Words Matthew Todd
Anyone who is expecting Andrew Haigh’s new film — about a teenager whose only friend in the world is a fading racehorse — to be some sort of Disney feel-good story is going to be bitterly disappointed.
“People are expecting Black Beauty,” he says. “But it was very important to me that it wasn’t sentimentalised. Lean On Pete [the name of the film and the horse] may stand for a lot of things for young Charley but he is just a horse that cannot understand him. It’s essentially about a kid falling through the cracks and there is no safety net to catch him.”