Bringing to life animals with the voices of humans is never easy. Often, it can take an audience out of the movie because it just doesn’t fit. But Josh Greenbaum’s latest film Strays is a hilarious look into the minds of dogs who are left behind and the group who bands together to help Reggie (Will Ferrell) as he has to come to the realization that he’s not wanted by his former owner.
When I spoke with Greenbaum for the release of the film, I asked him about toeing the line between the “uncanny valley” aspect of a human voice and a realistic dog within the movie and he said that mixing the two was fun and freeing in a refreshing way for himself as a director. “On some level, it’s really fun and freeing, right? Where as a director, it was almost in the animated space where I could kind of choose ideally wherever I wanted my actors to go,” Greenbaum said. “I love working with actors but sometimes when you’re blocking a scene, you run into that thing where they’re like ‘I don’t wanna sit here. I wanna sit over there. I don’t wanna walk over here on this line. I wanna stand’ and it’s all part of the creative process. This film, there was none of that. I just had to decide where every dog was at any given point, and you get to make those calls. The challenging part is, once I’ve made that plan of the blocking and how to see how we visualize and shoot the scene, now we have to figure out how to execute it.”
Which isn’t easy when your main cast is four dogs and you have to make sure your audience doesn’t catch that one of them has had to have a break or that one decided to go to the bathroom in the middle of a take. “There’s four dogs in almost every scene in my movie. And that’s what makes it really complicated. And every dog has two trainers, a lead trainer that they kind of are looking to for eye lines and all of that. So it becomes a very complicated kind of puzzle or chess match of who can stand where, who’s on camera, who can’t, but I loved it. I found it really fun and kind of freeing and I obviously made the sort of challenge and mess for myself because I said, I really wanna work and shoot this with real dogs so it feels incredibly real.”
One of the movies I likened Strays to was a favorite of mine as a kid: Cats & Dogs. The Jeff Goldblum movie was a staple in my house because the cats were Russian spies trying to kill the dogs but obviously the cats were better at everything than the dogs and the Tobey Maguire dog was trying to figure out how to be better at his spy job from the Alec Baldwin dog. Very serious stuff. Greenbaum said that a producer on Strays worked on Cats & Dogs but that he wanted to kind of have that same feel to this film.
“I’ve obviously loved Homeward Bound and older kind of films as well that I remember from my childhood,” he said. “I think for children, it’s easy to go along with a full CG dog or a really overly anthropomorphized animated kind of look. And I felt like for adult audiences, which this film is obviously targeted to, we’re a little more critical, right? We’re a little more cynical, a little more critical. And anything that pulls me out and doesn’t feel like a real dog can pull you out of the film and I really didn’t want that to happen. So I’m glad to hear that you didn’t experience the kind of uncanny valley. It just felt like you’re watching a dog who happens to talk like Will Ferrell.”
You can see our full chat here:
Strays is available on digital now.
(featured image: Universal Pictures)
