{"id":168767,"date":"2025-09-29T19:17:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-29T19:17:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/168767\/"},"modified":"2025-09-29T19:17:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-29T19:17:07","slug":"how-the-good-boy-director-made-his-dog-into-a-horror-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/168767\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Good Boy director made his dog into a horror star"},"content":{"rendered":"

Good Boy proves you can teach an old dog new tricks. Set from the perspective of Indy, a loyal and loving canine, Ben Leonberg\u2019s cabin-in-the-woods horror movie<\/a> digs into the clich\u00e9s of a well-trodden genre with a fresh POV and technical ingenuity. It\u2019s The Conjuring<\/a> by way of Jerzy Skolimowski\u2019s EO<\/a>, a harrowing affair where an animal\u2019s confusion and helplessness become another avenue for dread.<\/p>\n

Dispensing with one of the tried and true rules of production (avoid animals and children), Leonberg cuts together a masterful performance from his four-legged lead\u2013-his actual dog. With a mastery of editing and shot construction\u2019s fundamentals, Leonberg makes one of the scariest and most original horror films of the year. We spoke with the director about his process, practical solutions to technical limitations, and how dogs might perceive the Grim Reaper.<\/p>\n

The A.V. Club: Dogs in danger in film is such a taboo. What made you want to push that button?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ben Leonberg: Well, I knew I wasn\u2019t going to kill the dog. I started with the idea that in the first act of every horror movie, there\u2019s this dog who knows what\u2019s going on before anybody else does. Usually, he ends up in pieces in front of the family at the break into Act Two. See: The Conjuring, any number of films. What if you just told the story of the dog who doesn\u2019t end up dying but experiences the haunting? He\u2019s the only one who really knows what\u2019s going on thanks to his canine senses. How far could you push that?<\/p>\n

BL: He is not a show dog. He\u2019s really just been trained to be my best friend. That\u2019s genuinely true. He knows more than basic obedience. I grew up training dogs, not like I had a family that trained dogs, but I knew how to train dogs to do more than just play fetch.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The most important resource in getting that performance was time. It was figuring out how to position Indy so that it would look good in the shot, and the shots would tell the story. Then, what dials did we have to create a performance? Sometimes, it was filming things that Indy was already going to do and building the set around him, literally. We lived in that house with him as we were making the movie. Sometimes, you train him to do one thing, and then throw a curveball his way. He\u2019s been trained to get up on this thing in close up, and now I start saying \u201cneon sign\u201d to him, and he\u2019s just like, what? And he looks confused, and when you add scary music and a shot of a dark corner, it all adds up. So there was no one way that it worked. It was a lot of fun, but it was also hard and just took time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

My dog hates the camera. Camera comes out, he shuts down. Generally, is Indy good with cameras?\u00a0<\/p>\n

BL: Indy\u2019s good with cameras. The first step was to get to a point where he didn\u2019t treat the camera as something that he\u2019s meant to physically interact with. That said, there were many times we had to pause production because his nose made contact with a lens, which is wet and, you know, dog nosey. He learned that the camera meant he was supposed to do something. The same way that if I were to produce a tennis ball for Indy, he would go into overdrive, like, \u201cI\u2019m now ready for you to throw a tennis ball for me.\u201d At a much lower energy level, seeing the camera made him curiously engaged. He knew there was a chance I\u2019d give him some food for doing something a little extra.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s the kind of dog that loves to have a job to do. He\u2019s a retriever. His ideal job would be playing fetch as a professional fetch player. But once he saw the camera and realized there was something to do, he was trying to figure that out. That was a good baseline to work off of. We just had to be ready to suss that out of him.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kids and animals are notoriously tricky for filmmaking. What made you think you could pull this off?\u00a0<\/p>\n

BL: I am attracted to really difficult productions. I knew very early on the way I would make it, using time as the main resource. Movies don\u2019t have to be made in sprint fashion. I used to run long distance and train for marathons. I hope I\u2019m not stretching this metaphor too thin, but I can chip away at this slowly over time. I guess I have a lot of patience or endurance. And I had faith that it was a good idea and was able to get enough other people to believe in it as well. Then I just started trying it, and then it started working.<\/p>\n

As I was writing it, I was also shooting little short proofs of concept that would explain how, visually, this story will work. One of those proofs of concept, we put into some short film festivals, and Indy got nominated for an acting award. It kind of caught fire, not in a huge way, but in a way that gave us activation energy to really get going.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I was going to ask how you convinced people to invest in a movie like this.<\/p>\n

BL: Having the proof of concept was critical because people hear the pitch, \u201cHey, you know how your dog stares at empty corners?\u201d I would love to say it sells itself. It doesn\u2019t. People\u2019s next thought is, \u201cThat sounds awesome. It also sounds impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Was it challenging to watch Indy in these positions over and over while editing?<\/p>\n

BL: Yes. Keep in mind, I also know what\u2019s going on on set. To get what looks like concern and grief is being motivated by me going [makes nonsense mouth noises]. What is, in reality, perplexed looks like grief, because we edit it in a sequence of juxtaposed images that lead up to that. That\u2019s the thing in filmmaking and film theory that I\u2019m the most into. The juxtaposition\u2014this is like Eisenstein and stuff. It\u2019s not that profound. This is just how the cinema works. Shot of a dog with a blank expression, reverse shot of a corner that\u2019s a little too dark. The meaning is created in the edit and in the audience\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n

