Spoilers for I Don’t Understand You are ahead! If you are looking to see this project on the 2025 movie schedule, it’s in theaters now.
There are a lot of shocking and hilarious, yet upsetting, moments in I Don’t Understand You. However, there was almost more. During my interview with the directors of the new horror movie, they told me one death they were “not allowed” to incorporate. I have to say, I’m happy that was the case.
When I interviewed David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano about their new horror comedy, I asked them how they picked the deaths featured in the film and if any ideas didn’t make it into the movie. Considering a whole Italian family dies at the hands of Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells’ American tourists, Dom and Cole, I figured there may have been other people on the hypothetical chopping block. However, what they told me they cut was not what I expected to hear, as Craig revealed:
Apparently, you are not allowed to kill domestic animals in movies. So we had first had a couple of very random…
Well, that alone shocked me, but then Brian Crano picked up the sentence and shared that they originally had an idea to have Dom and Cole be responsible for the deaths of a few dogs:
We had them accidentally shoot some dogs. And then, those were going to be the only things that they cared about as characters was that they kill all these people, but they're like, ‘I can't believe we shot those dogs,’ you know? But, yeah, we couldn't get away with it.
You know, I’m happy they didn’t get away with it. Ten times out of ten, I’d rather see a movie where the dog lives or just isn’t even involved in the traumatic event.
I don’t know about you, but if I’m watching a movie and there’s a chance that an animal (and specifically a dog) could die, I’m immediately looking up if they make it or not. And if they die, I will turn it off. So, I get why they were told no. However, I do understand what they were going for here and see why they wanted to include it.
Dom and Cole really weren’t that upset or bothered by the people they killed, at least to me. They moved on from those deaths pretty quickly. So, I do find the humor in this choice, because it would have been funny in the deaths they were the most traumatized by were the dogs.
However, the dog idea was killed. And instead, they got some goats, that stayed alive as David Joseph Craig joked:
So, now there are goats that stay alive, which are beautiful goats.
I’ll say it again, thank goodness no dogs died, and they went with goats that stayed alive instead.
I Don’t Understand You is a really funny movie, thanks to Kroll and Rannells' talents. However, it’s also genuinely scary as these guys wind up killing a whole family after a whole bunch of miscommunications and misunderstandings. While it’s wild, I do fear that their being responsible for the deaths of dogs would have been too much for me.
However, at least the guys would have never gotten over it if it had happened. They might have gotten away with the crimes, but if the dogs had gone, that would have stuck with them forever.
No animals were harmed in Dom and Cole’s Italian vacation, though, and you can go see everything else that really did happen by watching I Don’t Understand You in theaters.
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