Photograph of Gary Ross © 2003 by Gilbert Frazee

Gary Ross is that rare writer-director-producer in Hollywood who has excelled at all three tasks. Born in 1956 to screenwriter Arthur Ross, 82 — whose notable career includes the original screenplay for Universal’s Creature from the Black Lagoon— Gary was responsible for the scripts to the hit comedies Big (1988) and Dave (1993) and the fantasy Pleasantville (1998) which he also directed. Currently, Ross has completed production on his newest writer-director-producer effort Seabiscuit, a drama about the champion racehorse of the 1930s which stars Pleasantville’s lead actor Tobey Maguire, along with Chris Cooper and Jeff Bridges. Ross recently took time out of his short post-production schedule at his company’s facility on the Universal lot to discuss all things Seabiscuit and how it stacks up to his earlier screenwriting efforts.

SCOTT: What was the driving force that got you started on Seabiscuit?

ROSS: I was sent the magazine article with a proposal. I’d always been a fan of horse racing, and I sparked immediately to the era when the story was about. It was just a unique and wonderful combination of a lot of things that I like. I loved the spirit of it, and I loved the fact that these three protagonists get together, any one of whom would be broken on their own, but together sort of found what they wanted to see in one another and enforced it. And there was a beautiful kind of a populist fairy tale, but at the same time it was completely real.

SCOTT: What about a Depression-era story was particularly appealing?

ROSS: I love telling the story of the Depression, which had never really been told before in an uplifting and inspiring way. We survived the Depression. That’s what people forget. I think that this is the first movie that’s been about the Depression that’s been uplifting and inspirational at the same time. It’s about people triumphing over that adversity, coping with it, finding something in themselves to transcend it. And there’s a pride in that. It’s exhilarating and thrilling and these three guys brought it out in each other and they found it in the horse. So that was something that I warmed to immediately when I read the book.

SCOTT: Don’t you think there’s also something magical and a uniquely American quality to these horses? In the 1970s, Secretariat was a hero to many, though he was a horse.

ROSS: Well, it’s funny, because Laura Hillenbrand [author of the novel, Seabiscuit] and I talked about Secretariat extensively when she sold me the rights. And what was kind of interesting was that we didn’t talk about Seabiscuit exclusively. We talked about Secretariat that day as much as we talked about Seabiscuit because we both felt that Secretariat’s Belmont was the most inspiring sporting event we’d ever seen. You were seeing such a display of determination and physical eruption of athleticism that it got more exciting the bigger and larger it grew. Normally, you want a close horse race. But the more he beat these other horses by, the more exciting the race became, which was really strange. So we talked about what a moving thing it was to see the horse do that.

SCOTT: How long ago did she sell you the rights to Seabiscuit?

ROSS: It was three years ago. And then I was gone for a while when I was going to write another project. Decided not to do that — decided to do this instead.

SCOTT: How did the script to this film come about?

ROSS: It was very clear what I loved about it. And sometimes there are just certain things that sort of suggest themselves to me easily. I felt very connected to what the story was about, and that made me keen to really work it. I think the first thing you do when you’re adapting something like this is you say, “Well, what do I like?” Sometimes, it’s a lot more complicated than that. It’s a first question. “What do I like about this story?” There was such a clear focus on what the horse meant and what people saw in the horse and what the horse meant to the country. And not that Seabiscuit fixed the Depression, because he can’t. But that people who had lost a lot, he made them feel like they deserved something. That, to me, was what the horse did for people. If he could come back, they could come back.
SCOTT: In what ways did he come back?

ROSS: He had run 46 races and that kills most racehorses. He was considered a loser from birth. And then he knocked off this blooded Eastern horse that had won the Triple Crown and was considered invincible, War Admiral. I think that what it did for people was it made them realize that they didn’t have to accept a limit or a definition of themselves just because time hurt them. And that’s what becomes a stirring, inspirational thing.

SCOTT: So was your writing process similar to Pleasantville, or Dave, or was it different?

