Dan M. “Buck” Brannaman, the man who would be dubbed “The Horse Whisperer,” knew early on society didn’t expect much from him.
The young Brannaman and his brother suffered repeated abuse at the hands of their father until local authorities placed them in a foster home.
“It was almost accepted that we wouldn’t amount to a whole lot,” Brannaman says, adding the pity expressed by his good-hearted neighbors “wasn’t something that would be good for me.”
“My childhood was stolen from me and I knew I’d never get that back. The one thing people can’t steal from you, no matter how much they torture you, is your free will,” he says. “It dawned on me I wouldn’t be able to succeed in life if I continued to blame everyone else.”
It’s one reason why he decided to open up for “Buck,” a new documentary capturing Brannaman’s affinity for horses. The film, by first-time director Cindy Meehl, follows Brannaman along as he travels from city to city with his four-day horse training course.
He can help tame the most savage of horses, but he’s even better at diagnosing the problems of their owners.
“When I started doing this I thought I’d just be helping people to understand their horses a little bit better,” he says. “Then, I realized that might be second to what I really do, using the horse to get people to look at themselves.”
Consider the case of a woman he met at a clinic whose horse showed her no respect.
“I shut off my microphone at one point and said, ‘let me guess. You’re the peacemaker at home. You take care of your kids and your husband and nobody appreciates you, no one respects you. You work your tail off to please everyone else and you get treated like a doormat,’” he recalls.
The woman began to cry.
“I’m not being critical. I’m just telling you what your horse told me,” he told her.
Brannaman’s intuition with both horses and people came in handy when Hollywood came a calling. He served as a technical advisor on the 1998 Robert Redford film “The Horse Whisperer.”
“He’s used to being surrounded by people who just agree with everything he says because they really wanna be there,” Brannaman says of Redford. The real-life Horse Whisperer shot straight from the hip, and a friendship between acting legend and horse trainer was born.
“He’s not eccentric and egomaniacal like a lot of celebrities,” Brannaman says. He can’t say the same for other actors he’s met along the way.
“You can’t generalize about actors any more than you can about cowboys,” he says. “But I’ve found these actors who have, in their lifetime, 20-30 different characters they play that are totally different, they almost don’t have a real identifiable personality. They can become whoever the director wants them to be. Some of them can, frankly, be a little flaky.”
Redford isn’t that way, he insists. Even the characters he’s played through the years are cut from similar cloth.
“He doesn’t have to change that much about himself [for a given role]. The humanity in Redford comes through in every role he plays,” he says.
Brannaman says he’s been approached several times about being the focus of a documentary but turned them all down. He met Meehl at one of his horse clinics a few years back, and they reconnected several years later.
She pitched the idea of a documentary to him over lunch in Montana.
“She must have hit me at just the right time since I said, ‘well, get after it then,’” he says. “She looked like she just swallowed a fly.”
The early days of the film’s shoot weren’t easy. Meehl kept missing “neat stuff” the horses did, Brannaman says, and she initially tried to stage his actions.
“That’s not happening,” he told her. “I had to stay loyal to the people who brought me to the dance in the first place, and not make my clinics any less just because they were there filming me. “You have to figure out how to anticipate when something cool is going to happen with a horse. You need to be in the right place.”
She learned as she went, and caught some remarkable moments, like when a troubled horse took a bite out of a man trying to tame her.
“She got pretty light on her feet in terms of anticipating things,” he says.
Some of Brannaman’s clients have a knack for communicating with horses. But he’s not impressed by any innate abilities.
“I’ve seen people squander natural talent because they don’t have a good work ethic and a passion for doing what they’re doing,” he says. “I was never blessed with the talent of a Ray Hunt … I thought I could make up the difference if I had a some true grit and determination. The biggest asset I have is I know how to work hard.”
Brannaman previously shared the details of his abusive past in his book, “The Faraway Horses.“ But the new film is opening his life up to a wider audience. He talks of attending early screenings of “Buck” and getting hugs from strangers afterward.
It makes sharing his early pain worthwhile.
“In order for my journey to this point to mean something, people need to know the basics of the story, the beginning, middle and end,” he says.
(Photo: Celebrated horse whisperer Buck Brannaman is the focus of the new documentary “Buck.” IFC Films)
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