Anyone thinking dog movies were the main inspiration behind the new R-rated comedy Strays would be wrong. While there’s plenty of canine DNA in these in the raunchy outing, it’s got more in common with Superbad than The Incredible Journey.
“I came in on Strays fairly early on; I read the script and loved it. I expected it to be more of a spoof and was like, ‘Oh, this is Not Another Dog Movie,’ but I was very surprised by the level of depth and character,” recalled director Josh Greenbaum. “It had its own story to tell, which was great, and there were themes about toxic relationships, how your friends get through them, and how you find your sense of self-worth. I didn’t look at dog movies for inspiration. I was, thinking about Toy Story, and that’s not a movie about toys. Strays is not really a movie about dogs, but it will appeal to dog lovers.”
“We wanted to wink and nod at all those moments that we know our dogs do, like spinning around when going to bed, making fun jokes about that, and ask what the inner monologue of those moments sounds like.”
It was those relatable elements of humanity where Greenbaum pulled his influences and references.
“I thought about my favorite R-rated comedies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” he explained. “If you go back before you saw that film, I remember thinking, ‘That sounds pretty dumb. It’s going to be kind of a loud comedy about a guy who somehow made it through life and has never had sex,’ but then it treated that very earnestly, honestly, and emotionally, so that was a touchstone for me.”
“When you make an R-rated comedy, I think the ones that excel, like Superbad or Bridesmaids being other great examples, you go there with your hard R outrageous body jokes, but you completely treat the characters like complex characters with real emotions, stakes, and stories.”
He continued, “There were two films that weirdly jumped into my head that I think, at first glance, you would say, ‘What?’ One was Stand By Me. It’s a film I love, and these four characters in Strays were going out on a journey, all growing and learning along the way. It was also similar to Breaking Away. That was a film I grew up with, my dad introduced me to it, and I absolutely loved it. Again, it’s got underdogs thing, pun intended, with the four of them coming together and supporting one another through friendship and finding their sense of self-worth.”
It was the buddy comedy element that Greenbaum leaned into. Will Ferrell and Jamie Foxx lead Strays‘ voice cast as an abandoned terrier called Reggie and a foulmouthed Boston Terrier named Bug. Along with Isla Fisher’s Maggie and Randall Park’s Hunter, the foursome set out to get Reggie back to his neglectful owner so the terrier can bite off his genitals in revenge.
“Even though we have a kind of four dog surrogate family, at the center are Will and Jamie,” the director explained. “Just like with movies like Midnight Run and Planes, Trains and Automobiles, they are an odd couple stuck together on a journey, and through their differing philosophies about life, the sparks fly, both comedic and dramatic, but they help each other.”
Strays is a movie about family, but it is not a family film. However, Greenbaum doesn’t want people to be pretentious or dismissive about it just because it’s raucous and rude.
“I think that the second you add swear words or graphic humor, somehow some people have to say, ‘Oh, well, it’s no longer art. It’s no longer intelligent,’ and I think that’s unfair,” he mused. “Obviously, I’m biased, but I think there is an art to it. Here’s the thing for me with R-rated comedy, I’m always very wary of saying, ‘Oh, we’ve got to push the hard R as much as you can because that’s what people want.’ People don’t care if the joke is R or PG; what they want to do is laugh. The R rating enables you to be more honest with your comedy, tell smarter stories, and be more emotionally honest.”
“I don’t want to speak for everyone, but when I get around my friends, we don’t talk in PG voices. We don’t censor ourselves. In a movie, it enables us to be more emotionally grounded and authentic; in doing so, the films can be more emotionally captivating for adult audiences.
Greenbaum, best known for directing the documentaries Becoming Bond and Too Funny to Fail and the comedy Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, not only had a “wonderful” script from Dan Perrault to work with but also had producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller on hand. Blending live-action with elements of animation was a first for the filmmaker, so he relished having that team behind him as well as brilliant swearing swordsmen Ferrell and Foxx ready to get dirty.
“We recorded all the voices after so we could keep rewriting, adding, and trying new jokes with audiences, but when you hire Will and Jamie. It’s like you let them run and spar, to use your analogy of swordsmen, which I love. They’re incredible.”
The director pushed for the cast to record their voiceovers together rather than individually.
