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	Printed Articles & Interviews Montreal Gazette January 15, 2005

Frederick Du Chau and Bruce Greenwood

Racing Stripes is a real zoo: 150 animals in all by John Griffin There is a sacred text in the Hollywood handbook that says directors and actors should never work with children, animals or computer-generated horseflies. Yet in the new family comedy Racing Stripes, Frederik Du Chau and Bruce Greenwood play against all three. And live to tell the tale.

Bruce Greenwood as Nolan Walsh

Belgian-born director Du Chau and Canadian great Greenwood flew in from storm-battered Los Angeles earlier this week to wave a poster and cuddle the movie's unnaturally cuddly stuffed zebras in support of their project.

Greenwood, who has played many characters in a career that includes big Tinseltown projects like I Robot and Thirteen Days and auteur films like The Sweet Hereafter with Toronto's Atom Egoyan, was quick to clarify that no children were involved in the South African production of Racing Stripes - just one very mature teenager.

Greenwood plays a grieving widower, over-protective father and retired racehorse trainer letting his old Kentucky farm fall to ruins in the shadow of a great thoroughbred estate run by a cold-hearted heiress (Wendie Malick). Hayden Panettiere is his horse-mad teenage daughter.

"Hayden doesn't count as a child," he explained over bottled water in a downtown boutique hotel. "For one thing, she's been working in films since she was an infant. She's an incredible professional. For another, she was too caught up with the zebras to act like a child."

Perhaps the zebra angle should be explained now. Racing Stripes is a rousing parable of class struggle and personal identity tied to an orphaned zebra named Stripes who thinks he's a racehorse.

There really are zebras in Racing Stripes - two foals to play Stripes as the cutest thing on four spindly legs, and eight to capture his energy as an adolescent who wants to run with the big guys in the Kentucky Open. It's one of the reasons Du Chau decided to shoot in South Africa. You go where the zebras are.

Comparatively speaking, they were easy to work with, though they won't be joining the actors guild in the immediate future. They're a little aggressive, have a strong sense of self-preservation and will do almost anything for food. Maybe the guild isn't so far off after all.

"The zebras were smart enough to know what they didn't want to do," noted Greenwood, sealing an immediate visit from the union rep to the South African zebra local.

"The thing about animals is it can take forever to shoot a scene. They have to hit their marks, and stay there without moving or changing expression. Some scenes took 50 takes."

Did we mention the reason the animals in Racing Stripes were required to do what animals rarely do - stand still? It's because the post-production demands of Racing Stripes required the animals to do another thing animals rarely do - talk.

Fortunately, Du Chau comes from animation, that masochistic subset of the filmmaking industry that routinely asks its practitioners to spend years in icy garrets handcrafting one-minute films with pen and ink. Getting a Shetland pony to move its head left or right was a breeze.

"I actually couldn't believe how quickly some elements of the production went," he said of the 14-week shoot in the province of KwaZulu-Natal in 2003, and the next year spent matching the Shetland's muzzle to Dustin Hoffman's voice.

The two-time Oscar winning Hoffman, who has been known to rule over the barnyard when on-set, wasn't actually a fixture during the live production. (He joined later, adding cranky old-guy vocals in his first-ever voice-over role and apparently really getting into it. But there were other animals to deal with).

"There were 150 animals in all, and as many trainers," Du Chau recalled, shaking his head in wonder. "Oh, and the weather changed every 15 minutes. It was my first live action film. I didn't know any better."

In fact, the 14-year veteran of West Coast animation storyboarded his film thoroughly, and was blessed with a strong set of actors, a great crew, and Goose the pelican.

Greenwood is still in awe of the bird, a creature he describes as having a brain the size of "a wafer, or a dime," yet still capable of hitting a mark on a barn floor from a flying distance of three hundred yards. "I don't know many actors who can do that," he confessed.

Or many who would want to share screen time with Goose, a gun-shy New Jersey hitbird voiced by Joe Pantoliano that steals every scene he's in.

Forget the pony, the zebra, Whoopi Goldberg's wise old nanny goat, or the bottle blonde purebred race horse that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Mischa Barton's tightly-wound California girl on TV's The O.C. You want a real marquee animal, ask for the bird.

Or the horseflies.

Because every racetrack movie must address the issue of what animals leave behind them, Racing Stripes asked Montreal company Hybride to create a couple of wise-cracking, cow-flap loving horseflies named Buzz (voiced by Steve Harvey) and Scuzz (voiced by David Spade). Goose, Buzz and Scuzz -they steal the show.

"It's about the triumph of the spirit," explained Greenwood, getting in his family values pitch.

Du Chau had on his game face and agreed, but could be forgiven for thinking Racing Stripes might also have been about the endurance of one spirit - his. Animals and computer-generated horseflies - you don't want to work with them.

Racing Stripes is playing in theatres now.