Categories: PETS

A Dog’s View of Evil in SXSW Midnighter Good Boy: Director Ben Leonberg on channeling Poltergeist and White Fang – Screens

Four legs and a wet nose: the ultimate defense against the supernatural in South by Southwest Midnighter Good Boy, starring Indy the dog.

One of the greatest challenges for any filmmaker is casting. So how did writer/director Ben Leonberg meet the star of his new supernatural horror, Good Boy? “I’ve known him his whole life,” Leonberg said. “I met him as a puppy in upstate New York.”

The actor in question is Indy, Leonberg’s dog and the protagonist of the film, which receives its world premiere at South by Southwest (and, yes, Indy is getting ready to walk the red carpet). Leonberg and his wife became puppy parents when they were living in Astoria, Queens, and then took Indy with them to their new house outside of the city. Then, for the next three years, they used their spooky looking home as the backdrop to a ghost story, in which the dog can see that there’s something uncanny happening but his owner has no clue.

Dogs and horror have gone paw-in-hand since the first guard dog growled at the first unseen menace. Take Poltergeist: E. Buzz, the family pet of the Freelings, is the first character the audience really sees as he goes from room to room, checking on his humans. One night before Indy came into his life, Leonberg was watching the Tobe Hooper-directed classic “for the hundredth time” when he started reappraising that scene. He explained, “It’s a trope in many movies that the dog knows something is up before the family does, and I was thinking, ‘someone should make a horror movie from the dog’s perspective.’”

When Indy became part of the family he finally had his star. However, Indy was not a trained performer, couldn’t hit his marks, and still doesn’t know what a camera is. What he did have “was this habit of staring without blinking – usually before mealtime – and that’s kind of a powerful cinematic tool, using his thousand-yard stare and then the thing he’s looking at in the reverse is an empty corner.” Leonberg used that stare in a short that ended up being a proof-of-concept for the feature after Indy won an acting award for his performance. “I kind of had to give him the full part now.”

Writing the script fundamentally meant stripping away some of the most overused conventions in dog movies. First, there had to be zero anthropomorphization: The dog was always a dog. In this, Leonberg was influenced by arguably the first great chronicler of the inner lives of canines, Jack London. “He was trying to write that these dog characters were not guided by abstract thought or human reasoning but simple instinct and basic reasoning.”

To retain that dog-centric vision, Leonberg realized that it was going to be easier to work with Indy if he was just around his regular people all the time. So Leonberg and his wife are glimpsed in passing and from dog’s-eye level as the main human cast. Meanwhile, that multiyear filming process allowed them to really observe elements of Indy’s everyday behavior that would fit the story they were telling. What Leonberg wanted was a natural dog performance in an unnatural setting, and not what he saw in so many films of “the Air Bud, Lassie kind of dog acting, where the dog looks really stoked to be there because he’s acting for food or a tennis ball that’s just off-camera. That’s not the mood we were looking for.”

In part, this meant fitting the story and the action to what Indy was doing anyway, “and getting him to do it on camera.” Normally, a filmmaker will gather all the shots for a scene or a location in one direction and then shift the camera and the lights to get all the reverse shots, and that wasn’t going to work here. “We would film a shot, take it into the edit and go, ‘OK, our dog can’t hit exact marks, and he ended the shot here. This is definitely where he’s going to stand in the printed movie, and that affects the blocking in the rest of the movie.’”

Leonberg had managed to effectively move Indy out of the human world. Now his bigger problem was squeezing himself into the experience of his 35-pound, four-legged friend, like in the scene in which Indy has to hide under the furniture. “The challenge wasn’t getting him to go under the bed,” Leonberg said. “The challenge was finding a bed that was big enough that I and the camera could go under.”