If I were to have to choose an entry from the 2025 movie schedule to grant the title of "Most Inventive Film," Ben Leonberg’s independent horror movie Good Boy would definitely be a contender. The writer/director spent three years shooting the movie from the perspective of his own dog, Indy. Such a task is no small feat and, as Leonberg explained to CinemaBlend, the process was filled with its share of ups and downs.
During our conversation with Leonberg, he spoke to the unique way he had to shoot this movie. When I specifically asked him about shooting from Indy’s POV, he said this:
Thank you for catching onto 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 eye line's only 19 inches off the ground.
Indy is a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, whom Leonberg followed around throughout the horror movie to tell the story. And, no, Indy isn’t an “actor dog,” as he had no prior experience before the small independent movie started filming. The movie follows a canine who starts to see a haunting presence in the home he and his owner, Todd -- who is dealing with chronic lung disease -- are staying at.
The concept of making such a narrative choice is intriguing, and it makes for an entertaining film. Interestingly, Good Boy was shot at the same place Indy and Leonberg called home in order for the dog to be comfortable with his surroundings and so that it would feel authentic to him. Still, special considerations had to be made from a technical standpoint, as Leonberg went on to explain:
Point of view is a huge part of the filmmaking and the storytelling [of Good Boy]. 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 some kind of custom tripod legs to get down at his eye line, and be able to make the movie from that level.
Ben Leonberg makes it look easy but, as he described, it definitely wasn’t a cheerful walk in the park to shoot the film. The writer/director said the elements that “seemed” to be easy were actually “really hard” in practice. One example he gave was that in order to get Indy to follow a specific path in a scene, the crew had to rub food on the ground so he had to scent to follow.
Good Boy went viral months ago for people getting worried about if Indy would die. That massive attention led to the movie getting a wider theatrical release. As Leonberg also pointed out in our interview, there was one particular aspect of filming the movie that he found difficult:
Getting him to hold a very specific tight closeup, a thing you could just tell an actor, ‘Hey, I need you to look just 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. Those are things a dog at least my dog cannot comprehend. So those tight, simple feeling closeups took a lot of trial and error.
It all paid off, considering his dog-centric flick has received a lot of praise from critics (check out our Good Boy review) and general audiences. Indy also wrote an open letter asking to be considered for an Oscar, and I'd say that's not a bad idea. As Leonberg also told us:
There was a lot of precision we had to get, which was difficult to get with a dog who I cannot stress this enough, doesn't know he was in a movie.
After all the hard work that was put into Good Boy, you can watch the movie now at home by streaming it with an AMC+ subscription. While watching it, really appreciate the time and effort that went into making a feature-length movie told completely from a dog’s point of view.
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