Good Boy is a haunted house movie told through the eyes of a dog, and the film’s director has revealed how he drew such a realistic performance from his own pet pooch.
Good Boy stars Indy the dog as Indy the dog, who accompanies his owner on a move to the countryside, where they take residence in a house in the woods.
But then things go bump in the night, and Indy starts seeing supernatural phenomena that suggests they are both in danger.
The horror movie shot for more than 400 days across three years, and since debuting at SXSW in March, the film’s co-writer and director Ben Leonberg has been explaining how the Good Boy team convinced his dog to act.
Indy is the “secret sauce” that makes Good Boy work
While speaking to Filmmaker, Leonberg said that inspiration for Good Boy came from thinking about the dog at the start of Poltergeist, “who clearly perceives the ghosts before anyone else.”
But he added that “Indy – my actual dog – is the second part of the equation, and the secret sauce that makes the concept work. He naturally has this really intense, unblinking stare.
“He usually hits you with it before meal time, but on the occasions when he’s just staring at ’empty’ corners, or tracking smells only he can perceive… it’s really spooky! I think every dog owner has wondered, or worried, why their dog barks suddenly barks for no reason, or stares at ‘nothing.'”
With the concept set, Leonberg then had to figure out how to coax a performance from his beloved pooch.
“The most important resource in making this movie was time,” he told Daily Dead. “You go into [filming] every day and you think you know how the dog, Indy, is going to react, but he’s just a huge X factor.
“It’s not like you’re working with a human actor who agrees on the reality of the premise that we’re making a movie together, you know? Every shot required some level of invention. Like, this didn’t quite work the way we expected, so we have to shift the camera or change how we’re dialing in these performances to get it all to work.”
Why carrots were a problem on set
Leonberg storyboarded the entire movie in advance, but then had to be reactive once Indy was on set.
“We’re setting up for the dog to react genuinely, and he’s as method as it gets. He can’t hit a perfect mark if his eyes catch the light, so you have to change how you’re lighting. You’re filming it so that the camera’s not distracting to him, and also you have to have flexibility to work around the impreciseness of Indy’s performance.”
Leonberg and his wife – and the film’s producer – Kari Fischer didn’t do any specific training with Indy in advance of the shoot, but prompted the dog with audio cues, hand gestures, and food, though definitely not his number one snack.
“Indy’s favorite thing would be carrots,” Leaonberg explained. “We never used carrots on set, though, because he would be too excited. We bribed him all the time, but it was just with his normal dinner food. He wasn’t as excited about that because if he looks super excited, it dispels the illusion of the haunted house movie.”
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