The Big Picture

Strays is a raunchy, revenge-filled talking-dog adventure comedy with a unique take on the genre. The movie features an all-star cast, including Will Ferrell and Jamie Foxx, and explores themes of toxic relationships and redemption. The film was a quick project, taking about a year from script to production, and involved filming with real dogs and later adding the voices in post-production.

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. Be warned, If you haven’t seen the movie yet, check out our spoiler-free interview with Greenbaum here, grab some tickets, then come back for that mid-credit scene breakdown, what Miley Cyrus thought of that ending, and tons more.

Strays is Homeward Bound all grown up, with a hint of cynicism and a lot more revenge. With an all-star cast led by Will Ferrell and Academy Award-winner Jamie Foxx, Greenbaum’s movie is about Reggie (Ferrell), a loveable and trusting Border Terrier whose owner, Doug (played by Will Forte), is an absolute heel. After numerous attempts to dump his four-legged friend are thwarted by Reggie’s loyalty and naivety, Doug manages to strand Reggie on the streets, where the little guy meets up with a pack of stray dogs led by Foxx’s Bug, a wily Boston Terrier. In what Greenbaum tells us is a metaphor for “a toxic relationship and how you deal with that and how you get out of it,” Reggie’s new street-wise friends—Bug, Maggie (Isla Fisher) the Australian Shepherd, and Hunter (Randall Park) the anxious emotional support dog—help Reggie exact his well-deserved revenge.

During the Q&A, Greenbaum discusses the challenges faced filming the first R-rated talking dog movie with an ensemble four-legged cast, from the bizarre VFX requests to working with dogs on their feature debuts. We learn which of the dogs was Oscar-worthy and which of them wrecked the sets, why they chose to end the movie the way they did, and how they matched dogs to actors. The director also shines a light on producers Chris Miller and Phil Lord for their approach to comedy, Will Forte for his “tricky” performance and that four-hour ball-breaking sequence, and shares an update on the pup his family adopted after wrap. For even more behind-the-scenes, check out the full interview in the transcript below.

COLLIDER: Can you talk a little bit about Louis Leterrier as a producer and what kind of an a-hole is he when he is involved in the movie? Just curious.

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.

By the way, I had a wonderful moment on the way in. I was standing there, and this lovely older couple just walked out, and they were laughing, but she goes, “That was a bit much.” [Laughs] That’s fair.

Image via Universal

First of all, that’s a ringing endorsement in my eyes. So talk a little about how this movie actually happened. Sometimes in Hollywood, it takes a long time to make something and other times it’s pretty quick, so how was it for you on this thing?

GREENBAUM: I guess in the world of Hollywood, I would call it “quicker,” actually. In a good way. I don’t know that Dan would feel the exact same way, and Erik [Feig], but actually, it is. I came on board around the time I finished my last film, which was called Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar. That was my first film, which, by the way, I feel like I’m cursed; that came out during the pandemic, so that got canceled. I’m glad our movie is still here, but there are reasons why we can’t have our actors out and all those types of things, so it’s interesting.

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 honestly was hesitant because I thought it would be just another dog spoof movie, you know, “Not another dog movie,” type of thing. So I was really excited and surprised by the amount of actual original story and heart and depth. Yes, we skewered the dog movie trope that Dan and I and Louis and all of us love, but there was a lot of heart there. Anyway, that was probably three years ago, ish, I’m terrible with time, but we then had to get it set up. We took it to Universal, along with Phil Lord and Chris Miller, and our amazing producing team. I put together, along with Dan and everybody, like a 15-minute pitch video on how I see the film and why we should make this, and I think Universal saw it and got it, and it went fairly quickly.

One of the most unique things ever is that we went to production without any talent. Literally, we had none of our actors, and we went out to Atlanta and just started filming, which is, I think, a huge kudos to Universal that they believed in the script and the team and everyone. Then, of course, while we were shooting, we got Will [Ferrell] and Jamie [Foxx], and our incredible cast, which was a fun day to announce on set because all the trainers were like, “Who’s gonna voice my dog?” So anyway, that was a very long-winded answer, wasn’t it? It was about a year from when I got the script when we started shooting and then another year and a half or more of editing because it’s a very VFX-heavy—as you might imagine—movie, so it takes longer in post than other traditional live-action.

