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“This Isn’t Air Bud or Lassie, Where the Dog is Always Happy-Go-Lucky”: Director Ben Leonberg on His Canine-POV SXSW Horror Film, Good Boy
Good Boy From a simple observation of canine behavior —”What dog owner hasn’t wondered why their dog barks at ‘nothing?'” — Ben Leonberg has with his SXSW-premiering Good Boy created what he calls “a haunted house movie from an entirely new perspective.” Leonberg’s own dog Indy stars alongside Shane Jensen in this story of an ailing man who retreats to his family’s secluded rural cabin only to confront generational trauma and supernatural forces. With Larry Fessenden as the family patriarch, whose foreboding presence appears solely through distressed VHS tapes playing, Skinamarink-style, on outdated TVs, the house here becomes something of a liminal space, one in which the ghostly presences are unseen (again, that “dog barking at nothing”) and suddenly erupting in demonic spurts.
But the biggest special effect here is Leonberg’s use of Indy’s POV as both a stylistic and narrative device. The film is largely shot from Indy’s eye-level, with some narrative information coming from diegetic sound (phone calls and those VHS tapes), as well as a couple of flashbacks, but plot advancement largely filtering through a dog’s consciousness. As a character, Indy is protective, heroic and necessarily confused, and to his credit Leonberg resists a storyteller’s natural urge to grant the dog a greater understanding than he’d have in the real world. It’s a choice that leads to truly heartbreaking moments as threats come from his destructive, isolation-seeking owner as well as whatever malignant forces lurk in the home’s many dark shadows.
As Leonberg discusses in our interview below, he shot Good Boy over the course of three years, relying on a mixture of home training and the Kuleshov effect to produce Indy’s very affecting performance.
Filmmaker: Your film prompts so many questions from a production point of view, but which came first, the concept of this film or observing some sort of behavior from your dog, Indy, that then prompted the idea of this film?
Leonberg: The concept came first. I was watching Poltergeist probably for the 100th time. The opening follows the family’s golden retriever who we learn can clearly perceive the ghosts before anyone else. This same trope (the dog who “knows better”) appears in tons of horror movies, and I thought that someone should make a movie from that dog’s perspective.
But 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”.
Filmmaker: How many days did you shoot? Was this a conventional production period, or were you shooting in fits and starts? What sort of limitations did Indy as protagonist place on the production process?
Leonberg: We filmed for over 400 days over the course of 3 years. It was an unconventional production by necessity and design. Indy is our family pet, so we had to invent a way of filmmaking that embraced those limitations. We were in a constant state of production those entire 3 years–either filming the few set-ups we could get each day, training Indy for future scenes, or building sets/gags for later use.
As much as we planned out this movie–and we really planned it (I hand drew storyboards for the entire film)–working with a dog who doesn’t know he’s in a movie is a huge x factor. We also really wanted Indy to be the center of the story and the film’s only point-of-view character. This definitely made our job harder, but Indy’s compelling on-screen presence makes it all worth it.
Filmmaker: And how much pre-shoot training did you do with Indy? Did you work with a trainer?
Leonberg: My wife (Kari, Fischer, the film’s producer) and I like to say that Indy has been training his whole life for the movie, but that the training was just to be our best friend. Beyond some advanced obedience training we did with a trainer when he was very young, we coached him for the film ourselves.
But filming, and capturing Indy’s “performance” didn’t rely much on conventional dog training. Indy doesn’t know that many commands or tricks, but he is a really smart dog – he learned quickly that the camera meant he was supposed to do “something”. And that level of curiosity was a great baseline from which to dial in the rest of this “performance”. We did the rest by prompting him with various stimuli (food, physical gestures, and audio cues). The blocking was the hardest part–we never found a way for Indy to hit exact marks.
Filmmaker: On a creative level, what sort of storytelling rules did you impose upon yourself given that the dog is the film’s POV character and in terms of information given the audience? What elements of the story were you content to leave mysterious given the dog’s ability to understand — or not — what was happening in the story world?
Leonberg: It was really important to me that Indy be a character that audiences would relate to as a real dog. That they recognize his behavior and reactions as genuine to dogs they’ve had. This isn’t Air Bud or Lassie – where the dog is always happy-go-lucky, clearly acting for food, or listening to an off-camera trainer. My goal was to have Indy behave and act realistically (or as realistically as possible given the film’s supernatural events). He’s not imbued with a voice nor directed by abstract thought, but by instinct, sensation, and simple reasoning. Creatively, we tried to mimic the mission Jack London brought to his canine protagonists of White Fang and The Call of the Wild.
