BTS: Good Boy

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From casting his own dog as the lead to shooting at dog’s eye level, first time feature director Ben Leonberg has perfected a filmmaking process entirely built around a pet. The result is critical acclaim and a viral smash for horror season.

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They say never work with animals but filmmaker Ben Leonberg had the skill and patience to spend 412 days creating his pet project: an adult horror movie starring his own dog. Good Boy, which was made for peanuts, has become a bone-fide breakout hit.

“Back in 2012, while rewatching the opening scenes of Poltergeist, a ‘what if’ struck me that I couldn’t shake: What if the family dog was the only one who knew the house was haunted?,” Leonberg explains.

Good Boy is the result of that question. It’s a paranormal thriller told from the perspective of a dog and with a distinct visual approach that often frames scenes from 19-inches off the ground.

“In this movie, the instincts and simple reasoning of a pet drive the story and storytelling. Indy is a real dog [a retriever] with real senses, and he'll follow his nose, literally. It's not teaching him to be in a movie. He has no idea he was in a film. It's just that we made the movie around him.”

At the start of Good Boy, Indy moves with his human owner to an isolated cabin in the country. As soon as he moves in, the canine hero is immediately vexed by empty corners, tracks an invisible presence only he can see, perceives phantasmagoric warnings from a long-dead dog, and is haunted by visions of the previous occupant’s grim death. Is the dog really sensing an evil dread or are we reading too much into his expression? The film plays on the ambiguity.

Projecting performance

“Everyone who's had a dog has at some point wondered why its staring at nothing or barking in the middle of the night?” says Leonberg. “I think that's very relatable. Also, dogs in horror movies is a trope we've seen before. They are often the ones who can sense danger before the human characters catch on. The inspiration for my film was to expand that kind of character by telling the story entirely from their point of view.”

In the process it became an intriguing thought exercise into the nature of filmmaking itself.

“People often ask how we got Indy to look scared and the truth is we didn't do anything. It’s just what you're seeing. There are things you can do such as air conditioning the room enough so he won’t pant and generally keeping things calm but all dogs have this very neutral expression. It’s the other filmmaking tricks and techniques that creates the performance. If the audience feels scared it’s because they’re projecting that onto him. In reality, he's having the time of his life!”

He elaborates, “In Hitchcock movies for example the actors aren't doing a whole lot. They’re not emoting much but because the camera is doing something in relation to them, it creates a performance and suspense. The filmmaking tells you to how to feel and you put that onto the character.”

Adjusting to the X factor

Nonetheless, when your lead actor is a dog, traditional filmmaking rules go out the window: For three years, Leonberg and his wife Kari Fischer (also the film’s producer) worked around Indy’s schedule— capitalising on his natural curiosity, eliciting specific expressions with silly noises, posing him in specific positions, waiting under beds for hours to get the perfect shot and enticing him around the haunted house set with treats.

“All shots with Indy were captured on closed sets so that we could maintain his focus, and we only ended up acting in it because I’m one of two people Indy truly loves and listens to.”

In reality the set was their own home in a rural location of New York State into which they moved during Covid. The familiarity of the environment was one clue to how the filmmakers enticed a performance out of their lead actor. The rest required constant invention and planning to build shots around his daily schedule.

“Indy is an enormous X factor,” says Leonberg who storyboarded the whole film knowing that Indy couldn’t be relied on to ever hit exact marks. “It’s not the kind of movie where I could have had a board artist draw every detail of the room and explain to my actor exactly how all the elements of the mise-en-scène would come into play. I had a goal of what the shot was supposed to accomplish in terms of the story but the process was always in flux, trying to figure out how to actually execute on this.”

Sometimes a shot that was supposed to be a medium had to be changed to a two-thirds shot or a close-up just because of where Indy ended up.

“I’d have to adjust the shot that come next in response to that new frame. It was definitely hard, but also really fun. It's a novel way to make a film using time as the primary resource where you're not trying to spend a lot of money or do 12 hour days, day after day. This was working a few hours a day at the pace of a hobby over the course of several years.”

Leonberg did all the camera and lighting himself crediting Wade Grebnoel (his surname, backwards) in the titles. He shot on a RED Dragon X 6K with vintage Nikon AIS glass. “The hero lens was the 15mm. It probably got used in every single scene for close-ups where his face fills the frame. It’s a wide angle lens that is perfect for a canine face. Vintage lenses take some of the edge off the resolution and makes the movie feel a little bit more handmade and organic. That was certainly what I was going for here.”

He wasn’t totally solo. Fischer learned how to operate camera for a few shots where her husband had be in front, and he brought in an additional camera operator for one day when they both needed to be free to move around with Indy.

However, for all but five of the 412 days of principal photography it was just the three of them - including the dog. Leonberg also redid the electrics and built practical effects including rain machines in creating the spectral presence that haunts the film.

Leonberg had a career in commercials before moving into narrative filmmaking with shorts like Bears Discover Fire which featured a life size puppet of a Grizzly. He also earned an MFA in directing from Columbia University where he taught for over five years.

He drew on his background working in immersive media to execute some of the most complex shots—leveraging compositing techniques he perfected in VR to remove himself and Fischer from shots where they coached Indy while on camera.

The recorded production audio which is mostly from camera or from a planted mic was just a guide. Since Leonberg and Fischer are coaxing Indy through each shot the sound required an entire rebuild in post including replacement of all the dog’s footsteps.

What comes next

It’s not a spoiler to state that Indy survives. Leonberg revealed as much before the film’s release likening it to audience knowledge of Ethan Hunt’s invincibility in Mission Impossible.

“My co-writer (Alex Cannon) and I never seriously considered a version in which he dies. If it was a sad ending, it might not have worked out quite so well. Horror movies are horrible by definition but people still like an ending where it feels like the hero has some sort of completed journey. We always knew we were going arrive where we did with Indy living to fight another day, so to speak.”

Independently produced by Leonberg and Fischer’s company ‘What's Wrong With Your Dog?’ Good Boy has made over $7 million in cinemas and is also available on horror streamer Shudder.

Unsurprisingly after all the attention his film has achieved, Leonberg is fielding pet related scripts. “Having developed a unique set of skills, at least working with my own dog, I’m being asked for my advice on other animal film projects. It’s not what I want to do next, although I probably will return to animal storytelling at some point.”

Instead, he wants to explore how new stories can be told using original perspectives.

“Refreshing genre tropes through new kinds of characters and marrying that to a literal new perspective is definitely exciting. Even though it was physically taxing to make a film from 19 inches off the ground from Indy's point of view, I want to take the idea further.”