From when you got the script to what everyone just saw tonight, how much changed along the way?

GREENBAUM: Quite a lot. I should say both a lot and not a lot. So the essence of the story, the concept of four main characters, always [was] there. The tone, the heart, some set pieces stayed, but what I love about working with Dan and the whole team was we just kept trying to beat it. And that’s the thing. This is almost like an animation film, right? So our dialogue we can keep changing constantly. So we just kept rewriting and trying to flush jokes and beat things. The set pieces that we had with the film we had decided before production, but the dialogue and the jokes within them we could keep working on. But yeah, we just kept zigging and zagging and figuring out what was working, but the essence of the story of what you just saw was there from the first time I read it.

I think this might be the first live-action dog movie that’s rated R.

GREENBAUM: Yes. I’m fairly certain of that.

Image via Universal

So I’m just curious, what does that mean to you? Because that’s an accomplishment.

GREENBAUM: Sure! It means the world. Thanks, Steven. Here’s what I can say is, I’m sure we have some filmmakers and writers and creative people out in the crowd here, given that we’re in the heart of LA, but I’m certainly, as a filmmaker, always wanting to feel like I’m doing something either original or that has never been done before, or maybe something that’s been done but from a totally fresh, new perspective. That excites me as a director. So to that end, the concept in and of itself when I first got the script and the idea of, “Ooh, let’s go make an R-rated talking dog movie,” was very, yes, to that point, exciting, being like, “Oh, this hasn’t been done yet.” So that was exciting.

One of the things that I love is that the marketing of the movie is telling you what the movie is, and it’s not lying. It really is about someone who’s trying to bite their owner’s dick off, which I think is amazing because when I watched it the first time, I’m like, “Are they really gonna do this? They really do this!”

GREENBAUM: It’s funny, our first test screenings and previews, I think we ran into this issue where people still didn’t believe that that was the plot of our movie. It just seemed like a funny thing that Reggie (Ferrell) was saying. We’re like, “No, that’s what they’re gonna go do!” So we did kind of tweak the wording, and if you notice, Reggie repeats it because Bug (Foxx) is in disbelief, like, “Wait, did you just say what I think you said?” So part of it was that, yeah, we really wanted to go through it. Obviously, the part that we’re trying to not leak out in the marketing is the fact that, in fact, they do, which was a joy for me when I got to that point of the script. I would have been very disappointed if it was like, “He learned his lesson and walked away.” I was like, “No, let’s not do that.” So yeah, that is the plot.

What do you think fans would be surprised to learn about the actual making of the movie?

GREENBAUM: One is the fact that we kind of shot it all without the voices, which is interesting. I also would say 95% of what you just watched is all real dogs, which was really important to me. Obviously, any time it was unsafe for a dog to do anything, it was like, “Alright, we’re gonna go full CG,” but for me, I really wanted to make sure at the start that you just felt that you were watching real dogs. Obviously, we had to have them talking since we were unable to train the dogs to talk, but I thought about it, and we could’ve gone full CG. This is right around the time Lady and the Tramp—which, if anyone saw that, it was really well done—it was all CG dogs, and Lion King, and all those kinds of amazing films came out. But I kept feeling like I’ve had dogs my whole life, and I’m sure lots of people in this room have dogs. You could put an elephant up in a film, and I’d be like, “Yeah, that’s pretty good,” because I’m around an elephant for, like, five minutes a year at the zoo when I take my kids there, but I think for dogs, I know dogs, we all know dogs. We live with them, their behaviors and mannerisms, and I just wanted them to feel as real as possible because the more real it felt, the funnier it gets, right? You’re not being pulled out, I think, for adult audiences. Kids will just go with 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. I don’t know if that’s surprising to you guys, but that’s an interesting fact that the bulk of that performance is real. If you sort of notice, think about Reggie’s performance of emotionality, and how that dog walked and was nervous and slowly entered Doug’s (Will Forte) house. That’s all work that the trainers put in where they actually trained, like, seven different speeds of walking. You think, like, “Oh, just walk.” No, if I walked in front of you all right now, you could get a lot of information. Am I walking like this? Am I walking a little slower like this? You can get a whole lot of information. With a dog, you can’t just have it walk. It might need to go slower or hang its head low or be happy, or sprinting in fear. There’s all this nuance that the trainers brought to the performance that, for me, was surprising.

