Miles to Go (16 page)

Home Again

I
know it sounds unbelievable, but shooting the first Hannah movie was relaxing. Yes, it was a full-length feature film. No, I’d never had a leading role in a movie before. Yes, I was in almost every scene. Yes, sometimes I had to act, sing, and dance simultaneously in coordination with up to 1500 extras. But I’d just spent four months living in a bus, performing for several hours, and sleeping in a different city every night. Then I’d gone straight to recording my album,
Breakout
. After all that, coming back to Tennessee—home!—where the movie was being shot—well, it was just about the most relaxing thing I could have imagined.

I slept every night at our farm in Franklin. My family was there. My animals were there. I could braid my horses’ tails and watch the chickens live a little bit of their dumb, sweet lives every morning. Nights when I got to watch the sunset I just sat there and thought,
This is the biggest blessing
. Forget the movie. Forget the crazy work schedule and media madness that led up to the movie. Forget the demands on my time. Forget getting up and thinking “I need to wear this to look good.” Forget the lack of privacy. When you’re alone in the middle of 500 acres, it’s all so far away. Nobody and nothing can get to you. It’s a slower life. When Emily came to visit, she said, “I can see why you never wanted to leave your farm. It’s so tranquil.” And Emily’s a city girl, through and through. Like I said: relaxing.

My favorite thing to do when I’m at home in Franklin is to go out on long horseback rides with my dad, the way we always have. Sometimes it seems like our horses are especially careful with me. They walk more slowly. They watch for holes. They’ve tripped before, but never with me. I’ve been riding them since I was so young, it’s like they still think of me as a little girl who needs to be coddled. But during the movie, I was riding my horse Roam and he got startled by a snake in the grass. He spooked and started rearing and bucking.

Have you ever been in a car accident? You know how it seems to go so slowly? How you have time to think a hundred things in two seconds? That’s how it was when Roam was bucking.

This may sound obvious, but never let a horse fall on top of you. Horses are big animals. I don’t know, I figure some of our horses weigh a thousand pounds. I weigh around a tenth of that. Who’s gonna win? Who’s gonna hurt whom? It’s easy to yell, “No, Roadie!” at a little two-pound dog. You know you’re bigger and stronger. But when you’re riding a horse, you have to stay in charge even though he’s clearly the mightier beast. Even if you don’t get hurt in a fall, if he steps on you by accident—you’re a goner. My dad’s had his foot broken by a horse. He said it feels like a car rolling over your foot.

All these thoughts flashed through my head as my horse jumped around and around. But I rode it out, rodeo style. (Wish the paparazzi had been there for that one!) I held on tight and stayed weirdly calm. I thought,
This horse will not drop me. We love each other. He’s going to take care of me. He’s going to protect me. He won’t let me fall.
Dad jumped off his horse and got me down as soon as Roam stopped kicking. Once my heart stopped racing, we headed back home. I didn’t mention my little adventure on the set the next day. Needless to say, the movie people would not have been psyched if I’d nearly gotten trampled.

Oh, yeah—Emily’s visit. For two seasons of
Hannah Montana
, Emily and I had struggled to get along. But we never hated each other. Now here we were, shooting our movie in Tennessee. On one of our days off, she had nothing to do, so she came over to hang out.

We went out on four-wheelers and drove out to a place on our property that we call the Shack. It’s a falling-apart house that is older than time. There’s antique junk everywhere—guns, medicine bottles, shoes. Emily and I crept up the rotting stairs, really carefully, holding hands. There had been a storm, and it seemed like the wind had blown up a whole new crop of treasures. There were bullets scattered across the floor. A column from an old newspaper. An icebox. (I guess the wind didn’t stir
that
one up.)

Then we saw something fuzzy in the corner. Two fuzzy things, in fact. At first they looked like baby dinosaurs. It was so wild in the Shack, I thought maybe they actually
were
baby dinosaurs. Or a cross between a duck and a raccoon. Duckoons. Then I remembered that once there had been a hawk or a turkey—some huge bird—nesting in the chimney. These were baby birds! Baby birds that looked like duckoons. Emily and I just stood there and watched them for a long time. We didn’t become blood sisters or swear best friends forever, but it was a great moment to share, away from the show and the movie and all the little squabbles we’d had. We rode home feeling the fresh air on our faces, and I could have sworn I felt something shift between us.

The Climb

W
hen I read the script for the Hannah Montana movie, I was really happy. I didn’t want it to be like an extra-long episode of the TV show. A movie should go further emotionally (and plotwise) than a half-hour comedy. The script had more depth than anyone expected, just what I was hoping for. I felt like I got to do much more serious acting.

