Ashley Avis on WILD BEAUTY: MUSTANG SPIRIT and Saving Horses – Jennifer Green interviews

When writer-director Ashley Avis signed on to direct the remake of Black Beauty, released in 2020 on Disney+, she didn’t know how it would change the course of at least the next several years of her life, leading to her follow-up project, the creation of a foundation, the adoption of multiple wild horses and a new role in advocacy. Avis’s documentary Wild Beauty: Mustang Spirit of the West earned her a Special Congressional Commendation from Congresswoman Dina Titus in March and is now nominated for a Critic’s Choice Award for Best Science/Nature Documentary.

The five-year venture, pieced together with minimal financing, involved Avis’ entire family and sent them into some “intimidating” places. It also inspired her and producer-husband Edward Winters to launch the Wild Beauty Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to highlighting and educating about issues facing disappearing wild horses, as well as rescuing horses in need.

On screen in Wild Beauty, we see Avis slowly transform from filmmaker to investigative reporter to advocate as they witness roundups of wild horses and come up against resistance trying to film them from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Traveling across 13 states to capture the wild horses in their natural habitats, the team went undercover, staked out roundups and pushed for access to holding pens.

In January, Avis will screen the film in Washington, DC in support of the Wild Horse and Burro Protection Act (HR 3656), sponsored by several Congress members. “I think animal cruelty is something everybody can get behind, despite what side of the aisle you’re on.”

Here, Avis tells the story of the making of her documentary and, potentially, a small movement to save wild horses. Meanwhile, she is also working on the script to direct a new remake of the Wim Wenders classic City of Angels, produced by Charles Roven (Oppenheimer) for Warner Bros, Atlas Entertainment and Perez Pictures.

FROM BLACK BEAUTY TO WILD BEAUTY

Avis describes growing up with horses and being fascinated by “great equine novels” like Black Beauty and Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion, but it wasn’t until after she’d built her career in film, with three independent films and “hundreds of commercials” to her name, that she got the opportunity to write and direct a horse movie.

“In being tasked with modernizing Black Beauty, I started researching modern-day issues horses are facing today,” she recalls. “When I started researching the plight of wild horses, I was shocked and just disgusted, and I felt such a sense of guilt that as a horse person in my youth I didn’t know that this was happening.”

When Black Beauty, produced by Jeremy Bolt for Constantin and starring Kate Winslet and Mackenzie Foy, was acquired by Disney, “that changed everything,” she says. And when the film came out in 2020, she says she received “hundreds, if not thousands of messages from children all around the world really quickly. And those kids were being impacted by the wild horse issue, in addition to other great themes like animal empathy and compassion.”

“In the quest to authentically show real wild horses” in the film, Avis says she and husband Winters went “out into the wild to film wild horses.” Onaqui horses, primarily from Utah, are featured in Black Beauty. “We fell in love with those horses.” And that, she says, “kicked off the documentary journey.”

FINANCING THE FILM

In 2019, filming a roundup also proved a turning point. “I’ve never felt my heart break in the way that it did that day, watching those horses get stampeded, particularly the foals, the little babies.” A roundup is where horses are chased by low-flying helicopters into trap sites. They are often run to exhaustion and can suffer injuries or even death. From the trap sites, their fates can include mass holding facilities, being sold off to the “slaughter pipeline” or getting euthanized, according to the Foundation’s website.

Avis describes pulling together a total of about $500,000 of grassroots financing from various investors and friends to make the documentary. “We did everything independently, very much in a scrappy way. We filmed when we had the money.”

She edited the film, which became a family affair. “We had one version of the budget where we had two cameras and a slightly bigger crew, and what we ended up having through I’d say 90 or 95 percent [of the filming], was me, my husband, my brother, who ran audio and was kind of an everyman producer, our cinematographer, and a first AC, and then occasionally my parents trailed us and made our food.”

PROJECT BECOMES PERSONAL

“We really wanted to use our platform as narrative filmmakers to try to break through, because a wild horse documentary has not broken through in the way that Blackfish or The Cove has for their respective species.”

Though they originally planned to have a celebrity narrator for the final film, Avis ended up narrating and the film feels very personal. You see Avis and crew/family as they react to scenes they’re filming or when they turn their cameras on BLM representatives preventing them from filming a roundup. “The story was never supposed to become personal, and it really changed as we went along,” she says.

“I didn’t want to put myself into the film at all,” she says, but it “felt very organic because there’s a lot to this issue and I really didn’t want it to be confusing. I really wanted to hit on a number of points about why it’s happening, who the players are, what the disinformation is, and then also certain things like wild horses going into the slaughter pipeline and being legally shipped across the border to Mexico, and why all of that is happening and why it’s wrong.”

“The response from people in the audiences over the past year has been this combination of anger, but passion to do something, and I think that is partially because they are connecting to a real story versus something that was a little bit more removed with someone just narrating what’s going on. I think that was the pro [of the project getting personal], and just getting bolder along the way,” she says.

REACHING YOUNGER AUDIENCES

But becoming so personally attached had downsides too, especially in the editing phase, “going through all that footage over and over again, and the footage we didn’t include in particular. That’s just too hard to see. It was harrowing. It was really hard to watch horses getting hurt over and over and over.”

Of the 300-plus hours of footage they shot, Avis says they left out some of the worst scenes, for example of injured horses – “pretty awful stuff to watch. It’s too hard, I think, even for adults to see.” And Avis had always envisioned the film to reach younger audiences, the kind of kids who had reached out to her following Black Beauty.

“We really wanted a strong 12- to 14-year-old to be able to see it, and to be able to raise their voice and be inspired and to tow that line so a parent isn’t going to shut it off if kids of a certain age are in the room. That empathetic adult is not going to shut the film off because it’s too hard to see.”

“That’s where we decided to draw the line” – not showing anything that would prompt someone to turn away. “We do have some people walk out of the theater because they’re so emotionally upset at what’s going on – but most people stay, which I think is important.”

RESCUING HORSES

As the project became more personal, so did the urgency to help save horses. “While I was cutting Black Beauty, I started learning at that time more about the slaughter pipeline, and there was an afternoon over a weekend that I saw this little grey filly, who was a BLM-branded mustang in a kill pen in Texas, and I spoke to my husband, and I said, I’d like to try to rescue her.”

They ended up adopting all 13 horses in her lot that were being shipped to slaughter, she says. “That’s where my bonus for Black Beauty went.” They “ended up looking for adopters all around the country for those first 13 horses, and it was just such a beautiful experience, even though we took on a bit off more than we should have probably been chewing at that point.”

“Over the years we’ve continued rescuing, and the last horse we rescued was a wild horse also caught in the slaughter pipeline from Idaho that Mackenzie Foy, from Black Beauty, adopted.”

And that, she says, is how Black Beauty came to life.