What is it like when you have all these different dogs that are basically having to do a shot when you have four dogs? It’s like actors except animals.

GREENBAUM: One of the things I tried to do in the film was I wanted to have moving aspects where you have, like, four dogs in the shot and the camera is moving. To do that, then all the trainers have to coordinate the movement of the dogs. What I learned quickly was that we could have a dog walk from where Louis is down here, pick up a ball, go over here and drop the ball, spin around, bark, go back, and do that. That one dog will do that nine out of 10 times, which, that surprised me. I was like, “Wow, these trainers are amazing.” But the problem with our film was I needed that, but then I needed another dog to stand here and jump up on the chair. Once the dog picked up the ball, the other third dog has to lay down, and then the fourth dog has to come in here and turn. So that’s when it all fell apart often. It’s very, very, very complicated, but at times of work, we would get up to 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 takes, which is not normal on a film set for most people. There are some directors that go way past that.

Which shot in the movie was the fucking ball-breaker?

GREENBAUM: I hope there are no kids here. My kids still think it’s about Reggie [wanting] to bite Doug in the butt because they’ve been watching me work on the movie for like a year. They’re like, “So what’s it about, Dad?” They’re gonna find out at some point.

There’s a lot of difficult shots. I’ll answer for Will Forte; the shot that you just saw at the very end, it’s in super slow motion. We shot it at 1000 frames a second, which creates a very, very, very slow frame rate. We use a [motion control] machine where the cameras go from here to here, and it moves super fast. We did a bunch of different takes and it layers all of it up. So this is a shot where it’s panning across Doug, he’s on the ground, the dogs are pulling the legs, there’s fire in the background, Reggie’s going crazy on Doug’s crotch, and then you see Hunter (Randall Park) turn around. It’s like that one long shot. That shot was incredibly difficult, but it took over four hours to shoot, and Will Forte, god bless him, laid there for four-plus hours. I think we could have used a double. I kept saying, “We have your stunt double,” and he’s like, “I’m fine!” He’s the sweetest man ever. That was a very difficult shot to pull off.

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.

Image via Universal

LOUIS LETERRIER: The fucking cats. [Laughs]

GREENBAUM: Oh, the cats! Yes, very good point. I thought the cat shot would be easy…Cats are terrible to work with. I’ve worked with them before, but they’re just really hard. All we needed them to do is sit on a box, and they do not want to do that. Dogs do three things – they love food, but they also want to please you, that’s why they’re great animals in terms of training, and cats, I think they just don’t care. So that was very difficult.

How much debate did you spend with the song you were gonna put at the end because “Wrecking Ball” is fantastic, but was it almost another song?

GREENBAUM: Good question. It was, for a little bit, another song. I think, actually, this was even in Dan’s script. There were not many songs in the script, but there was one. He had written in Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” which is a fantastic song. We put it in, I really loved it. If you recall, it was used, also, in a very different way in Trainspotting…It was like, “Oh wow, this is so dark using this.” So it was kind of in that vein, and I think two things happened; one, we all realized it wasn’t quite delivering. It’s great, but what I wanted it to feel was sort of three things – triumphant, like, he did it, but also cathartic and emotional, and also funny, right? So I think we were getting two of those three in varying degrees, but we weren’t really getting an anthemic thing that Miley [Cyrus] gives you. I’ll also say, I think we tried, and Lou Reed’s estate said no. [Laughs] But that was a blessing because it forced me to go back to the drawing board.

