel suite usually reserved for big movie stars. “It feels very strange to be traveling around and being put up in places like this. It’s crazy. This is soooo huge that I still wake up every day wondering if it’s true.”
Tall, thin, tawny-haired and unassuming, Evans, 45, says that he undertook the novel during a time of considerable personal upheaval.
“I was disillusioned with screenwriting and with the film business in general. It was a very spiritual time because I felt that my life had kind of messed up and I’d been in the wrong career. So I was very raw.
“I had first heard about a horse whisperer from a blacksmith in Dartmoor in the far southwest of England. It really made me shiver. I was so moved by it. And then I did a whole lot of reading about it. Of course, it goes back centuries, and it’s cloaked in witchcraft and magic and folklore. When I started to research it in the States I found many different traditions, Native Americans.”
Fast start
Evans’ novel, published earlier this month, made its debut in the No. 3 position on the New York Times’ fiction best-seller list Sunday. It centers on Tom Booker, a Montana horseman who can do wonders with demented horses. He is called upon by Annie Graves, a hard-boiled New York magazine editor, to help her young daughter, Grace, and the girl’s horse, who have been traumatized by a horrible accident with a truck on an icy country road. It’s a story about love, self-discovery and transformation set against the backdrop of the big, unflinching Western sky.
“It’s a sort of Zen story,” Evans says. “I’ve always described it as an epic Zen love story. I’m not a Buddhist, more a student of it. I’ve always found it a persuasive thing.
“So I always knew the book was about people passing through the most terrible pain and in the process finding out things about themselves that they didn’t know before. Like the parting of the clouds and getting back in touch with the more important things that a lot of us tend to lose sight of.”
Evans says he felt no pressure when he had to hole up in his London study and finish “The Horse Whisperer.”
“I knew where I was going and I had been given this great vote of confidence. If my friend had told me it was no good, I would have thrown it away. It scares me sometimes to think about that.
“It was an odd story to write. Every story I’d ever written I had to bend the characters to make the story work or bend the story to make the character work, and with this it was never like that. In a way, it just laid itself down in front of me.
“People seem to think I sat down and wrote this calculated best seller, but nothing was further from my mind. I just felt passionately about this story. No one in their right mind would this story about a horse meant to be a best seller. That’s nuts.”
Law to TV to film
Evans grew up middle class in Worcestershire in the Midlands, studied law in a university which “cured” him of “the idea of wanting to be a lawyer.” So he got a job as reporter on a small newspaper in northeast England. He aspired to work at the Sunday Times in London, but editor Harry Evans (no relation) told him to wait a year and then he’d hire him.
Impatient to sample city life, Evans got a job as an off-camera television reporter, and 18 months later worked his way up to producer of a weekly current affairs show. He was put in charge of coverage of the Middle East and American politics and spent time traveling around America during the 1976 presidential campaign.
By the time Harry Evans called with a job offer on the Times, Evans was producing television documentaries about artists, writers and filmmakers for the “South Bank Show.”
That inspired another career change. “I was making a film about David Lean, the director, and he became a mentor and friend,” Evans says. “He kept telling me, `Why are you making a film about me? You ought to be making a film yourself, not about somebody else who makes films.’ I kept thinking about that.”
Before long, Evans left his secure job and tried his hand at filmmaking. He and his wife had just had a second child, he says, and “it was a quite precarious thing to do, a lot like writing `The Horse Whisperer,’ actually. But I was lucky enough to get a script together and got the money for it. And each time it got a little easier to get a film going.”
Evans made TV films and one feature film, “Just Like a Woman,” which was released in America by Goldwyn. It got good reviews but no business.
His disillusionment with the film business has to do with the nature of screenplays, which he considers “constricting,” and the whole process of getting a green light for a picture.
“The process often requires you to lie, even good people to lie,” he says. “If you’re trying to get a film going, you have to pretend to the director that you’ve got this actor and to the actor that you’ve got the director. And you’ve got to pretend to both of them that you’ve got all the money in place. And you have to pretend to the money people that you’ve got both the actor and director in place, so it’s a hall of mirrors. The only way you can get it off the ground is to convince all these people you’re telling the truth.”
Working with Redford
But Evans had no difficulty saying yes to Redford, who plans a double turn as director and star of “The Horse Whisperer,” based on a script by Eric Roth, Oscar-winning screenwriter for “Forrest Gump.”
“I’ve always admired Robert Redford’s work enormously,” Evans says. “There’s a sort of moral integrity to it. He hasn’t been spoiled by Hollywood in a way which a lot of people have. In fact, he said he always viewed Hollywood as enemy lines, somewhere you went to drop a bomb and get the hell out quick.
“I’d seen `A River Runs Through It’ after I’d known it as a book and I’d loved the book. I thought the way he captured the spirit of the book was impressive, so in truth the dice were loaded in his favor before I even took these calls from others. He really had it in his heart. He knew this half book inside out, knew what I was getting at.”
Redford offered Evans the chance to write the screenplay but he declined, knowing how difficult it would be for him to be “coldheaded and ruthless” in compressing material he is so attached to.
Ironically, Evans says that the film deal that collapsed before he began writing his novel last year is now available for him to direct as a result of “the brouhaha” of `The Horse Whisperer.’ ” But he’s not sure he’s interested.
After completing his publicity commitments, which will take him all over the world until year’s end (28 countries have bought publication rights), Evans plans to write a second novel. But not too quickly and certainly not the same sort of story in a different way.
“It’s important for me to do what I’ve always done,” he says. “Write something that comes from my heart.”