ROSS: It was different. Because it’s an adaptation and so you’re trying to plug the meaning and the intention and the being and focus what you’re trying to say within the parameters of an already existing story. You’re sort of searching in your soul for how the movie. And the book was quite a phenomenon by the time I began to do the adaptation of it, so it really is a different process.

SCOTT: How so? Do you write all day when your creating Seabiscuit?

ROSS: I started in early 2002, and it was very labor intensive. We were trying to get the movie shot that coming winter. I was working here on the screenplay, and going to the Santa Anita racetrack and going on location scouts while I was writing. It was a pretty intense process. And because of that I’d get up around six, and I would write ‘til about noon, twelve thirty. I outlined for two and a half months, and I wrote the script in about three. So for me the outlining process is always the precursor to the writing. That’s where point of light is, like sketching a canvas — finding the entrance. And to me, that’s almost as creative as the actual screenwriting process. So, after five months, I was done writing last June and I started shooting in October.

SCOTT: That’s a fast turnaround for a major studio film.

ROSS: Yeah. It’s very fast. But we’d been preparing. A lot of the decisions were made early enough that they overlapped with the writing process. Every single shot was listed. Every moment of the horse races was diagrammed down to the smallest detail, rehearsed, reverberated. You know, there were ten revisions of the horse races in terms of the shooting plan and feasibility, how we’d go after it. When you’re filming horses, you only get six furlongs a day, and they have to rest for two days. And each take is about two, two and half furlongs. So each set of horses that I have, I only get three takes. If I don’t get it in those three takes, that thing’s gone. I’ll never get that horse race.

SCOTT: It sounds like pre-production totally paid off for you.

ROSS: I’m just lucky in one respect — because I’m a writer, I’m used to the outline process, I don’t see prep as clinical, I see it as creative. So I don’t feel impeded when I’m sitting in there planning how I’m going to shoot the races.

SCOTT: If this was as intense as it was to shoot the horses, when you only had to shoot actors, it must have seemed like a cakewalk.

ROSS: If all I’m really delivering on is the pyrotechnics of the movie, I’m not in the service of the book or the story. A writer gets very partial to it when you care about something. The acting scenes are just as challenging. It’s just a different skill set. And one you can’t prep for as much — you can to a certain degree.

SCOTT: One thing that struck me in watching the footage was the story of the people in the infield, not sitting in the stands. That seemed to be really emblematic of a period and how these people kind of were almost the biggest fans of Seabiscuit. They didn’t have much money.

ROSS: Well, yeah. The horse became a folk hero because, he was somebody who’d come back, and we were really coming back. And the infield position, those are the cheap seats. Then, you know, there were only three sports in America. There was boxing, horse racing, and baseball. And horses became stars. There have been better racehorses than Seabiscuit. I can name off the top of my head ten horses that would have crushed Seabiscuit. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that he transcended who he was. And because of that, he became a very accessible piece of mythology. Because he got the most out of who he was, he was better than he should have been. He beat the odds and the definition of it. And it reinforces our best feelings and beliefs about ourselves as a country which is that there is no limit on you based on how you were born or bred. Nothing could be truer than that.

SCOTT: What was your source of research beyond just the book?

ROSS: The only research I really had to do was about horse racing and the world that I was going into. Laura handed me the Seabiscuit research. I talked to her extensively. She’s a consultant on the movie. So she was available to me as was any of her research, and I was able to find out things from her that she hadn’t written in the book. So she and I talked quite a lot. But a lot of the stuff I had to learn a new language. You’re learning to think a new way. You have to create such authenticity around the horse people, you have to totally digest this world, become an expert in it before so that it becomes second nature.

SCOTT: How much of who you are as a film maker is informed by having your dad, Arthur Ross, as this great screenwriter from the classic age, Fifties and Sixties?

ROSS: Oh, a lot — I grew up around it. It was never alien to me. You know, this was always pretty natural; screenwriting was at home. And I obviously became a writer before I became a director. So I guess it had a large effect on me. I think the two major influences I had were my dad, and then I studied with a woman named Stella Adler, who was probably the most famous acting coach in actually the world. And I probably learned more about acting and theater and drama from her than anybody.

