At the height of her fame, Winx became known as the “people’s horse”. She is an Australian icon who transcended her sport ”joining the realms of fellow legends like Cathy Freeman and Sir Donald Bradman. During her reign, huge crowds descended on racetracks across Australia to witness the Phar Lap of the modern era pull off the impossible, 33 straight wins, a feat unlikely to ever be repeated.
Winx’s final race was watched by a world television audience in its millions and as the legendary sports commentator, Bruce McAvaney, succinctly noted, “We’ve never had a horse mean so much to so many people.” Although the world’s greatest racehorse retired in 2019, she’s still breaking records. Winx’s only foal sold this year at auction for a world record $10 million dollars.
Directed by Janine Hosking (My Khmer Heart, Knowin the Score) and written by journalist and author Andrew Rule, A Horse Named Winx goes behind the sports headlines and victories to reveal the unforgettable spirit of champion who away from the racetrack faced her biggest battle and once again refused to be beaten.
As A Horse Named Winx gallops into Australian cinemas on September 5, Nick L’Barrow spoke with director Janine Hosking to chat about finding the narrative around Winx’s incredible career, how she humanised the race horse, and bringing the fairy tale to life.
Nick: Something that stuck out to me early on in A Horse Named Winx is the narrative decision to portray Winx’s story as a fairy tale. I loved the whimsical music, and the story book that starts this tale off. I’m curious to know at what point in the process did you decide that was the way you wanted to showcase Winx’s story?
Janine Hosking: That’s a really great question, and I wish I had a fabulous answer. My answer is going to sound very chaotic!
Sometimes I feel that you get handed down prejudgments of how a film should play out, and so I tend to go into them with no trick wire. I just listen to what people are telling me, observing things out on the road. But the part that I like the best is obviously the edit, where all the issues and storytelling come to the fore.
So, I didn’t set out to set her [Winx’s] story as a fairy tale at all actually. But what happened was that term came up when the trainer, Chris Waller, and the jockey, Hugh Bowman, were interviewed. I saw it coming up a few times in the archive that what this horse was achieving was seen as a racing fairy tale. It just doesn’t happen, and now it kept repeating itself.
But I think the penny dropped when I went to interview this guy called Peter O’Brien, and Patty Sheehan, who were there when Winx was born. And when this little foal was born, of course, she gets up and starts running in a miracle sort of time frame. It was that story that I loved. It was written on her foaling report, so it wasn’t something that was made up later.
She was born at daytime; most foals are born at night. She gets up quickly, most foals stumble. And of course, she turns out to be extraordinary. So I kept going back to this foaling report. And in the end, we decided to animate this foaling report, and the report made itself up further and further to the front of the film.
I started looking at footage of foals being born, just to see for myself how long they took to stand up, and there wasn’t any footage of Winx herself. So, I thought, why don’t we take the story of an ordinary foal and then show the fairy tale to perhaps try and make the film as magical as possible. But also, so that non-racing people could get a handle on it and understand why she was special from the beginning.
I think Peter O’Brien, the breeder, says this line about Winx about how he knew she was special from 10 minutes of age. So, it was a bit hard to ignore it and not play into it. But it was there in the beginning, then I took it off, and then we put it back on. And I nearly took it off again!
Then the sound mixer saw there was something missing with it. Something wrong with the delivery of it. That’s when we got Rachel Blake to deliver the fairy tale narration, and then I felt comfortable.
Nick: You mentioned the attempt to make this accessible for people who may not really know a lot about the world of horse racing. What did that process look like of finding the balance of making it accessible for those people, but still intriguing and interesting for those who know about this world, and perhaps, Winx’s story already?
Janine Hosking: It took me a long time in the edit to try and get that balance. But, at the end of the day, I thought, why not lean more towards the films that we know that people enjoy about racing, which are always around the “great horses”. Your Phar Lap’s. Your Seabiscuit’s.
