Q: Were you nervous getting back in the saddle after the accident?Ī: I was a little tentative. We really felt a warm feeling toward it and obviously, I felt a very warm feeling toward Showtime. We got to know each other pretty well-coming back almost made the picture better, in a sense. It was like meeting up with an old summer stock company because we had gone through the period riding horses, roping and drinking beer in the bars. It was seven or eight months and everybody came back and most of the crew came back. Q: How long did it take for you to recover?Ī: I had to go have surgery and rehabilitation. We are shooting this because you are in it and we are not going to make the picture without you.” I think it was one of the nicest compliments ever paid to me as an actor because usually there is a guy on the next plane and he is there to start the next morning wearing your clothes. One day later, they came to me and said, “We’re shutting the picture down. Arthur said, “I’ll shoot around you until you get back.” They took me off to the hospital with my smiling “the show must go on” attitude. I tore my right Achilles tendon, I tore my rotator cuff, my hamstring. I turned and hooked my toe on the top rail of the fence and down I went.Ī: I just hit the ground so hard.

In the middle of rehearsal, I climbed on the top of this fence which was about 5 feet tall. If you don’t ride all the time, you get a lot of aches and pains.įirst rehearsal of the first shot of the picture, I play a scene which is no longer in the picture-I walk across this bullpen with longhorn steers and I with Stella Stevens. Your behind does not remember the way it felt four years ago. It’s something I do before I go into any western. We had been working out and riding horses. It was an interesting project in the fact that we started it long ago, in the fall of 1999. I’ll wait to do that in two or three years.” Get on the horse and get over there.” Then I thought, “No. I was tempted just to go into Walter Brennan from time to time, “Listen, boy.

Answer: It was an homage to Walter Brennan.

Indian horse richard