During the TV series, I’d become more and more of a Method actor. In Method acting you use experiences from real life to summon emotions for your character. When you have to be sad, you think about things that upset you. I started talking about Hannah as if she were a real person, because I really thought of her that way. She existed in my mind. During the movie, when Hannah is kind of a brat, I acted a little like the bratty, fit-throwing Hannah when I went home. I mean, I didn’t exactly throw fits, but I was quiet and grumpy and exploring the character in my head. And then, in the movie, when Miley was herself again and is eating Southern food and hanging out with her grandmother, I did the same thing.

I worked nine hours a day dancing, singing, and acting, but being in Tennessee made the time fly by. I was home. My family was around, and Mammie was there with me all day long, every single day. The environment was familiar, even though I hadn’t been to all the movie locations. For one scene, I sat in the middle of a vast field of daisies with big electric fans behind me blowing a soft wind through the flowers. If you didn’t look at the cameras, the lights, or the fans, the setting was captivating.

The scariest moment came when I was shooting a scene with Lucas Till, who plays Travis Brody, my love interest in the movie. There’s a scene where the two of us go to a waterfall where our characters used to hang out as kids. We were supposed to jump off a high rock ledge into the churning water of the waterfall. I’m a horrible swimmer. And I’d been eating crappy fried food for days. I was feeling fat and knew that my wet shirt would stick to all my bumps and lumps—not something I wanted on camera! But most of all I was scared of the big jump. And if that weren’t enough, the water was cold. Ice cold. Dang it!

Lucas had done his jump. Now he was treading water at the pounding base of the waterfall, waiting for me to plunge in. I stood at the edge of the ledge, but I just couldn’t do it. It was so far down! I hadn’t tested the water, but I knew how cold it was. I thought I was going to die. Poor Lucas was down there, shirtless, freezing, yelling, “Hurry! You’ve gotta jump!” Finally I went. It was really freaking cold. But, wow! The exhilaration was worth it. When I came out of the water the director said, “That was amazing, and your cankles look great!”

Right, about my cankles. They had become a big joke on the movie set. I’d tell the director, “I can’t wear these shorts! They show my cankles,” or I’d say, “I can’t eat this fried dough—it’s going straight to my cankles.” And the director was always saying, “We need to try that again, but oh my gosh your cankles look fine.” Or “Good job! I didn’t even notice your cankles.” I really meant it when I said I like to spin stuff in a positive way. “Cankles” may have bugged me at one point, but I took it and made it my own. Also, you have to admit it’s just a funny word. So, there were my cankles, on full display for the movie cameras at the foot of a glorious waterfall in my hometown. Life could be worse.

Life
had
been worse. When we moved away from Nashville I was at a low point. The Anti-Miley Club— a few mean girls at school—was making me miserable. Of course I’d been back to Nashville loads of times since then, but now I was coming home as a full-fledged movie star. (Well, I wasn’t exactly a movie star yet. I was still in the making-the-movie phase, but close enough.) When I performed with The Cheetah Girls, I felt like I was proving those mean girls wrong. Now I had nothing to prove. Those girls didn’t matter at all anymore. They had no power to make me unhappy, and, through
Hannah Montana
, I was the one with the power. I had the power to make lots of people laugh. In my little piece of the world, it felt like a triumph of good over evil.

I’d left my Tennessee troubles behind, but it was still my home town. I didn’t spend my childhood plunging into freezing waterfalls, but still, to have Miley Stewart come back to Tennessee, Miley Cyrus’s home—it was life imitating art imitating life (like my dad always says). It tends to get me going in circles, thinking about how my character Miley’s life is like mine and mine is like Miley’s.
Hannah Montana
is all fiction, of course, but there’s a thread through it that is connected with what’s real in my world and the way I’ve been raised, being with my dad through the journey of music.

In the movie, I sing a song called “The Climb,” which kind of captures the magic of what the show means to me. Dad always tells me that success is the progressive realization of worthy ideas or goals. That means that the best part—the part when you’re most successful—is when you’re taking steps forward toward your dream. When you’re working to achieve it, not when you’re on top. It’s like Carl Perkins told me when he and my dad were rabbit hunting without guns. It’s about enjoying the chase.
It’s about having a dream and seeing it in the distance. It’s about working for what you want. It’s about the climb.

At the end of the movie, as each actor finishes their part, they get “wrapped,” which means the director announces that the person is done and the whole crew claps. On our last day of shooting, after everyone left had wrapped, they called out, “Mammie,” who had sat there every day, no matter how hot it was or how long the shoot went. They wrapped Mammie, and everyone gave her a much-deserved standing ovation. It made me feel like my two families were now one.
(Go, Mammie!)