I remember just going through hundreds and hundreds of songs and thinking, and trying to figure out what genre is it? And it did hit me that, “Oh, it’s probably a breakup song,” is probably the answer because that is really what’s happening here. It’s a breakup. And so once I clicked into that, we started drilling down. One of my favorite moments as a filmmaker is a moment like this where I remember playing it and being like, “Oh,” and started to get little tingles. Then you send it to the editor, and you pull it, and you’re like, “Stick it under the scene,” and then it’s just like full chills. You’re like, “Oh, this is it.” It was waiting for us, buried under– Literally, I probably went through 500 songs. I love how it came out. Then, of course, was the moment of truth, like, can we afford it because it’s not a cheap song? And will she say yes? And luckily, Universal took care of the first part and Miley Cyrus took care of the second part. She had to see the scene and approve it, and she did.

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?

GREENBAUM: I’m gonna guess that’s the shot that made that woman say, “It’s a bit much,” on the way out. It was probably only one take, and I think Louis, you did shoot that shot.

LETERRIER: It was very messy, one take-ish. We created this shit cannon.

GREENBAUM: It sounds so much better with his French accent.

LETERRIER: It’s the smallest, cutest dog that has the explosive shit. There were a few shots where I had shit coming at the camera.

GREENBAUM: By the way, very quickly, I am curious, shit humor in visuals like that are just the most divisive, and I’m sure in this audience there are half of the people like, “You didn’t go far enough,” and then half like, “You went way too far.” It’s just whatever it is. I think the first part of this movie, that sequence was like two and a half minutes longer [laughs], and I was like, “It’s perfect. It’s done! Don’t change a frame.” It’s now, like, 30 seconds.

Image via Universal

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?”

GREENBAUM: I wasn’t nervous. We got emails, like, “Guess what, guys, it’s R-rated.” We’re like, “What?! That’s crazy!” No, not nervous. My last film, we ran into it with Barb and Star, where they were not gonna give us a PG-13, which it is a PG-13 movie. But yeah, we ran into I had to change one word and this and that, but this was a very clear R, and they had no issues. Maybe there was a thought about drug– No, I don’t think there was anything. They just said, “It’s R, and you’re good to go.”

Talk a little about what you learned from early screenings, like family/friends or test screenings, that impacted the finished film.

GREENBAUM: I’m a big fan of showing the movie early to friends and family, just kind of figuring out what are my blind spots, what do we not know or aren’t picking up on? The movie played fairly well early on, but you know what’s interesting is when you do all voiceover, the pace of the comedy comes down to your editors in a way. On set, it’s just the actors, and you might just leave it in a two-shot and go, “Boom. That chemistry, that pace, that rhythm is all perfect.” When you’re doing all the voiceover, you’ve got to cut it all together, cut the dog shots together, and sometimes I found the rhythms of the whole film weren’t quite working yet. That was one thing.

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. You want him to get his confidence, you have to not like him, but if you play him too hard, too mean, too aggressive, it could be hard for people to watch, right? None of us like to watch someone being abusive and mean and threatening to a small dog like that. So, that was a big question, but at least, I think from my memory, the early screenings of friends and family, they felt like, “No, it’s working.” That’s also the magic of Will Forte. He plays that guy well, where you don’t feel super threatened and you can hate him, but still kind of enjoy his performance in it.

I’m trying to think of what else we learned. It just was a lot of kind of traditional figuring out pacing, and I think the tone was always there. It’s an interesting process because, usually, I have all my cards on a wall, right? Again, looking at Barb and Star, I cut 30 minutes out of that movie in probably 15 sequences. This movie, and I think there are various reasons why, we cut one tiny thing out, and that’s it. So on my wall of scenes of the movie, it was everything, and then there was this one little thing that we cut out. It was mostly just because it wasn’t a great joke in the night-out montage. They all like to make fun of me that I cut it because I was in it. The dogs were looking at an erectile dysfunction ad on a bus, and I, for some reason, was like, “I’ll be the guy with erectile dysfunction.” So I am the guy next to a cute Golden Retriever, and I think they were talking about how hot the Golden Retriever was. It was a bit we liked but didn’t love, and we cut it, and with it went me. By the way, Dan is the doctor at the end of the movie, how great was his performance?

Phil Lord and Chris Miller, they’re really good at their jobs, and I’m just curious, what is it about them? They have such a good track record as producers. When they’re involved in something it usually means it’s going to be pretty good.

