Indy stars at the lead in the new horror film Good Boy.
The director and producer enlisted their family pet and filmed in their home for more than 400 days to meet the challenges of working with a pooch.
Director Ben Leonberg wants to make sure that when discussing the lead actor in Good Boy, there are quotes around the word “performance”.
“I cannot stress enough that he does not know he is in a movie,” Leonberg said in a recent video call.
That’s because the star of his horror movie is his dog, Indy, an 8-year-old retriever with reddish fur and a curious nose. To be clear, Indy is not just in the film, he is the undisputed main character of this story about a pooch whose ailing owner moves to a creepy family home in the woods. All the (living) human characters appear almost entirely in shadows. The audience sees the terror unfold entirely through Indy’s eyes as he senses a malevolent presence.
But Leonberg and his wife and producer, Kari Fischer, insisted that the production process was not scary for their pet. In fact, the trick of the movie is that through cinematography, sound design and other cinematic tools, Leonberg is projecting a performance on to Indy, a turn that won him the Howl of Fame award at the South by Southwest film festival.
“We were saying the title of the movie repeatedly during the production of the film,” Leonberg said.
In a Critic’s Pick review for The New York Times, Erik Piepenburg wrote that Indy’s “soft eyes and remarkably focused demeanour channel joy, pathos and, most astonishingly, terror,” and added that the director and producer “should be proud: Their nepo baby actually deserves the acclaim”.
Good Boy, which runs just 73 minutes, was an experiment in film-making and dog ownership for Leonberg and Fischer, who shot for more than 400 days over three years while living with Indy in the North Jersey house that served as their main set. Actors later provided voice-overs for the characters, but during principal photography, only Leonberg and Fischer (who appear as shadows) and Indy were involved in filming.
Indy never fully grasped the concept that he was acting in a movie, of course, but he did start to enjoy the work.
“Because he’s so smart, he got to the point where he knew that taking out the camera meant that he was going to do something and he was really excited about that,” Fischer said, adding that when “we were shooting a subjective shot where it’s his perspective, he’s not in the shot, we had to close the door because he would try to come in and stand in front of the camera”.
The concept was inspired by a repeat viewing of Poltergeist even before Indy came into their lives in 2017.
“That 1982 horror film “begins with the golden retriever wandering through the house, clearly clued into that a haunting is about to begin before any of the human characters realise it,” Leonberg said. “I thought someone should make a story like Poltergeist but it’s just the dog’s movie.”
Once Indy arrived on the scene, Leonberg started using him to figure out how that might work. At first, he tried short films that were shot-for-shot remakes of scenes from other horror movies, but with Indy. One of the earliest features was Indy in the moment from The Shining when a ball rolls up to young Danny as he’s playing in a hallway.
“The challenge is: How do you control a dog’s eye line?” Leonberg said. “Because that story as it unfolds in The Shining doesn’t really rely on dialogue. It’s just cinematic tension through shot size, perspective, the relationship between the camera and the eye line.” It was a good model for Indy, the director added, because Danny “isn’t emoting a whole lot”.
Indy has an intense stare that, Leonberg said, is familiar to most dog owners as the look that comes between filling your pup’s food and placing it on the floor. But Leonberg needed a steadiness in Indy’s gaze so he could employ the Kuleshov effect – a classic technique named for Soviet film-maker Lev Kuleshov that explains how audiences can read emotions into a neutral expression based on what they perceive the actor is seeing through editing.
If Indy was panting, that wouldn’t work, because he “looks like a mouth-breathing idiot,” Leonberg said. Fischer put it more politely: “When Indy has a neutral expression, he is Ryan Gosling in Drive. When Indy has a panting expression, he is Ryan Gosling in Barbie. Completely different movie.”
They solved that problem by keeping the set calm and cool, moving air conditioners into rooms where they were filming.
Another challenge: Indy could never hit the same mark repeatedly, the way most human actors (and even some professional animal ones) could.
“We would get just one shot a day,” Leonberg said. The next day he would comb through the footage to pick the exact frame they would use so they could capture the reverse shot that perfectly replicated what Indy was looking at.
Close-ups were also difficult because if Indy moved a tiny bit, he would be out of focus, and Indy is an active dog. On the other hand, some of the sequences that look particularly tough were actually easy. Leonberg could get a tracking shot of Indy wandering around the house by leaving a trail of food. Indy also loves water, so was happy when he was being pelted with fake rain, even though, as Leonberg said, “wet dog just looks sad”. That worked here when Indy’s character was supposed to be worried.
When he does seem to be emoting, he was usually reacting to random or nonsense words uttered by Leonberg or Fischer.
“There’s a scene where he’s being held while something pretty horrifying is happening and he looks scared,” Fischer said. “And we were just reviewing footage from the scene and it’s me saying, ‘Chicken! Pheasant!’”
After principal photography, when actors were brought in for voice-overs, the film-makers said they registered the production with the American Humane Association, in line with the Screen Actors Guild policy. But Indy didn’t end up working with any other humans.
Although Indy’s character goes to great lengths to defend his human against the forces of evil in Good Boy, Leonberg doesn’t think the real-life Indy would stick up for them in that way.
“Indy’s character is better equipped to deal with the supernatural than Indy in reality,” he said. Indy’s priorities lie elsewhere.
If a spooky spirit dangled a toy, he might abandon his mission. “For Indy, it’s tennis ball, game over,” Fischer said.
Good Boy is in theatres October 9.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Esther Zuckerman
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