My belief is that horror works best when it plays inside the audience’s imagination. That’s why I so often rely on the Kuleshov effect and Indy’s naturally occurring 1000-yard stare. For example, if the audience is presented with a shot of Indy tilting his head in curiosity, followed by a shot from his subjectivity of an “empty” space, then our imagination (which naturally assumes the worst) fills in the rest.
Filmmaker: There is so much rain in the film! Could you discuss the challenges of working with the rain machines and having Indy be so wet?
Leonberg: Because Indy could only film in such a short window each day, that meant we had a lot of production time to build complex set-ups ahead of his start time. This was both a challenge and an asset. It’s obviously physically very difficult to film under rain machines (and to light the rain correctly!), but it also does amazing things to Indy’s performance just by getting him wet. It’s not a coincidence that Indy’s “darkest hours” are when he’s out in a heavy downpour. Wet dogs just look sad! Indy’s a water dog though, so he wasn’t actually bothered.
But the rain (and general wetness of the film) is also an important part of the haunted landscape–especially because it’s told from a dog’s perspective. As a little kid I overheard an old hunter talking about how when animals are mortally wounded, they’ll instinctively seek out cold, wet, damp spots, then lay down in the mud to die. He claimed that it was because the mud made dying hurt less. Haunting stuff! You also sometimes hear stories about old dogs that will do the same thing (crawl under the porch to die, or wander off and lie down in the mud when they’re sick). That stuff has been rattling around in my brain since childhood and (without giving too much away) it’s in the DNA of some of the movie’s supernatural motifs.
Filmmaker: I know you have a background in VFX. Could you tell us some of the tools you used and how much you were able to realize yourself and how much you had to bring in other artists?
Leonberg: Despite having worked in virtual reality for years, and doing the majority of the compositing for Good Boy myself, this film is above all a practical production. Though there are vfx shots, none of them are of Indy. Indy’s 100% real. The rain is real (from rain machines). The fog is real (from actual weather).
From working in 360º degree video for VR, I have an instinctive understanding for how to “plate out” unwanted elements of a shot through compositing and capturing blank background plates. This was really handy when I needed to be on-camera (in the same shot as Indy) as a trainer. I’d then remove myself in post-production. And with Indy being such an “x factor” in terms of blocking and camera movement, having the confidence to turn what was planned as a standard shot into a vfx-shot on the fly (that I would composite myself) was a huge asset to keeping production on schedule.
The majority of the additive vfx work was for the supernatural. Though always accomplished in-camera, these were the shots where I worked with other VFX artists to touch up and improve the practical effects.
Filmmaker: The film is very much invested in themes around illness and mortality and how our own personal reactions to these can be intensely private ones. What did you draw on for this aspect of the film, and particularly the relationship between Todd and his sister?
Leonberg: I think that fundamentally all ghost stories are about mortality–what happens to us after we die, the inability to let go, or anxiety about what’s “beyond”. And I certainly relate to Good Boy’s human characters when faced with that. But I was always more interested in what the experience of human mortality would be like for our dogs. You hear about lap dogs that face down grizzly bears when their human families are in peril, or dogs that run into burning buildings without a thought for their own safety. The questions I was interested in exploring was: what wouldn’t a dog do to protect the person he loves most from invisible dark forces? What would it be like for a dog who would die to protect the person he loves?
Filmmaker: Your particular haunted house is one inflected by generational trauma, which is often conveyed through media and home recordings. I thought a bit about the liminal space in Skinamarink a bit, as well as other more classic haunted house tales. I understand this was your own house. Did you live in it during the shoot, and, on a thematic level, how did you conceive of this setting within the lineage of haunted house films.
Leonberg: Yes, we did live there during the whole production. My wife was an amazing sport and game to transform what is in reality a charming cottage in the woods into a haunted family estate. I love that you mentioned a feeling of a liminal space–I think so many haunted houses have that vibe, and it’s absolutely what I was going for: like the house itself is in this ethereal spot between the world of the real and the supernatural. That’s why I spent so much time learning the local weather so our day exteriors were always shrouded in heavy fog. One of my biggest literary references for the story and the design of the house was Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher.
