postPerspective
A haunted house horror story told from the perspective of a dog is the story behind the indie film Good Boy, the feature debut of Ben Leonberg, who co-wrote the script with Alex Cannon. He also directed, photographed and edited the 72-minute film over a three-year period, with help from his wife Kari Fischer (also the film’s producer) and with their own dog, Indy, as the star.
Positive word of mouth at its SXSW premiere has continued since its release into cinemas by IFC, turning the microbudget indie drama into a viral hit. In fact, Good Dog has gotten some award love recently, including as a Top 10 Independent Film of 2025 by the National Board of Review, and it was nominated in the Best Editing category at the 2026 Independent Spirit Awards.
Leonberg and Fischer adapted their own home in a rural part of New York state into a creepy haunted house set for Indy, a red-haired Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, to play in.
As Leonberg explains, the dog had no idea it was making a movie, nor did they teach Indy any new tricks or commands. “He has no understanding of marks or cues, and he spent most of the shoot napping. Yet his on-screen presence is so magnetic that I put the whole movie on his oblivious little shoulders.”
Good Boy might appear to have come out of nowhere, but you have a solid background as a filmmaker. Can you explain?
Like a lot of people my age, I grew up making movies on VHS tapes and MiniDV. I didn’t have a formal film school education, so I was kind of self-taught, especially on the technical side. I learned how to make movies with a group of friends, shooting sketches for improv or making little commercials for the businesses in the town where I went to college. When I got into the real world, my first gig was in advertising for athletic apparel at Adidas and Reebok.
I started out as a one-man band filming smaller assets, such as a football player throwing a ball around with high school kids. This was during the DSLR revolution of 2009-2010, and I was one of the first people at Reebok and Adidas who knew how to use those cameras. My experience and crews grew, and although I never made a Super Bowl commercial, I did make one for the Stanley Cup.
I decided to go to film school at Columbia University for my master’s because I had never really taken a screenwriting class or a real directing class. I returned to my commercials work at a different level and with a new focus, and I began developing Good Boy on the side until we felt it was ready.
What was the light bulb moment that made you want to dedicate the best part of four years working on this story?
It came to me after watching Poltergeist, probably for the millionth time. If you remember, it begins with a golden retriever wandering through the house, aware of the haunting before the humans catch on. I thought somebody should tell a story entirely from that kind of character’s point of view: The dog who knows better.
There’s something so creepy about that in a horror movie, where you can’t help but imagine the worst. Even though it’s a traditional haunted house story, because we’re seeing it from Indy’s POV, it’s almost like we’re seeing a side of the story we haven’t seen before. As someone who loves dogs and grew up with them, I felt like that was a movie I would want to see.
I already had a technical background, but after my MA, I finally understood that story is the most important part. Everything flows from story. I became interested in how making every shot either of the dog or from his point of view could unfold a narrative in a new way.
The problem, of course, is that you can’t say to a dog, “Just look a little bit over here” or “Stop on this mark” the way you can to an actor.
I started making test films with Indy to figure out how to do even the basics, like shot/reverse shot for an actor who doesn’t know he’s in a movie. What sustained me was that I believed in the idea. Plus, I like a challenge.
To what extent did you storyboard the film?
Like most scripts, we worked on Good Boy for a long time before starting to film. The conceptual challenge was trying to stick to the rules of a canine protagonist. He’s not going to be able to speak. He’s limited to doing what a dog can actually do, so it was about using those limitations as an asset. The discipline meant telling the story from the point of view of what Indy sees, smells or hears.
Storyboards were super-important, and I created them on an iPad. I’m not a very good illustrator. They were stick figures, but the most important thing I got from doing it was the idea of how to use shot size, what angle the camera should be in relation to the line of action, and lens choice. Plus, Indy has a very neutral but intense expression, so can I use that to tell the story?
How did you solve the challenge of getting repeatable takes with Indy?
I would spend the day setting up the shot, doing everything from rearranging the props to doing the electrics. Sometimes, since this is an old house, I literally had to create outlets in places where none existed before. In the time I had left, I’d look at the previous day’s footage.
As unusual as the film is, we applied the fundamentals of filmmaking quite practically. We would approach a scene logically. You’d start with the widest coverage, then work your way in to a close-up. That’s conventional to shooting, lighting and managing props, but with Indy, it was also an opportunity to set his blocking as we moved in.
Let’s say there’s a scene where Indy walks into a new space. I’d have a wide-angle shot of the room, then he would walk in and freeze because he hears a strange noise. We might shoot this 40 times, from which there might be eight usable takes. In each of those eight takes, he is hitting very different marks, so I have to pick one and then adapt the rest of the shots with lighting design, props and so on to match.
Every day, it was like making a bespoke custom setup that was in relation to what we had done either the day before or, in some cases, weeks or years before. In addition to that unusual way of making the film, I would often roll the camera and then run around to get into the shot with Indy because I was also training him and standing in as the body of the human actor. That was another level of complexity added on top.