GREENBAUM: I totally agree. They also just happen to be great guys and super smart and super funny. What’s cool about this is they would just come in and help in any way. They’d often just be constantly filled with writers’ jokes and pitch jokes and all that, which you normally don’t get out of your producer, to be honest. It’s like, “Oh, you’re giving amazing jokes and helping in any way you can?” But I think to answer your question, it’s probably two things; one is, every meeting we had together was always about the story, the heart, the emotion, the drama. We’re not talking about the comedy a whole lot, we’re talking about the emotional center of the film, and I think that’s important in any film comedy or anything. It’s got to work, first and foremost, in the dramatic sense. The jokes and everything are like the icing on the cake. So they approach all of their work that way, and I think that you see that consistently. I remember going to 21 Jump Street and being like, “I figure this is going to be silly and funny,” and all of a sudden, you’re kind of emotionally invested in this relationship of these two guys. They do that constantly in all of their work, and I share that. I think the whole team shares that sensibility.

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. You have to start locking shots months out because one single shot of a dog talking takes three months to process, and you have a deadline. So you have to go backward from there, and you’re locking shots but trying to change dialogue. But I think that’s a lot of what they do is they’re just never satisfied, and that creates a really good product at the end, a good film, a good piece of art, or whatever you wanna call it. I’m sure there’s more to their magic, but that’s the bit that I kind of distilled from why they’re so great.

What is it like talking to a VFX house about, “I don’t think they’re humping fast enough?”

GREENBAUM: Yeah, definitely. Or how about this one? “His penis is a bit too pink and a little too wet.” I think I said that a few times. You know the shot where a Hunter is trying to hook the keys with his rocket? It’s hilarious, and all at the same time, you get so into the weeds of making a movie that you’re not thinking about it as funny at all. It loses its craziness, you’re just talking about humping that fast, and everybody nods, like, “I agree, it’s not fast enough.” There’s nothing funny about it, you’re just analyzing it and doing it.

But there were moments. Obviously, every once in a while, there’ll be a moment where I get outside of myself. There was one I remember, it was like four in the morning in Atlanta, and we’re waiting for Bug to hump the pile of trash when he’s first in the alley, when he comes and he’s trying to scare those mean dogs. He’s not really doing it, and it’s four in the morning. The crew is kind of like, “Oh my god,” and all you hear is the trainer going, “Humpity, humpity.” And I remember being like, “What am I doing?” Because that was the command she taught. After a while, he sure enough jumped on the bag of trash, and you heard little rustling, and people cheering the dog on.

I could be wrong, but I heard you adopted one of the dogs.

GREENBAUM: I did. I have Will Ferrell living with me now. There’s a puppy at the beginning of the movie in a little cardboard box who pops out. There were two of them, and they both needed a home. I took home one of them and one of our other producers took home the other, and I called my wife and daughter and said, “You guys, I’m going to bring home a dog.” They’re like, “Yay!” So they named him Reggie, appropriately, and yeah, he’s with me. He’s the best. I should have brought him tonight, but he’s a bit of a terror. I’m hoping he’s not getting any ideas from the movie. Yeah, we’ve got Reggie living with us.

When I saw this a few months ago, it did not have a mid-credit scene. When did you guys figure out that was gonna be in it? When did you actually film it? Was it recent? Was it in the past?

GREENBAUM: Yeah, always there. I think we debated whether it would be mid-credits or end of the movie, things like that. I think I was most attached to just that crotch cast that Will Forte’s wearing [laughs]. Just the idea of this weird crotch cast, and there were just tubes coming out of it. Like, what are those tubes doing? Then Dan’s awesome performance being a very straight doctor who’s had to deliver this terrible news. But that take was always there. I think maybe just the cut you had didn’t have it, or something.

Was it always called Strays?

GREENBAUM: Good question. It wasn’t, but it won’t be as crazy a title change as you would think. When I read it—this is my brilliant director’s idea—when I read it, it was called Stray, and my big pitch was, “We gotta call it Strays.” So I added the ‘s.’ But no, I actually did have kind of a take on that, which was that that was more the vibe of the movie to me, was this kind of camaraderie of a friendship. In a way, even though, of course, it’s Reggie’s film, I definitely pointed to Bridesmaids, which was, that’s not a film about all the bridesmaids, it’s a film about Kristen Wiig’s character, but the vibe of the film kind of conveys the group and the friends. So we changed it when I came on board, we added the ‘s’ and changed it to Strays.

