The Cowboy and the Quadruped (1989)

Tagline: ‘Love can cross any divide’

It is 1880. Manifest destiny has propelled countless families to leave behind everything they know in order to create a new life, forge a new beginning.

But often the land they found was wild and awash with danger.

This is the story of one man – John McCredie. Bringing his family west and promptly finding gold, he thought he had found his destiny.

He was right, but the path was full of tragedy, and the outcome nothing he could have predicted.

One dark and stormy night, bandits set upon his smallholding. His wife and children brutally killed in front of him, our hero barely escapes with his life. Destitute, he wanders the frontier towns, doing whatever he can for money to fund his chronic laudanum habit.

Until he meets Bonny.

Her long eyelashes draped over beautiful brown eyes, silky hair flowing across her shoulders. At that moment John knows he has the strength to go on. As long as he has her he can reclaim his land and take revenge on the bandits that ruined his life.

Through their ordeals the two bond. Their relationship becomes more than just friendship. John realizes that what he had before had never been enough. Real love can only come about through adversity. And through adversity he had found real love.

Join John on his voyage of discovery, as he comes to understand that love can cross any divide.

***

Long before Ang Lee challenged traditional cowboy stereotypes, I had penned this minor classic. The concept was simple – take the Western formula of one man and his horse and push it to its logical conclusion. In doing so I called into question all our assumptions about love between species with the simple injunction: ‘if it feels good it can’t be wrong’.

Not surprisingly, a film this original found backing hard to come by. Therefore, still stinging from the butchering my feel good classic Cabbage received at the hands of an unsympathetic director, I decided to make this myself. Pooling my resources I assembled a skeleton crew and a director I could trust and began casting. The late 80s was of course dominated by machismo nonsense, and so finding a male lead was difficult. But after much searching I came across an actor, who is now I might add making waves in Hollywood.

Shooting was hard. I demanded to revue the rushes at the end of each day, and anything that spoiled my vision was reshot. This meant that some scenes took much longer than anticipated. It took 45 takes to finally capture the tenderness of that first campfire experience. Added to this, the first Bonny tragically died of shock shortly into shooting. Finding another Bonny proved impossible, and we had to recast and reshoot the lot.

This made it all the more painful when I was informed that most censors looked down on the genre of unconventional romance, and the only market I would be able to distribute in would be Japan. Thankfully, video rental sales easily paid back the $45 000 I spent on production – indeed I had the pleasure of attending a signing only last week.

I am now working on the sequel:

The Cowboy and the Quadrupeds - When three isn't a crowd!