Interviews
‘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.
Leonberg explains, “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!”
Interviews
‘The Death of Robin Hood’ Director Michael Sarnoski on Brutal Violence and Reinventing the Legend
Michael Sarnoski (A Quiet Place: Day One, Pig) gives a darker spin on a classic ballad in The Death of Robin Hood, which sees a legendary outlaw confront his own violent legacy.
A24 releases the dark reimagining of the classic folk tale in theaters this Friday, June 19.
Hugh Jackman stars as a grizzled Robin Hood, who begins Sarnoski’s latest in a grim place of death and violence before a grave injury presents a rare chance at salvation.
In 13th-century grit and squalor, the violence in The Death of Robin Hood is especially brutal, setting up a stark contrast for the outlaw’s thematic journey in his final days. Speaking with Bloody Disgusting ahead of the film’s release, writer-director Michael Sarnoski explained that the visceral brutality at the film’s outset was both a reflection of period authenticity and in service of Robin’s story.
“It’s always a little bit of both,” Sarnoski explains. “The initial idea for the movie was I wanted to humanize these characters from this old legend and really understand them. So, part of that is understanding the authenticity of the period and studying the brutality of the old ballads. Both things evolved at the same time, because then it became this story about this person who was grappling with their own legacy of violence and their own folklore.”
Photo Credit: Aidan Monaghan/A24
He continues, “It was a little bit of a chicken and the egg thing where it was like, ‘Okay, the authenticity is where we’re going to access the humanity.’ But then, through that, we also have to access how these people felt about that violence. And because of that, we really have to make that violence feel human and real and brutal and not Hollywood-ized at all.“
But don’t expect The Death of Robin Hood to be too beholden to period accuracy; the filmmaker never wanted to lose sight of its characters or their humanity. “I was more trying to capture, in my mind and soul, what it might have felt like to live at that time. When you’re steeped in nature and all of its brutality, but also all of its divinity and spirituality, what would that just feel like on a deeper soul level? A lot of the research was focused on just trying to capture that human side of existing back then.”
The Death of Robin Hood avoids retreading the familiar origin story of the outlaw and his Merry Men; the past is a distant memory steeped in blood for this iteration of Robin Hood. Save for Little John (Bill Skarsgård), very little calls back to the familiar folklore fixtures and iconography.
“It wasn’t straightforward,” Sarnoski says of his writing process and choosing which characters to incorporate. “It kind of happened organically. I knew I just wanted the pieces that I needed for that character, but then at the same time, I wanted to acknowledge that he’s grappling with what he believes his life was, and the violence of that life and of that time. But then at the same time, he’s also not a fully reliable narrator. He has been jaded for decades and has just been steeped in that violence. Even he and Little John especially aren’t 100% sure which of these things were stories and which were real in some way, because I think even in our own lives we have that, where our memories become these stories that we just tell each other.”
“I wanted to make sure that we’re doing some justice to that Robin Hood legend, and there are a lot of references to that. I wanted to use it sparingly and specifically, but then also acknowledge that no one in this world is 100% sure who this guy was, not even the guy himself.”
Photo Credit: Aidan Monaghan/A24
While Jackman commands the screen as the world-weary outlaw, it’s Murray Bartlett (“The Last of Us”, Opus) who steals scenes as the enigmatic leper standing vigil over the Priory.
Bartlett’s complex performance, buried under unrecognizable costuming and prosthetics, surprised even Sarnoski in more ways than one. “The initial surprise was finding such a great actor who was willing to completely disappear. And that takes a lot of ego death and bravery and excitement for the pure creative, emotional side, and also bravery in the performance side of, ‘You’re not going to have 90% of the tools that you usually use. You’re going to have to do this with your eyes, your voice, and just your physicality.’ So, I think just the surprise of finding someone who was like that was the feature, not the bug. He was so excited about that, and he found it very liberating.
“Then, it sounds kind of obvious, but the next surprise was just you write this character on the page, and you’re like, ‘Okay, he’s supposed to have this depth, he’s mysterious, but he’s also gentle, and he becomes this almost teacher.’ In your mind, you’re like, ‘Okay, I think this character can work.’ But then you see Murray embody it and you’re like, ‘Oh, this is so far beyond what I ever could have hoped for.’ And it’s so moving and so human in spite of all the limitations on the performance.”
Sarnoski notes this character acts as the ferryman, right on the cusp of life and death. That, along with the period, also informed the Leper’s look, “In those old monasteries, they had these orchard cemeteries that were also where they buried the body. It’s this place of graves and growth. He has subtly different outfits that he wears depending on if he’s ferryman or orchardman. There was a lot of thought that went into all of that.”
Credit: Aidan Monagha
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