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: It’s very difficult. I find it to be very, very difficult. One of the hardest parts of the process, to be honest. I fully sympathize with the idea of, like, “We gotta get butts in the seats, butts in the seats,” but my job, I find, as the filmmaker is to make sure your experience once you’re in the seat is exciting and you’re surprised, and there’s left turns and right turns. It is a balance. It’s a conversation with the studio and with my producing team and everyone, and it’s tricky. I generally like the balance to be done with this. Obviously, we were never going to give away the big ending, but to your point earlier and the idea that we might insinuate that they go to Doug’s, that that is maybe gonna happen, that’s kind of a pull.

Originally there’s a lot of little surprises, like the Dennis Quaid cameo, the eagle swoop-up. I mean, when we first screened this for people, they hadn’t seen the trailer. I think it was more, I’m guessing some people, hopefully, the eagles swoop-up they hadn’t seen yet, or maybe they’d all seen the trailers. But yeah, we’re hitting certain things. It’s a challenge. There’s no easy way around it. You just feel it out, and you figure out, “What are my absolute no-go’s?” Here’s what I will say—and I said this to the studio—I don’t care about protecting jokes, which I think is sometimes what they think. “Oh, you don’t want to give away your joke.” We have tons of jokes. I care about the emotional surprises – twists, turns, surprises where you weren’t expecting something. Those are what I’m trying to preserve for the experience of watching the film for the first time, and it is a balance, for sure.

I totally understand where the studio is coming from because a lot of people don’t realize it, but the average person goes to the movies, like, once or twice a year. So how do you get those people to be like, “This is the movie I want to go see?”

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.” Another one we’ve discussed at length, and I’ve kind of been holding my ground is, I really like the bunny, the reveal. We’ve been debating it, and I’ve been kind of holding my ground. It’s tricky. So anyway, it’s always a push and pull. It’s been a great relationship with Universal and a great conversation. They’ve been amazing how much they listen and actually don’t just say, “Well, too bad, we’re doing it.” It’s been a lot of back and forth with the whole thing.

Image via Universal

Talk a little bit about how you figured out the ending. Was it always that ending? Did you guys debate something else?

GREENBAUM: Certainly, we never wavered on Reggie getting his revenge on Doug. Coming out of the film, we always discussed [that] we liked Bug finding his home with the girl he rescued, Maggie (Isla Fisher) winding up at the police squad, Hunter finally leaving his cone and finding his confidence and consummating his relationship with Maggie. [Laughs] I think Reggie was the one we discussed. Certainly, I think I speak for Dan and I, we both really like keeping him that he’s choosing to stay a stray. I’ll explain part of what that is because I’m sure there are people in the audience, in general, there’s a feeling you get from people, like, “No, I need him to find a home, I need him to be happy, I need him to find love,” which I totally get. But for us, the film metaphorically really was about being in a toxic relationship and how you deal with that and how you get out of it, and how your friends help you out of that, and how you find your own sense of self-worth after being in a relationship where you were giving, giving, giving and getting nothing back. As silly as that may sound, that was always the emotional throughline to us, that it wasn’t just about the dog/human relationship, it was about human/human relationship. So that’s a lot of what Dan and I spoke about while we were working on the show together. So therefore, at the end of the movie, it just never felt right to us if the solution was finding someone new and you’re happy.

Now, did we consciously put the little boy in the yard who tells him, “Good boy?” And maybe there’s a chance that that boy could take him in later on? Yes. But we wanted to kind of separate those. I don’t know how it sits with everyone, but it sits really well for me, which is where I start for Dan and Louis, and the rest of the team. So, that’s probably the only element of the ending that we really kind of played around with, but never really ultimately went there and tried that out.

AUDIENCE: How did you find the dog, and how did you find the person who voiced the dog?