And a documentary, from my perspective, doesn’t need to be didactic. If we were going to aim for a cinema release, we needed to take the audience on a journey. And that could be an audience that loves sport, because this is an elite sport story, as well. At the heart of all elite sport stories is pressure. It’s never as easy as it seems.
So, the Winx story ticked that box for me. Once I understood the story, I thought there had to be a little bit more to it that being this perfect run of 33 wins. So, that’s when it became about the people around her, and what they weren’t telling the media at the time. What was really going on in the eye of the storm?
Nick: That relationship between Winx and people like her trainer and her jockey are really what made me connect with the film, and I think that’s because the documentary humanizes Winx, much like the people around her do too. How important was it for you to humanize Winx in the film?
Janine Hosking: I had owned ponies. I wasn’t a racing person, but I had ponies, so I understood the connection between a horse and a human. Particularly, when you’re in love with ponies, and the feeling you get back from them.
Now, when we went to the stable with Chris Waller, where there were hundreds of horses, these magnificent creatures, you just look at them and go, “Oh my God, this is so beautiful”. But the feeling was that deep care was taken.
And then interviewing Chris later, he said that he was worried at some point because she was playing up in the barriers. And he was trying to figure out if Winx was sick of racing, trying to figure out what this horse is thinking so he can get the best out of her.
His constant mantra to the people that work with him is that you can’t get champions to work at the best of their ability if they’re not happy. If the horse isn’t happy, they’re not going to race well. You see that connection at every level, from the strappers, right through to the trainer. They’re constantly looking at Winx’s body language.
Then a personality starts to emerge where, you know, she was a very highly intelligent horse. She was getting a lot of human interaction from a young age. So, you’re seeing that the people were prepared to me know what Winx’s personality was, and they all had different experiences.
But, one of my favourite moments is actually when one of the owners talking about her posing for the cameras and being a diva! And when we were filming with Winx, I could see that quality there!
Nick: Speaking more on that relationship between Chris and Winx, there is a moment towards the end where Chris is sensing that Winx’s racing career might be coming to a end. It made me wonder about the filmmaking equivalent when it comes to storytelling. Having a relationship with filmmaking like you do, how do you use your intuition to sense when a story is complete? At what point do you know the story you’re telling is ready to come to an end?
Janine Hosking: I think the thing is not repeating the same story over and over. For new audiences, it’s about letting them know what Winx achieved, and being respectful to the history that came before. I was never going to be completely happy with the film ending with the last race, and everyone triumphantly putting their hands up in the air, because life goes on.
To answer your question, perhaps some people may have ended it there as a true sports story. You end it on that triumphant note, and you roll the credits. But, to some degree, it was a bit of a risk, because this is a long-ish film, but I wanted to know what happened to this horse after retirement, because the humans say it left a huge impact on them.
In fact, I approached them to do the film one year after she’d achieved all this. So, they probably wouldn’t even have contemplated a documentary if I’d gone earlier on. They were exhausted by the journey, and so the timing was right now. Having said that, it takes time for both the people in the film and the filmmaker to take the journey together, to trust each other.
And as I became more immersed in the Winx story, it became very important to me that, if people are going to the cinema and to pay money to see this film, that they see the truth. That they see an unvarnished story, and one they hadn’t expected.
For me, it was a little unexpected. I knew that she lost her first foal, so I was curious to know what the circumstances of that were. And I learned along the way how close Winx also came to dying. So, the next stage was finding out what that journey looked like, and who were the people who could explain it best, and that was the vets that were trying to save her life.
Now that was a whole new thing! When I started out, I did not contemplate that. But, when we got to those scenes, I was pretty convince that we’re telling people the full, complete story. And that the spirit of that horse was not only in racing, but also to do with saving her life. I think that became an even more compelling storyline, in a way.
Thank you to Janine for taking the time to chat, and to Transmission Films and TM Publicity for organising the interview. A Horse Named Winx is releasing in Australian cinemas on September 5.
