From R-rated VFX requests, casting Will Ferrell and Jamie Foxx, & Will Forte's four-hour-long ball-breaking sequence, this Q&A is a real treat.
The Big Picture If you missed out on Collider’s early screening of Josh Greenbaum’s raunchy talking-dog adventure comedy, Strays, don’t fret. Editor-in-chief, Steve Weintraub, got to sit down after the credits for a Q&A with the director, and Fast X director and producer for Strays, Louis Letterier, in attendance.
JOSH GREENBAUM: Louis. How long do we have to talk about how much of an a-hole he is? No, Louis Leterrier is an incredible director and also producer on this film. He also shot some of the beautiful sequences we saw. He was in charge of the Poop Ballet, as we called it. Louis is amazing. I also have another important person to point out who is here – our writer, Dan Perrault, is also here.
Anyway, I was looking for a project, and I got an email that had Dan’s script in it with an amazing logline that basically said a sweet naive dog gets abandoned and wants to get revenge on his owner by biting his dick off. I was like, “I’ve got to read this one right away.” It was accompanied by an animated gif of a small dog humping a larger dog, which our producer, Erik Feig, had sent out. And anyway, I read it, I loved it.
I think part of what I was trying to do is not have too much anthropomorphizing of their expressions, like eyebrows if they're confused. Instead of furrowing eyebrows, I’d try to get the dog to cock its head because that's what dogs do when they're confused. Because for adult audiences, I'm easily pulled out when CG or something pulls down. I don’t like that feeling as an audience member.
Then our incredible VFX team kind of comped it together. Although it's really more of a traditional shot where it's just actual all-real elements, there’s no CG, but they're all layered together from every time you move the camera, and then you kind of layer them together. That's one. I'm sure I'm forgetting…but that was a big one.GREENBAUM: Oh, the cats! Yes, very good point. I thought the cat shot would be easy…Cats are terrible to work with.
I have so many follow-ups, but my next follow-up is gonna be about shitting. Talk a little about the shot where there's all the shit in the thing, and there was that one thing of a liquidy mess that hits the wall. How many takes was that? Did Louis do this? Talk a little about the first time you showed it to the MPAA. Are you nervous, or are you like, “I know it’s R-rated, we’re fine?”
The big one I think we were most worried about was figuring out how Doug was playing. Doug is a tricky character, Will Forte’s character. Forte, when he first called me when we were talking about the movie, he was on board, he was excited, but he was like, “I think I have to play him pretty mean, right Josh?” I was like, “Yeah, I fully agree.” We have to find the right balance, but if you’re not mean enough, the movie doesn’t really work.
The second thing they do, and it has worked really well for them and for me, they don't put the pencils down ever. You’re never saying it's good enough until somebody pulls the editing board away from the pencils and makes you stop writing. So, in this case, until the very last second, we just kept saying, “Can we make that joke better? Can we fix it? Can we tweak that?” The challenge here is we have a turnaround where it makes you work backward.
One of the things about marketing is that you have to sell a movie, but you also don't want to give away everything. Talk a little bit about what it's like as a director when you are watching those trailers that the studio’s showing you. That balance of, “How many shots do I want to give away,” versus, “I’ve got to get people to opening weekend?”
GREENBAUM: Yeah, and I think they're right. I'm really happy with the work they've done. It's been great. I think the trailers they’ve cut and the pieces out there are really funny. I think that the art is great, so I’m really happy. But it is a challenge. You’re always questioning yourself, like, “Oh, maybe we do need to give that away, use this clip, and do that.
Oftentimes, Louis would go off with four dogs and shoot cool wide shots in the mountains while I'm somewhere else shooting, very close up, the hero dogs that you kind of recognize. If you pay attention, somebody probably saw, there are a couple of shots that you can spot that the dogs are a little bit different. So finding the dogs is tricky. They need to be older, which is a little hard if they're not acting dogs. Maggie was the only active dog of the four.
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