GREENBAUM: We found the dogs in a lot of different ways. So first of all, we kind of locked in that we wanted these certain looks. I think some of the breeds were in the script, and then we kind of found one or two after, like a Great Dane and we used a Border Terrier, so Reggie’s a Border Terrier who often looks like a mutt. But you kind of have to use pairs because, for those who don’t know, we had four dogs playing each of the dogs. So there were four Bugs, and there were four Reggie’s, and there were four Hunters. Now, granted 95% of the film, you saw one of them, really only one. This dog is named Sophie, she’s playing a boy even though she’s a girl, and this dog is named Benny, and 95% of the time, they are the ones you saw in the film. But we did need other backup dogs.

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. The other three dogs didn’t know a single command. They didn’t know “sit,” they didn’t know “stand,” they didn’t know anything two months before we started. So that gives you an idea of how talented the trainers are that they got these dogs and trained them two months before we got them off to that level. We found them all over the place. She was from Texas. My dog that I adopted was from the UK, very popular breed in the UK is the Border Terrier, and not very popular here. Hunter was from somewhere in Austria. It was very hard to find the older dogs, and we found them in shelters and rescues. So a few of the dogs, like I said, were actors.

Then pairing the names, it just was a fun process of thinking about who might fit the character. And, like I said, that came later. We had a funny app, there’s like a cheap app on your iPhone I used a lot where you can take a picture of dog and then record a voice, use a voice, and then it will quickly animate it…But I did use that a lot. I remember sending it out to Dan and Louis, and being like, “Alright, I took Will Ferrell’s voice, and I took Jamie Foxx’s, and I put them on the dogs. Let’s listen,” and kind of seeing how they married, and that was part of the process. Right away, I think Will was such an obvious choice, and Jamie, and they had never worked together. I had worked with Randall Park before, and I always wanted to work with Isla, so I felt like each of their personalities, casting-wise, kind of fit. It just took time thinking of names and looking at the dogs and working through it.

Image via Universal 

AUDIENCE: Speaking of the dogs, which was the best actor?

GREENBAUM: Very early, I would say without a doubt, it was Maggie. She knew 70 tricks when we started filming, so she was ready to go. She’s been in films, I can’t remember what they were called, but she’s acted. I’ll tell you, the little chihuahua at the end was the dog in Cruella. Fun fact. This is what I’m excited about now. So, she was probably the best, and even though you didn’t ask it, I would say, by far, the worst was Hunter. Hunter was really young and he would get the zoomies. You guys know what that is? So he’d be on set with his cone just ripping through sets, smashing into C-stands, and I remember calling Dan aside and being like, “I think we have to write him out of the movie. He can’t sit, he can’t stay, he can’t do anything.” To his credit, and obviously, more to his trainer team’s credit, that dog just completely figured it out and became one of the best. That stunt where he knocks on the doorknob, that’s shot practically. They trained the dog. He loved it. He’d run to the door, jump up and smash it down. He was amazing. So that was probably the best dog at the start, but I’m most blown away by Reggie’s performance in the film when I watch it. It’s so full of soul and emotion, and there’s definitely some VFX work that’s helping here and there, but a lot of it is the trainers and their working with that dog to get a performance out of it.

AUDIENCE: You mentioned that you started without actors, except you had your actors, and your actors were the dogs. You describe how you spent a huge amount of time. How did you find dogs essentially from all over the world for these parts?

GREENBAUM: It’s really a question for Mark Forbes, who’s our lead animal trainer. This is what he does. He has a network of trainers all around the world, so that’s where they start. To be honest, what he also was trying to do was talk me into the breeds that they already had trained dogs in. So, for example, I was struggling for months with some of our dogs, like I mentioned. I mean, all three of the dogs besides Maggie had no training, and they were struggling at the start of the shoot. Then one night, we had to shoot that scene with Chester, who is an English Bulldog who thinks that he has the invisible fence. That dog was like the most incredibly trained dog. They put him on a stay for 30 minutes while the whole set is getting lit, and he just sits there calmly, and I’m like, “I should have cast that dog as one of the leads.” So yeah, I don’t know if I can totally answer the intricacies of how they find the dogs exactly, but they start with the trainers who then have ties to all the animal community and rescue shelters and this and that and that, and they figure out how to find them. Definitely, a good amount of the dogs outside of our leads were working, acting dogs, professional dogs who mostly are owned by the trainers themselves. So they kind of come with the trainers.

