Was that scene of Eddie reacting to Secretariat eating real? Did that actually happen?
Randall Wallace: "No, but what he did was something quieter that I didn't know how to shoot. And this is an example of...I frighten some historians when I say I don't let the facts get in the way of the truth. And I don't mean it at all that I'm trying to be casual about the hard-edged reality of what happened. In fact, with this story what Secretariat did was so stupendous that the danger was that audiences who didn't know about Secretariat would walk out and say, 'Well that was a Hollywood ending.' And that was another reason I wanted to do the epilogue and show people the real people."

"But what Eddie had done was the day Secretariat died, when he had to let go of Secretariat - when he had to turn him over to other people to take care of him - there's a picture that just broke me heart. It was Eddie sitting alone, staring, away from everyone and weeping. And that picture moved me so much that I wanted to put a scene of joy, I wanted to have that expression in the movie in a different place."

Everybody knows Secretariat even if they're not into horse racing, but truthfully not many people know who Penny Chenery is. So what do you hope audiences are going walk out thinking about this woman?

Randall Wallace: "I think that Penny is the kind of hero that transcends gender, if you will. I mean, certainly the fact that she was a hero in an age when she wasn't standing up for the principle of the thing, she was just being herself. She was not thinking, 'I owe it to other women to barge into this mens club or to be unafraid to do what I need to do.' What's most remarkable to me is that it's one thing when your enemies oppose you and try to break you down.

It's another thing when the people who are closest to you, the ones that you look to for support and encouragement - like your husband, like your brother - are the ones saying, 'You can't do this. They're all smarter than you.' And I thought that made Penny a remarkable character, one that we can hold up as a model."

"I'm a father myself and my sons are pretty much grown now, but we love to go to the movies together. And I've always wanted to go to a movie that I could look up at the screen and turn to my boys and say, 'I want you to be like that.' That's what I want people to feel for Penny. I think that's awfully rare. We're now in this time, like in '73, where we're in a war that seems to go on forever and we've got leaders in all walks of life, all areas of life, that we don't really trust. We don't trust their honesty; we don't trust their commitment. And along comes this horse who is incorruptible and a woman who would not yield to what other people believe, and that stirs my heart - and I hope it stirs the audience."

The shots of the horses looking into the camera and relating to the human actors around them are incredible. How difficult were they actually to direct?

Randall Wallace: "The horses were, frankly speaking, I had the best horse people in the world. In fact, I believe I had the best people in the world in every aspect of making this movie. I used the people that I'd used on We Were Soldiers and I have a family concept on this, that everybody is a filmmaker and this is our film. I'm the captain. I've got to point them in the direction I want to go. I have to lead them, but we're all doing it together. So we had amazing people handling the animals. And we did have tricks to use to make the horses look in this direction or not."

"One of the most, I don't know - I hate to say magical - but mysterious things about this for me was the scene when Penny stares into the eyes of the horse. And it happened to every one of us when we were filming the horse's eyes. You're looking into it and you'd go, 'There's something there.' It's not cognition the way humans have it. I think it's something deeper. People love that scene of Penny's eye to eye contact and what I've thought about that is that it's one interpretation, certainly, and a logical one, that Penny was looking into the horse to see if she could tell what it was that was inside that horse. But it's something else, I think, which was Penny was looking into the eyes of the horse which was so honest and absolute to try to find what was true and absolute inside herself. She was looking at the horse to see inside of her."

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Secretariat hits theaters on October 8, 2010 and is rated PG for brief mild language.