‘Good Boy’ Director Ben Leonberg on Getting Indy the Dog Ready for His Haunted House Debut
One of the most anticipated new horror movies this coming Fall is director Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy, which frames a haunted house tale from the eyes of man’s best friend.
Good Boy marks Leonberg’s feature directorial debut from a script he co-wrote with Alex Cannon. It stars Indy, Leonberg’s real-life canine best friend, with the cast also including indie horror stalwart Larry Fessenden, Shane Jensen, and Arielle Friedman.
The concept behind Good Boy is so effective that not only are audiences deeply invested in Indy’s well-being, but the film is getting a wide theatrical release on October 3.
The fervor and excitement don’t surprise Leonberg, speaking with BD via email, one bit. “It kind of proves what I’ve always believed about dogs: In movies, you can kill off thousands of people, beloved figures, even kids, and audiences will barely flinch. But touch a single hair on a dog’s head and people will lose their minds! Just look at John Wick—the entire franchise is basically fueled by the fate of one dog. So to see people so invested in Indy feels weirdly natural, and honestly kind of wonderful.”
Production on Good Boy was extensive; it required a lot of training to get Indy into camera-ready shape, dodging ghosts in one creepy haunted house. “As a filmmaker, I was essentially in a constant state of hands-on production for those 3 years. The main reason for that is Indy could only film 1-3 hours a day, and I used the rest of those days to build shots that would cater to his specific strengths and weaknesses. Indy didn’t have a training schedule—I did. It surprises a lot of people to learn that Indy only knows a handful of tricks and commands—his ‘performance’ isn’t created through conventional training. Instead, it was about being ready with the camera in the right place at the right time, and coaxing him using a combination of everyday commands, weird sounds, physical gestures, and food. Once those moments were edited together, they created the illusion of a performance. There was a lot of planning, patience, re-shooting, and reorganizing my life to build the film around his habits.”
The training paid dividends; it’s all too easy to get anxious anytime Indy is confronted by sinister supernatural forces in Good Boy. Don’t worry, though, as this just speaks to the incredible central performance by Indy. “The ‘scary‘ scenes were always the most fun for Indy and the most creatively fulfilling for me. What looks like frightened barking or paralyzing fear onscreen is, in reality, Indy staring down a treat or a tennis ball just off camera that he really wants. (And which he got as soon as we ‘cut’). Thanks to the magic of filmmaking and juxtaposition of disparate shots (the Kuleshov Effect), the audience projects their own emotions onto those puppy-dog eyes.“
It’s not just the canine performance that immerses us in this story, but the clever camerawork that further puts us in Indy’s, well, paws. “Right off the bat, one huge challenge was purely practical: Indy’s eyeline is just 19 inches off the ground,“ Leonberg explains. “Getting the camera on his level meant building a custom rig and tripod designed just for him. For handheld work, it meant a lot of bending and crouching—my back definitely paid a price. Almost every single shot demanded some kind of invention, whether it was rethinking camera placement, finding a new way to work with Indy, building a new piece of equipment, or just embracing the chaos and following his lead.“
Just as important a character as Indy is the haunted house itself. In Good Boy, the location serves as both an onscreen character and a crucial training ground for Indy.
Leonberg says, “I wanted the house to feel like a liminal space, caught between the real and the supernatural, with foggy exteriors and an ethereal atmosphere. But Indy navigates the space intuitively, exploring nose-first in a way that feels completely lived-in. And in reality, it was ‘lived in’. We lived in the house for the entire duration of filming. Indy treating the house as his actual home is a big part of why his performance looks so natural–because it is!”
Leonberg drew inspiration from the family pet in Poltergeist, namely, in the way the dog seemed to notice the supernatural ahead of the Freelings. But that wasn’t the only famous horror pup that inspired the filmmaker. “Without a doubt, Jed—the dog (and original ‘Thing’) from The Thing—is an all-time great, and honestly, the bar we were aiming for with Indy.
“Jed was an astonishing animal actor. There are shots of him just wandering the outpost, essentially ‘casing the joint,‘ where the synchronicity between his behavior and the camera work is so precise it blows my mind. Jed was actually a wolf-dog hybrid, and Carpenter mentions on the DVD director’s commentary that’s why his stare feels so unsettling and unblinking. That intensity and the use of Jed’s subjectivity were hugely inspirational for us while working on Good Boy with Indy. And of course, I have to shout out Pipit from Jaws. RIP Pipit!”
The post ‘Good Boy’ Director Ben Leonberg on Getting Indy the Dog Ready for His Haunted House Debut appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.