MANE EVENT

DREAM HORSE I Teasers goes off to the races with Toni Collette for a real-life Welsh tale…

April 2019. It’s a cloudless day at Chepstow Racecourse in Wales, and the assembled crowd, including Toni Collette and Damian Lewis, are breathlessly watching the track, getting ever more excited until they erupt into overjoyed hollering.

Presumably their horse has just passed the finish line, but, for now, there’s not a nag to be seen. Instead, a car drives past for an eyeline guide. Ah, movie magic. We’re here for Dream Horse, based on a true underdog story also covered in 2015 doc Dark Horse.

“The story was already part of the local mythology of Wales, and the part of Wales I come from,” director Euros Lyn (Doctor Who, His Dark Materials) says. “So I feel like I’ve got a really strong personal connection with it.” The film follows Jan Vokes (Collette), a bar worker turned racehorse-breeder in a small former mining village in South Wales. Her horse – Dream Alliance – ends up performing better than anyone could’ve anticipated.

Also on set today are real-life figures Jan and Brian Vokes and Howard Davies, who have been collaborators since the earliest days of the script being written.

This is the first time that Collette has met her character’s real-life counterpart, an experience the actor describes as unexpectedly moving. “It was quite trippy. A bit surreal.” Dressed in a lilac anorak and green blouse, Collette’s not feeling the pressure too much. “There is an element of freedom because, you know, the documentary’s been made,” she laughs.

The Welsh accent has been a challenge, though. “I’m OK at accents, but this is a very unfamiliar one,” she says. “It needed to be true. It’s such an honest film that if I was in any way generalising, I would hate that.”

Damian Lewis, who’s playing Davies, grabs a deckchair during a break in filming. “The fairytale aspect, the improbability of a horse being raised on an allotment, in a depressed or post-industrial Welsh town, and then coming to these big racecourses, to the preserve of the aristocracy… It’s a really heartwarming story,” he beams.

Although the story has been told before, Lyn saw the opportunity to make the audience experience the racing in a way you can’t in a documentary, “to put the audience right in the middle of the race, so that they can feel what it’s like to be a horse, running at 30 miles an hour and jumping over six-foot fences.”

Like the doc previously did, Dream Horse has just had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. “I think Dream Horse is a uniquely Welsh film, but it’s a universal story about characters who have a dream of doing something impossible,” says Lyn. “And I think it’s a film that will speak to people across the world.” MM

ETA | 17 APRIL / DREAM HORSE OPENS IN TWO MONTHS.