The Cowboy and the Queen: Documentary Celebrates Empathy & Unlikely Friendship Across Worlds

Love and empathy toward horses is what brought a California cowboy and the late Queen Elizabeth II to a long term friendship – and the messages around that are what filmmaker Andrea Nevins hopes to spread in her documentary The Cowboy and the Queen.

Nevins is an award-winning filmmaker based out of California, but was born and raised in Manhattan – with an East End twist, as she grew up spending a lot of time on Shelter Island. More recently, Nevins spent the majority of her summer in the Hamptons – partly in East Hampton and partly in Sag Harbor.

“This is a  story about a man and a real hero’s journey,” Nevins said. “A man who went through hardship and came out the other side with a discovery about how to make the world a better place. He wouldn’t have been able to do that had it not been for meeting the Queen.”

The documentary follows the life of Monty Roberts, an 89-year-old horse trainer from Salinas, California who grew up around horses and was part of a rodeo as a child. Roberts took umbrage with how horses were trained – particularly the concept of “breaking” them. Having grown up in the 1930s and 40s, Roberts felt that horses should be trained using kindness and compassion for them.

“You break their spirit down until they don’t fight back anymore,” Roberts said in the film. “I believe that violence isn’t the answer.”

Roberts’s technique – which, as the film notes, broke from thousands of years of traditional horse training – was heavily criticized in the industry. However, Nevins told Dan’s Papers it received some sarcastic attention from horse magazines in the 1980s, with writers mocking his technique – and that caught Queen Elizabeth’s attention.

“For the Queen, her animals were a place where she had some agency in her life, because from the time she was very young, she was suddenly thrust into a position of a lot of authority and a lot of responsibility,” Nevins said. “It was World War II, and the queen had been sent off to Windsor Castle alone with her sister, and only had her dogs and her horses for five years during the war. During a very scary time for her, she really could rely on these animals and develop a deep relationship with them.

“Monty was also thrust, from the war, into difficult circumstances. He grew up on a big Salinas rodeo, and they were removed from the rodeo in order to house Japanese prisoners, and that was very disturbing to him. He knew a lot of these kids and he had been beaten as a child and had various traumas. And horses, like for the Queen, became a real place where he could find solace.”

The Queen contacted Roberts, who went to the United Kingdom to meet her – and he wound up training 23 of her horses. It was the beginning of a 33-year friendship, from 1989 to the Queen’s death in 2022. Nevins said the pair would often call, checking in on each other and on their horses.

He said the film specifically highlights masculinity – and how Monty Roberts represented both the masculinity of his time and an evolving form.

“He’s very much a man brought up in the ’40s,” Nevins said. “He’s a cowboy, he played football, he’s pretty masculine in all the ways that you would think of masculinity at that time in America. But he’s very quick to cry. He’s very quick to wear his emotions on his sleeve, and that, to me, spoke a lot of bravery, of a kind of iconoclasm and that’s a story that I wanted to tell. There’s not a lot of cowboys that you hear about who are so tender-hearted and thoughtful.”

Nevins hopes that viewers will see a clear message in a story of friendship across two worlds, formed through a mutual feeling that love is as successful of a motivator as brute strength.

“I do believe that the audience walks away with a sense of real, practical knowledge about how to do it, how to walk into a room and meet with somebody who you may have fear about, and lower your blood pressure, lower your breathing point, and open up so that other person can trust you,” Nevins said. “Monty had a wonderful nun who taught him and said, ‘I can see that you’re beaten by your dad, and one direction you can go having been treated this way is anger and and repeating this pattern, the other way is to go the extreme opposite.’ Monty really took that to heart.”

The Cowboy and the Queen had its New York premiere at the IFC Center on September 6, and as of this Thursday, September 12, is streaming on the MasterClass platform. It’s also playing at NYC’s Plaza & Media Arts Center.

Learn more at thecowboyandthequeen.com.