The scene in which the horse is cruelly whipped looked quite realistic. Does anyone know if it was in reality physically mistreated?
shareI don't know but I agree it seemed real. No way you could get a horse to act like it was being whipped if it wasn't.
shareIt's a great movie, but I'd hate to know that the horse was really whipped. Hurting animals in films doesn't make them any more poetic. It just makes them ignorant and stupid.
shareIn an interview with the director, he said the horse wasn't mistreated at all. It was trained to do what it did. The man never actually made contact with the horse as he was whipping it in the first sequence.
Thanks for the great news, benman46... Knowing this helps me better enjoy what I felt was a great film. I would have hated to have it spoiled by something like that.
shareI also remember a scene where a chicken's throat was cut and bled out; also looked very realistic
shareI think that's a little different. People generally cut chickens' throats (or have them cut) before cooking them. All of us who eat chicken participate in that. So when I see something like that in a movie of this kind, I see it like one would in a documentary. (Vegetarians probably feel that this is cruel too and it's hard to disagree with that; but let's just say that most people in today's society aren't vegetarians and I suppose cutting a chicken's throat is the fastest, least cruel way to kill them.)
There's no need to ever hurt/abuse horses in any way. To do it solely for a movie seems especially cruel.
It was a duck not a chicken.
Ducks blood is common in Chinese cooking and unfortunately it's a bit hard to get a decent amount out after the heart has stopped beating, and the technology required for humane slaughter practices used in the west is a bit out of reach for the world's poor.
yes, it reminded me of Andrei Tarkovski's "Andrey Rublyov ", the scene in which they set the cow on fire!
but it had a good effect for the movie to be realistic.
The creators of the film were so dedicated to making the movie realistic that they felt the only way to make it so real was to actually whip and abuse the horse. Unfortunately, they had to do so many takes that the horse was killed in the process. Also, many of the stabbings and shootings that take place in the movie were real and many humans were killed in the making of the movie. Lots of people had to die to make this movie, but much like you, it's the death of that horse that really bothers me.
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