In Canada, back in those days, in the mid to late ’70s, it was a small business and so you did a bit of everything. I did the horse thing but was also a transportation guy. A friend of mine, Bill Corcoran was ADing a TV show and he said ‘here, come and work with me and be my 2nd AD’ and so I did. It was good, I enjoyed it but I didn’t pick up the profession then.

I continued rodeoing and training horses and transported horses by air around the world for a living for quite a while. That was an interesting way to see the world. Then I went to California for a while and worked for the likes of Desi Arnaz Sr. and Robert Mitchum training horses where I had the opportunity to meet more people working in the film industry.

Then I came back to Canada and I was working at a racetrack called Fort Erie, a historic place which is in the southern part of Ontario, they came there to film The Black Stallion and they called on me to setup the whole racing sequence; procure the horses, train them for the race. That led to more of a full time career in the business and I went on to AD some more shows in Canada but continued to fly horses. I then went to Morocco and bought and trained all the horses for The Black Stallion Returns, a great experience.

Dino de Laurentiis built a studio in North Carolina and there was an influx of Canadians that went to work at that studio. The second movie they did was a movie called Cat’s Eye

with Drew Barrymore and I got a call to go there and talk to them about being the transport coordinator on the film.

When I went there, I met the assistant director who was this Spanish guy who had worked for Dino a lot named Kooky Lopez, who was famous in the industry and an interesting fellow. His brother was Pepe Lopez, a producer and they’d done movies like Lawrence of Arabia and he said ‘instead of doing transport come and be my 2nd AD’.