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
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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