AUDIENCE: How much improv was involved, if any?

GREENBAUM: Well, when you’ve got Jamie Foxx and Will Ferrell, it’s like, “Let them go!” But no, a lot. Great question. First off, we had a fantastic script that Dan wrote, we had incredible jokes, and Will and Jamie and everybody loved them. I mean, we would have packets of alt jokes ready to throw out. What I insisted on and luckily got was, early on—and I think this might be because I have more of a live-action shooting background—in the animation world, the actors come in, and they do their lines on their own with a director usually or something, and I thought that was kind of crazy. I’m like, “Why would we do that? Let’s get them together in a room and let them play off of each other.” I think Will and Jamie were so excited about working together that they did. So every session they had, they came together, and I think you can kind of feel it. It encouraged them to improv but also overlap. Dan and I talked a lot about, “How do we get the naturalistic performance you see sometimes in R-rated comedy where it’s not set-up, punchline, set-up, punchline?” It’s just kind of the way we talk that feels more natural and organic, and it’s like a mumbled joke here and a mumbled joke there. It just feels more real, and so we encouraged that. So it was a ton.

And the other fun part of this film was I would often take a clip and then show it to the actors and let them riff. So I remember showing Jamie Foxx all the weird stuff I had that dog do to prove to those big dogs that he’s crazy, and that’s where Jamie goes, “I’m 36-inch vertical!” I was like, “What a great improv! A dog who’s trying to convince other dogs he’s crazy, he’s talking about how high his vertical is?” It was great. Another funny improv, though, on the flip side of that is, I remember—again, a Jamie story—when Bug’s walking out in the woods and he’s upset, and he’s like, “I’m not lonely, I’m not scared.” Well, a leaf happened to fall randomly, and Benny got super scared of the leaf, so we’re like, “Oh, we’ve got to do something with that.” So, Dan and I started to write. We tweaked a little of the dialogue and showed it to Jamie, and then it became, like, “No man, I’m not scared of anything…Fuck! Fuck you, leaf.” So there were moments like that where they would play off the visuals. But yeah, definitely always encouraged improv.

I also think improv, not just for comedy’s sake, is like a core philosophy for me. It creates better performance because it just gets actors out of the lines. I think what’s cool about Dan, as a writer, is he has the same philosophy. Other writers, totally fair, are like, “No. The words are the Bible, don’t change them,” which I totally get. Especially if you’re an Aaron Sorkin, and you’re like, “Nope, there’s a rhythm. I wrote this very intentionally.” But for me, I’d rather sacrifice maybe the word-perfect stuff, and sometimes I have to go back, and be like, “No, you need to say this the way it was written.” But you just get a better performance, whether or not it’s funny or it’s also just a better performance.

Image via Universal

AUDIENCE: Speaking of the VFX, I was wondering if the digitized mouth movements were always the endgame for these animals because I know that for Homeward Bound, they have the animals just act throughout the entire movie, but they don’t animate the mouth movements. On the other end of the spectrum, you have a movie like Babe, and to this day, I’m still not sure entirely how they pulled the effects off for that. But I was wondering if animating the movements like this for Strays was always the plan, I guess.

GREENBAUM: Yeah, it’s a great question. It was always the plan. But I will say, when we were previewing the film, we’re testing it, we’re showing it to friends and family, we’re showing it to audiences like you guys, and then it gets scored. I don’t know if anyone’s ever been to a preview where you have to score a movie, but that’s a big part of the process. All of that, when we previewed, we tested, and we showed them, all of it was the style of Homeward Bound, simply because we didn’t have the VFX process yet. And what was good for me was it still worked, right? That was an interesting test. And at one passing moment, we were like, “Oh, we could save a lot of money…” But it was to the point where there’s a lot of jokes that hit much harder for me, and I think for most people, when you just feel a little bit of the dialogue, that you see that they’re mumbling out of their mouth and this and that. So it was always back and forth, but yeah, Homeward Bound was a huge inspiration. It was a little bit of a discussion, but kind of always the game plan.

Strays is now in theaters.