Have you always been into these kinds of technical gambles?\u00a0<\/p>\n

BL: I love trying to make things that seem impossible practical. No one has tried this before. What if we did it in this really hands-on way? It\u2019s a good way to stand out. In an era where, with digital effects, anything is possible, now nothing is impressive. What if we do this for real? I am attracted to things that seem difficult, especially if it can be solved through hard work and thoughtful filmmaking. That\u2019s my jam.<\/p>\n

What was the inspiration for the creature design? Did you enter with a \u201cmuck monster\u201d in mind?\u00a0<\/p>\n

BL: Indy is the point-of-view character; this isn\u2019t a human\u2019s conception of a Grim Reaper. We think of the Grim Reaper as a skeleton with a scythe because those symbols mean something to us and play on our anxieties. The worst thing that Indy can imagine is his human getting taken away from him. So his Grim Reaper is more organic. I heard this story once that when dogs are sick or animals are dying, they\u2019ll go down and find wet places in the forest, in the mud, and go lay down and die. It\u2019s like how you\u2019ll hear about the old dog that wandered under the porch to die. Maybe for a dog, a specter of death would be this grim biological force. In terms of the design, there\u2019s not much to it. You get tons of liquefied mud and dirt, a bunch of spatulas, and apply.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Did Indy like being covered in the muck? All the wetness and rain.\u00a0<\/p>\n

BL: Oh my gosh, yeah. Rain does amazing things for a dog\u2019s performance. If you ever need a dog to look sad, just apply water. Same with any fluffy animal, probably doubly true for a cat. That said, he loves the water. Playing fetch in water would be heaven to him. So literally get out a hose, hose down the dog, find a muddy patch, \u201croll over boy.\u201d That was his hair and makeup for the whole day.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The sound in the opening scene was overwhelming. How did you capture Indy\u2019s perspective sonically?<\/p>\n

BL: A lot of the sound design choices aren\u2019t written into the script, but we did know we wanted to have moments where there\u2019d be sounds and stimuli that Indy would react to and find more important than the thing that is important to the humans. If he were in Evil Dead, the second they start reading the Necronomicon, he\u2019d be like, \u201cLa, la, la, I\u2019m going to go investigate a squirrel.\u201d So in the car, there\u2019s this important conversation going on between the siblings, and then he hears something in the woods and homes in on it. We go into the audio version of tunnel vision, where, since he\u2019s focused on this figure behind the car, we\u2019re just hearing that. Everything else is fading into the background.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The sound design team was so important in this. My co-producer [Brian Goodheart], who also marshaled all the post-production sound and did most of the sound editing, especially the dog work, was on board while we were writing the scripts. A lot of thought was put into that. They pulled off a miracle.<\/p>\n

Dogs don\u2019t recognize faces, so I appreciated the lack of them in Good Boy. But was there ever an urge to show his owner\u2019s face?\u00a0<\/p>\n

BL: We withhold it until it\u2019s really specific. I was dogmatic\u2014pardon the pun\u2014[that] this was Indy\u2019s movie. Every shot would either be of him or from his point of view. He\u2019s only 19 inches off the ground, so practically, that meant a lot of humans would be treated like the Muppet Babies adults.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was also a huge, practical boon because Indy is my dog. I trained him. There are things that he\u2019ll do with me that are in the movie, and I am not an actor. It allowed me to be in the movie. Then the person who really plays Todd, Shane Jensen, can bring in his vocal performance to bring the whole thing to life. The faces aren\u2019t the most important part of it. Dogs, when they look at people, one of the first things they look at is \u201cDo they have something in their hands for me?\u201d So hands are in the movie as much as faces, more than faces.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is heartbreaking watching Todd deteriorate from Indy\u2019s perspective. What made that work for the film\u2019s emotional spine?\u00a0<\/p>\n

BL: A lot of men, when they get bad news or are in pain of some kind, can frequently shut down, but will try to find solace in pets and animals. Not that I\u2019ve done that, but I can really relate to that. That is relatable for a lot of people more than just men, obviously. In terms of the story, that emotional arc, it\u2019s also the inversion of most of our experiences with animals. We outlive our pets. People learn about mortality through pets. Flipping things around here, we\u2019re experiencing mortality through an animal\u2019s eyes. What would the experience of death and dying and an unstoppable Grim Reaper-like force be like for an animal? I was always trying to poke at that idea.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What was the hardest shot or the hardest action that you had to get Indy to do?\u00a0<\/p>\n

BL: Pretty consistently, the things that seemed like they should have been hard were pretty easy, and the things that should have been easy were incredibly hard. This is part of the reason why all the sets were closed sets, because they needed to be as distraction-free as possible. We\u2019d be so close to getting the shot. He\u2019d walk in, you\u2019d have the right eyeline, and then he\u2019d be like, \u201cLook, a butterfly.\u201d Mitigating little distractions was, if not the biggest challenge, a constant challenge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Good Boy proves you can teach an old dog new tricks. Set from the perspective of Indy, a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":87942,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-168767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}