“Luckily, they all were game to do it. I think Will and Jamie did every one of their sessions together. I got a session or two with all four of them, with Isla and Randall, and I encouraged them to overlap, improvise and step on each other’s lines, which they’re always told not to do,” Greenbaum enthused. “I wanted to get that fun and comedic improv, but also naturalistic. I wanted to make sure we had the mumbly, quiet joke to the side or overlapping the snide remarks and all the little things that you get when you let brilliant actors like them improvise.”
Having to shoot the animal actors before the human cast added their dialogue meant the filmmaker had to shoot more than intended to ensure his editors had enough to work with. It also meant he could try things out and see what Ferrell, Foxx, and the others could come up with.
“When Bug first runs out of the alley in the city, he scares off the mean, big dogs and acts like a crazy little dog. I just had the trainers do as many weird behaviors as I could film,” Greenbaum recalled. “I had him spin in a circle like he might be barking at his own ass, I had him jump weirdly, he ran over and humped a pile of trash, and then I showed those clips to Jamie Foxx. When the dog jumped in the air, Jamie he made a weird noise and said something like, ‘You see that? That’s a 36-inch vertical!’ I was just like, ‘That’s so funny. Why would a little dog be bragging about doing a vertical and try to threaten other dogs?’ That’s what you get when you have Jamie Foxx.”
“Similarly, I remember a scene in the movie where Bug is walking through the woods, and a leaf fell and spooked the little dog while we were filming. We showed it to Jamie, and he added a whole thing where he’s walking through the woods saying, ‘I’m not scared of anything,’ that’s right when the leaf falls, and he says, ‘Aagh! F**k you, leaf!’ When the actors brought something new to the table, I would ask my editors to find footage from the extra stuff we shot that could make the bit that the cast came up with work so it was like a living, breathing film the whole time.”
However, there was one moment that the director didn’t see coming, and that was how bizarre it would feel picking out faux poop that would play a vital role in a dog pound escape scene. Like Hitchcock trying to find a substance that would look like realistic blood in Psycho, this was Greenbaum’s creative struggle.
“I think we did pretty well,” he laughed. “There were a few different techniques, and we absolutely had a turd creation department (laughs). There were moments while making this movie when I stopped, and I had to think about what was going on. This was one of them.”
“You’re a director in the middle of making a Hollywood movie, and here was my prop department presenting me with, I would say, 500 pieces of s**t; I’m not kidding, and I’m looking and having a pair each one with each dog for the dog pound scene. I was thinking about which one would go with which dog, thinking, ‘Is it believable? Is it funny?’ I had to pull back and be like. ‘This is my job. What am I doing?’ (laughs)”
Greenbaum eventually found the final feces. He revealed, “There was a combination. I think some of those were like painted styrofoam, others were created with a sort of cake icing bag but on a larger scale, and we also had a poop cannon for when one of the dogs poops against the wall. You want it to look and feel real because the second you get anywhere near trying to be cartoony, it ceases to be funny for me.”
As proud as he was about rising to that challenge, it was securing a cameo by one of his heroes, Dennis Quaid, that Greenbaum recalled most fondly.
“I couldn’t believe it, and he was so down for it,” the director enthused. “I love Dennis Quaid, and he was in Breaking Away, one of the influences for me with Strays. So there we are on set, having this in-depth conversation about him making that wonderful film that means so much to me.”
“The original Strays script just said a birdwatcher was out in the woods. Dan and I were working through that whole set piece, and we were like, ‘Oh, it’d be funny if all of a sudden we cut to an ornithologist looking at certain birds and saw an eagle carrying two dogs,’ and we wondered who would be funny. We wanted to do some winks and nods to dog movies, so that’s where my brain went towards these great movies that Universal produced, including A Dog’s Purpose, which Dennis starred in. We contacted him, he got it, and it was pure kismet because he happened to be in Atlanta where we were shooting.”
Greenbaum concluded, “Dennis showed up, killed it, and was super funny. I remember sitting there trying to come up with different bits and thought of this gag about what was in his book, and he loved it. Honestly, it was a blast, and Dennis is the best.”
The filmmaker is now a dog owner after taking in one of the four-legged cast members when filming was over. “I adopted little Reggie,” he confirmed. “There’s a puppy at the beginning of the film that comes out of a cardboard box; he needed a family, so I brought him home to my wife and daughter, and now I effectively have Will Ferrell living with me in my house.”
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