At what point did you decide that Red was the right camera for this film?
When I got into commercials, I had used the Red One for years and had known it well. It was a camera I had worked on in the equipment room in my grad program at Columbia, so while I had experience with a lot of different cameras, I completely knew the Red ecosystem and workflow.
I’d filmed tests with Indy on a Red One, and one of the things I realized was that it was going to be extremely beneficial to shoot at a higher resolution than our ultimate delivery. To get the best framing for Indy, I would want to have the ability to crop and reframe in post.
As mentioned, he can’t hit exact marks. I was almost approaching every setup a little bit wider and a little bit further back through the lens or the camera placement so I could then reframe to account for Indy’s variability. That’s when the Red Dragon came into the equation. We started out with a Red Dragon-X 5K and then upgraded the firmware so it could shoot 6K, which was perfect for us. I was already comfortable using the camera, and the extra resolution enabled us to reframe in post. That was one of the most important reasons to shoot on this camera.
What was your lens choice?
The Red has a very color-accurate, clinical representation of the world as a baseline, which you can push against using older glass. I wanted to marry the bold color you can get from the high-dynamic-range of the camera with a more textured, handmade look through vintage lenses. I tried several different versions, including Leica and Canon FD, but I really like the Nikon AI lenses, both for how they looked and their focal range.
The hero lens of the film is a 15mm specialty wide-angle lens. It’s got a lot of quirks. It can’t focus to infinity until you get to f8 or above, but because it’s a real wide-angle lens that isn’t full of fisheye distortion, it’s perfect for a canine face. Normally, if you were to use that kind of a lens for a close-up on a person, it would not be super-flattering, but for Indy, it produces a beautiful shot because he has a big, long nose and big ears that stick out to the side. It’s a close-up, but you have a beautiful, deep background behind him that you wouldn’t otherwise get if you were shooting on the standard 35mm, 50mm or 75mm lenses that get used for close-ups of human actors.
What was your editing package?
I edited in Adobe Premiere partly because the Red workflow with Adobe is so streamlined. It’s fast and nimble, especially with the way that we were shooting. The ease of adding to my DIT log every single day and logging shots, tracking what was working, and numbering shots was practical. These mundane but important administrative-type functions were super-critical in making it all work.
How did you store and manage the high-resolution files?
The short answer is: with a lot of storage! I must credit my post supervisor, Michael Cacioppo Belantara [of NY boutique Alchemist Post], and my colorist, Jeff Sousa. From other projects I’ve done, I know how much Red RAW R3D can bring things to life. Jeff and I were very much aligned in the look we wanted to achieve, embracing what was already great about the Red footage and taking into account our aesthetic and lighting choices. I edited in Premiere using proxy files and then reconformed for Jeff to grade from the R3Ds.
Over 400-plus days, I had a lot of unusable footage, and I didn’t throw things out as I was going. I’m sure I could have saved hard drive space if I had, but it felt like bad practice to be deleting potentially usable footage. It’s around 73 terabytes of R3D footage. Also, I’m a DIT purist, so I had it backed up in triplicate. We spent a lot on hard drives.
Sound is a big part of any horror movie. How did you approach sound on Good Boy?
From the very beginning, my co-writer and I were thinking about how sound would play in this horror. There are scenes where Indy is at the top of the stairs, looking down at an empty space, and we tried to figure out how long we could sustain those pauses and beats of tense silence. We knew sound was going to be really important.
Brian Goodheart [co-producer and re-recording engineer] marshalled the whole post sound team and was involved from the start. He wasn’t on-set, but he was always seeing cuts and getting the raw production audio as well, which was not usable. It was almost all thrown out and then rebuilt in post.
Brian was responsible for the rebuild of the natural soundscape — the things that should be there diegetically. He worked with mixers and designer Kelly Oostman to add supernatural textures that accentuate tone and tension. Then, with composer Sam Boase-Miller, they each took a pass at the film. We’d get a pass with all natural sounds, then another version of the movie with just the supernatural sound design, and then a version just with musical swatches, then final music as we got further along. As the director, it was great to be able to isolate the sounds and music and see how we could blur them to create tension or elevate some scenes. I’m passionate about sound, and it was a huge part of the odyssey to make this film.
Are you fighting off other point-of-view pet pictures, or do you want to do something completely different?
I’m very excited for my next film. I’m committed to a project that will have human actors who know they’re in a movie. I have gotten a few animal scripts sent my way, which is fun, but I don’t think I’ll make a pet movie for movie No. 2.
What I certainly will do is continue to use perspective in a unique and novel way. Not to chase a gimmick — the camera’s not always going to be on the ceiling for the next movie — but to see how I can use perspective, subtle lens choices and technology that backs it up to tell a story that, even though it might seem like it has familiar beats, looks very new and fresh because of the way it’s told.
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