'Good Boy' Director Talks Challenges Of Filming The Horror Movie Completely From Indy The Dog’s Perspective- ‘A Lot Of

Filming, from Indy's perspective, it's a lot of low shots. Can you talk about how difficult that was and the challenges that presented? Yes, thank you for catching on to that. As also the cinematographer and camera operator for the film, my back definitely feels it. Indy is quite small. I'm not sure it comes across on camera, but when he's standing, his eyeline's only 19 inches off the ground. And you're right, point of view is a huge part of the filmmaking and the storytelling. So having a camera that was at that level was really important. Most tripods even in camera equipment are built for human subjects. So we actually had to find kind of custom tripod legs to get down at his eyeline and be able to make the movie from that level. So, yeah, every every part of the filmmaking was a little bit, you know, tweaked or customized to the consideration of. But we're doing this for a dog. so yeah just on a on a uh brass tacks you know first uh you know consideration we had to find equipment that was indy's height you know it's funny um i would not have guessed this on the outset but the things that seemed like they should have been really hard were much easier than expected and the easy things were harder which is not to say that when you're working with a dog everything is opposite to humans actors but i'll give you an example um there's a scene where indy wanders he's following the supernatural forces which at this point are invisible and he's kind of going through the house into a garage and he makes several stops and uh you know we've been working with indy for a while so we figured out how to do that where how do we have this camera follow him kind of continuously and we made a path for him to follow it was not a literal breadcrumb trail to follow but we would take his food and kind of rub it on the ground so there was like a sense that he would follow and getting him to repeatedly follow that scent trail and do this big kind of it's not a wonder by any means but like you know almost a minute long shot was pretty straightforward on the other hand uh getting him to hold a very specific tight close-up a thing you could just tell an actor hey i need you to look like just like an inch to the left that stuff took a long time because there's no way a dog will ever understand i need to stay exactly where i am where my eyes are how they catch the light that's gonna take like those are things a dog at least my dog cannot comprehend so those tight simple feeling close-ups took a lot of trial and error sometimes we would just film them put them into the edit because we were editing as we were making the film we realized we don't quite have it everything needs to be adjusted like you know a few degrees or like up down left right and we'd actually have to try again the second day so there was a lot of um you know precision we had to get, which was difficult to, you know, get with a dog who I cannot stress this enough, doesn't know he was in a movie.