By Gill Pringle & Jeremy Nigro
“We shot in New Zealand for five-and-a-half months,” Bryce Dallas Howard tells FilmInk, recalling her time living in New Zealand. “The kids went to school there, and we all lived in a little house. There were sheep at our window in the morning waking us up, and we would open the window and say hi to them.” Filming in the middle of nowhere didn’t bother the actress. “I love nature, and it’s very important to me,” she says. “It’s how I was raised. I would go into the woods a lot, by myself, behind my house. One time, I got lost, which was really bad. It was really, really bad. But I eventually found my way home after dark, and no one in my family noticed! They never noticed! I was one of four, so they were like, ‘Ah, Bryce is the oldest! I’m sure she’s fine!’”
Howard recalls what it was like having to take a two-hour drive to the middle of a forest to find the set and how the crew rescued a horse on one of those trips. “There was a horse that was clearly abused, who was tied to this wooden fence that was right by the freeway,” the actress explains. “The horse was on the side of the freeway, and we would drive back and forth to work every day. The horse looked like it had been abused, and neglected, and there was no water or hay there for the horse. Every time we would drive past, we would report what was happening, and there was still no water, and still no hay. Bob [Redford] got someone to investigate, and to knock on all the doors in the neighbourhood to ask, ‘Is this your horse?’ No one would claim it. They’d say, ‘Oh yeah, that horse is always out there.’ So he coordinated with a rescue place, and he himself went and rescued that horse.”
Robert Redford plays Howard’s father in the film, and it certainly sounds like he had a few adventures of his own on the set, as director David Lowery recalls. “We were shooting out in the middle of the woods. We had about ten acres of woods that was basically our backlot. It took two hours to drive there every day. It was pretty remote, and it all looked relatively similar. Our base of operations was an area where the forest had been cut down, but there are a lot of those. Redford was staying at a resort that had a helicopter, and he’s like, ‘I’m just going to helicopter in.’ That is your right to do so as Robert Redford, but the helicopter dropped him off at the wrong place, because everything looked the same. I don’t know how that happened. There was no one around! Did they just set down and just him and his assistant get out and then the helicopter took off again? That is incredible to me, but that’s what happened. They realised that they were at the wrong place, and they just decided to walk to the set. Someone driving a sports car eventually came by. His car was completely full of energy drink cans, so Robert Redford and his assistant had to shove all these cans aside and get inside. He drove them to the set, and on the way there, he’s like, ‘Oh, are you guys movie stars?’ He had no idea who he was, and I think Robert Redford was very happy that day. That was a very fun day for him just because that entire experience was so ridiculous and adventurous. I think he really enjoyed it.”
Pete’s Dragon is released in cinemas on September 15.
