More info on Pie from the BFI interview:
Hats and horses
JB: I believe in all the Westerns you made you rode the same horse and you wore the same hat.
JS: Yes, I had the same horse. The hat wore out, I just had to change it. I'm very superstitious and I still have the hat and I keep the hat on the set and that cancels out the curse...
[Laughter]
JB: What happened to the horse?
JS: The horse was amazing. I rode him for 22 years. I never was able to buy him because he was owned by a little girl by the name of Stevie Myers, who is the daughter of an old wrangler who used to wrangle horses for Tom Mix and W.S. Hart. He retired and he gave this horse to her. He was a sort of a maverick. He hurt a couple of people. I saw him when I started making Westerns. Artie Murphy rode him a couple of times. He nearly killed Glen Ford, ran right into a tree.
[Laughter]
But I liked this darned little horse. He was a little bit small, a little quarter horse and Arabian. I got to know him like a friend. I actually believed that he understood about making pictures. I ran at a full gallop, straight towards the camera, pulled him up and then did a lot of dialogue and he stood absolutely still. He never moved. He knew when the camera would start rolling and when they did the slates. He knew that because his ears came up.
[Laughter]
I could feel him under me, getting ready. He always moved. Pie, that was his name. I remember in one picture, the bad guys were in the saloon and I had a little bell on the saddle that was sort of an identifying thing. The baddies were going to get me because they knew when I had come into town because of the bell. The camera started panning on Pie's feet as I get near the saloon and the guys are getting ready to kill me. And then the camera goes up and there's nobody on Pie. And of course I'm back behind and I kill the whole crowd of them.
[Laughter]
Somebody came up before we did this and said, "How are you ever going to get the horse to do this?" I said, "Well let me talk to him." And there was a feller who worked with me a lot with the horse by the name of Jack Sanders, wonderful little Western feller. And I talked to Pie. It was three o'clock in the morning with all the lights up. And I said, "You just start here and go to the other end and stop." And Jack Sanders was at the other end. They said, "How long is this going to take?" I said "Do it right now" and Pie did it. And the last picture that Hank Fonda and I made, The Cheyenne Social Club, Pie was getting old. We did it in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Pie got sick and I couldn't use him the whole time. And, unbeknownst to me, Hank painted a picture of the horse in watercolour. He's an excellent artist - watercolours, oils, ink, lithograph, anything. He has an amazing talent. When we got home, he brought me the picture and two days later Pie died. It was a great loss. But I have Pie in our library and I consider him a friend.
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