He’s the kind of dog that loves to have a job to do. He’s a retriever. His ideal job would be playing fetch as a professional fetch player. But once he saw the camera and realized there was something to do, he was trying to figure that out. That was a good baseline to work off of. We just had to be ready to suss that out of him.
Kids and animals are notoriously tricky for filmmaking. What made you think you could pull this off?
BL: I am attracted to really difficult productions. I knew very early on the way I would make it, using time as the main resource. Movies don’t have to be made in sprint fashion. I used to run long distance and train for marathons. I hope I’m not stretching this metaphor too thin, but I can chip away at this slowly over time. I guess I have a lot of patience or endurance. And I had faith that it was a good idea and was able to get enough other people to believe in it as well. Then I just started trying it, and then it started working.
As I was writing it, I was also shooting little short proofs of concept that would explain how, visually, this story will work. One of those proofs of concept, we put into some short film festivals, and Indy got nominated for an acting award. It kind of caught fire, not in a huge way, but in a way that gave us activation energy to really get going.
I was going to ask how you convinced people to invest in a movie like this.
BL: Having the proof of concept was critical because people hear the pitch, “Hey, you know how your dog stares at empty corners?” I would love to say it sells itself. It doesn’t. People’s next thought is, “That sounds awesome. It also sounds impossible.”
Was it challenging to watch Indy in these positions over and over while editing?
BL: Yes. Keep in mind, I also know what’s going on on set. To get what looks like concern and grief is being motivated by me going [makes nonsense mouth noises]. What is, in reality, perplexed looks like grief, because we edit it in a sequence of juxtaposed images that lead up to that. That’s the thing in filmmaking and film theory that I’m the most into. The juxtaposition—this is like Eisenstein and stuff. It’s not that profound. This is just how the cinema works. Shot of a dog with a blank expression, reverse shot of a corner that’s a little too dark. The meaning is created in the edit and in the audience’s mind.
Have you always been into these kinds of technical gambles?
BL: I love trying to make things that seem impossible practical. No one has tried this before. What if we did it in this really hands-on way? It’s a good way to stand out. In an era where, with digital effects, anything is possible, now nothing is impressive. What if we do this for real? I am attracted to things that seem difficult, especially if it can be solved through hard work and thoughtful filmmaking. That’s my jam.
What was the inspiration for the creature design? Did you enter with a “muck monster” in mind?
BL: Indy is the point-of-view character; this isn’t a human’s conception of a Grim Reaper. We think of the Grim Reaper as a skeleton with a scythe because those symbols mean something to us and play on our anxieties. The worst thing that Indy can imagine is his human getting taken away from him. So his Grim Reaper is more organic. I heard this story once that when dogs are sick or animals are dying, they’ll go down and find wet places in the forest, in the mud, and go lay down and die. It’s like how you’ll hear about the old dog that wandered under the porch to die. Maybe for a dog, a specter of death would be this grim biological force. In terms of the design, there’s not much to it. You get tons of liquefied mud and dirt, a bunch of spatulas, and apply.
Did Indy like being covered in the muck? All the wetness and rain.
BL: Oh my gosh, yeah. Rain does amazing things for a dog’s performance. If you ever need a dog to look sad, just apply water. Same with any fluffy animal, probably doubly true for a cat. That said, he loves the water. Playing fetch in water would be heaven to him. So literally get out a hose, hose down the dog, find a muddy patch, “roll over boy.” That was his hair and makeup for the whole day.
The sound in the opening scene was overwhelming. How did you capture Indy’s perspective sonically?
BL: A lot of the sound design choices aren’t written into the script, but we did know we wanted to have moments where there’d be sounds and stimuli that Indy would react to and find more important than the thing that is important to the humans. If he were in Evil Dead, the second they start reading the Necronomicon, he’d be like, “La, la, la, I’m going to go investigate a squirrel.” So in the car, there’s this important conversation going on between the siblings, and then he hears something in the woods and homes in on it. We go into the audio version of tunnel vision, where, since he’s focused on this figure behind the car, we’re just hearing that. Everything else is fading into the background.
The sound design team was so important in this. My co-producer [Brian Goodheart], who also marshaled all the post-production sound and did most of the sound editing, especially the dog work, was on board while we were writing the scripts. A lot of thought was put into that. They pulled off a miracle.
Dogs don’t recognize faces, so I appreciated the lack of them in Good Boy. But was there ever an urge to show his owner’s face?
BL: We withhold it until it’s really specific. I was dogmatic—pardon the pun—[that] this was Indy’s movie. Every shot would either be of him or from his point of view. He’s only 19 inches off the ground, so practically, that meant a lot of humans would be treated like the Muppet Babies adults.
It was also a huge, practical boon because Indy is my dog. I trained him. There are things that he’ll do with me that are in the movie, and I am not an actor. It allowed me to be in the movie. Then the person who really plays Todd, Shane Jensen, can bring in his vocal performance to bring the whole thing to life. The faces aren’t the most important part of it. Dogs, when they look at people, one of the first things they look at is “Do they have something in their hands for me?” So hands are in the movie as much as faces, more than faces.
It is heartbreaking watching Todd deteriorate from Indy’s perspective. What made that work for the film’s emotional spine?
BL: A lot of men, when they get bad news or are in pain of some kind, can frequently shut down, but will try to find solace in pets and animals. Not that I’ve done that, but I can really relate to that. That is relatable for a lot of people more than just men, obviously. In terms of the story, that emotional arc, it’s also the inversion of most of our experiences with animals. We outlive our pets. People learn about mortality through pets. Flipping things around here, we’re experiencing mortality through an animal’s eyes. What would the experience of death and dying and an unstoppable Grim Reaper-like force be like for an animal? I was always trying to poke at that idea.
What was the hardest shot or the hardest action that you had to get Indy to do?
BL: Pretty consistently, the things that seemed like they should have been hard were pretty easy, and the things that should have been easy were incredibly hard. This is part of the reason why all the sets were closed sets, because they needed to be as distraction-free as possible. We’d be so close to getting the shot. He’d walk in, you’d have the right eyeline, and then he’d be like, “Look, a butterfly.” Mitigating little distractions was, if not the biggest challenge, a constant challenge.