SCOTT: Do you think there are thematic ties between Seabiscuit and your earlier scripts, Pleasantville, Dave and Big?

ROSS: On the surface, there’s no question. Those are very high concept, fish out of water fairy tales. Seabiscuit is a drama on a much bigger scale. In some respect, I feel privileged to make this movie. I may not ever get this big a canvas again that had this many things that I love. You’re painting with such a big brush, you’re all over America, and you’re shooting things that have such enormous scale. There are also similarities with those movies at the same time. You can see this is a populist script. I think it’s about people finally reaching down and exploring their heart or their own integrity, and their own relationship to other people. And I think that Dave finding his own integrity to stand up for certain things, and finding an inner strength to be that ethical compass, and I think a lot of that is informed here. And people reaching out to help one another, that’s informed here. Hopefully, there’s a feeling or spirit of generosity in a world that doesn’t always afford that kind of generosity of spirit. That is true in Big. It’s about marketing of toys to children, and it’s a kind of mercenary, fun-filled business world, toppled by the genuineness and vulnerability of this one kid. Similarly, in Dave, it’s the world of politics. And this guy’s spirit is kind of redemptive. And he conceives, in some way, to close the door.

SCOTT: There are specific brilliant moments in the scripts of your first three movies. In Dave, where Ving Rhames the secret service agent tells Dave, “I would have taken a bullet for you.”

ROSS: The reason I think that moment works is because what its feeling says is that it doesn’t matter what your title is. Dave has been a President through his actions, if not through his tongue.” And that transcends the Presidency. The reason that’s a human moment that touches people is because what he’s saying is “You’ve earned my trust and my belief.” He’s an imposter, who went in the job as an imposter, and became real through it.

SCOTT: Big is filled with wonderful, memorable moments, but my favorite moment is when she says, “So how old are you?” And he says, “I’m thirteen.” And they say good-bye, and she goes to kiss him. And she’ll only kiss him on the head. ‘Cause now she knows what he is really. And she’s been fooled the whole time. But it’s also done in a sweet kind of way where she appreciates what he’s been through.

ROSS: There’s a huge kind of complexity in the moment, because she obviously has had a relationship with this guy, she’s fallen in love with him. But now he’s a kid again, and so she can’t relate to it right away. So she has a whole set of feelings for him that are very complicated in that. And, yes, it boils down to kissing him on the forehead. Which is the best expression of everything that she’s feeling.

SCOTT: In Pleasantville, another movie filled with great script moments, but my favorite was when Tobey Maguire tells Joan Allen, who goes from being black-and-white into color, “It’ll be okay.” And he gets out the makeup and starts to do transform her back into black-and-white. But he knows what’s going on, and he’s going to make it right because he knows in part he’s responsible for what’s been happening.

ROSS: That’s my favorite scene in the movie. That was very much informed by my relationship with my mother. My mother was a decent Sixties housewife who decided she wanted to be more than that. It was an era when women’s roles were changing. And if you’re a thirteen-year-old boy—you go to school and do your homework. Well, my mother went back to school and it was this odd situation where the tables were turned, and I helped my mother with her homework every night. So I kind of engaged in a bit of a conspiracy with her to help her find her identity again as a woman after it had sort of subsumed into this Fifties cliché. And we had a private understanding. And in that script, my mother informed that scene, with this boy helping his mother to both be this thing and hide this thing and it was complicated. The irony of that scene was that my mother died the morning that I shot that.

SCOTT: In the future, do you have other kinds of stories that you still want to tell, or do you feel like you’ve found a home in a certain kind of story?

ROSS: Well, there are huge differences between Seabiscuit and my other stuff. There are also similarities. And you’re going to write in your own voice. And so I don’t look at it too closely; I just do what I’m attracted to and drawn to. What I want to do now is walk down the street and see like a person, not a filmmaker, and try to respect that part of life that lets you be an artist. Because if I just become obsessed with finding one hit movie after another, they won’t be good movies, I’m certain.

Freelance writer Scott Essman can be reached at scottessman@yahoo.com.