Toni Collette was so moved by the true story of her latest film, “Dream Horse,” that for quite some time, she couldn’t even manage to talk about the movie without crying over how inspiring and heartfelt it is.
“Dream Horse” is the story of a Welsh supermarket clerk named Jan Vokes who dreams of owning a racehorse and convinces the people of her town to chip in a small amount every week until they can finally afford to buy and train what would become a champion racer.
“I just fell in love with it. Until very recently, I couldn’t talk about it without crying because I found it so moving how this horse brought an entire community together,” Collette told TheWrap’s Beatrice Verhoeven at TheWrap’s studio in Sundance. “I’m a sucker for an underdog story and it’s so inspirational and so empowering to see this woman, who in her life who is a little lost, and she focuses on this horse and puts everything into it, is completely determined and changes not only her life but the entire community. It’s beautiful.”
Director Euros Lyn’s “Dream Horse” is actually based on a documentary called “Dark Horse” that came to Sundance five years earlier. Lyn was intimately familiar with the documentary and the news story from his home in Wales, but he wanted to make sure that Collette stayed true to the drama of the character in “Dream Horse” rather than just imitate the real Jan Vokes.
“When you make a piece of fiction, you can’t be trying to pretend to be the real people. You have to be truthful to the art of it,” Lyn said. “Having Toni, who is so brilliant at finding emotional truth and making you care about characters and making you laugh and also has the steel and the heart and the passion to bring to someone like Jan, that was the poetry of it rather than pretending to be a real person.”
“Dream Horse” is being released by Bleecker Street and will hit theaters on May 1. Watch TheWrap’s interview with Collette and Lyn above.