|
|
|
MARK FORBES on 'HOTEL FOR DOGS'
Contributed by Michael J. Lee, Executive Editor
for Radio Free Entertainment
January 9, 2009
In the family comedy Hotel for Dogs, Emma Roberts and Jake T. Austin star as orphan siblings who foster a sense of family when they use their resourcefulness to renovate an abandoned hotel and take in the city's homeless dogs.
The cast also features Don Cheadle as a compassionate and determined social worker looking to match the kids with a suitable home, and Lisa Kudrow and Kevin Dillon as reluctant--and sometimes comically clueless--foster parents. In this interview, animal trainer and coordinator Mark Forbes, whose credits also include Marley and Me, Evan Almighty, and Because of Winn-Dixie, takes us behind-the-scenes to explain some of what goes into turning canine companions into stars of the big screen.
Hotel for Dogs is now playing in theaters everywhere.
|
The Interview
|
MEDIA: When casting, what qualities do you look for in a dog? Friday, one of the canine stars of the movie, seems very expressive.
MARK: Yeah, and you usually get that with your lead dog, and that's what you do look for. You look for a face like that just stands out. And the second thing you look for is temperament. It's got to be a dog that isn't afraid of a lot of things, has a brain. You'll find most breeds that were bred for a purpose have a brain, whereas breeds that were just bred for a lapdog or a certain look [are] sometimes not as smart. Sighthounds, although they were bred for a purpose, are about as smart as this table, actually. [knocks on table]
Friday is a Jack Russell. Doesn't this breed require a lot of attention?
They do. They need a job. Like a lot of dogs that were bred for a purpose, they need a job, and if they don't get a job, that's when they start becoming destructive. It's not that they're malicious or anything, it's just that they have so much energy, they need to get it out...Which for us is great. Training a dog for a movie or for TV work, you can always channel the energy. It's much harder to try and get energy out of a dog that doesn't have very much. It's much harder than channeling the energy to train.
Were you looking to cast a Jack Russell in the lead canine role from the very beginning?
You know, the casting process on this project was very long, and there were many, many different chefs in the kitchen, from the studio to the producers, the director...Everybody had an opinion. And it was, I want to say, almost a two-month process before they really cast all of the hero characters and what they wanted, and went through many different versions. But I think Friday was always a Jack Russell.
Do you go through shelters looking for dogs?
We do. We go everywhere. And especially for this show. We had eight lead characters to cast, whereas on a lot of movies, you have one. So we had eight teams of dogs to find. And it's one of the hardest things we do. Half of our job is finding the right dogs. Because you can go out and get puppies many places, but to find an adult dog that has the look, has the right temperament, that somebody doesn't want, is a lot harder. And so we go to rescues, we go to shelters, we go to breeders. And it's usually a phone call to someone who knows somebody over here, who leads you to someone else. That's how we usually find them.
Are there breeds you would reject immediately?
I don't reject any breeds, because who knows what the project's going to call for? I love working with dogs that, again, were bred for a purpose. They just problem-solve better, they want to work, they have energy. Dogs that don't necessarily always have that, [such as] Afghan sighthounds, are willing, they just aren't always as intelligent. And then a lot of times, what we'll do even is--and I'll get in trouble with all the breeders in America for this--we'll go to the country of origin to find the dog. If it's a German Shepherd, we'll look in Germany, or if it's a French breed, we'll look in France. Because a lot of breeds that come over here to the United States are no longer bred for the purpose they may necessarily have been bred for...Because over here, a lot, they're bred for show. And when that happens after generations and generations, they stop looking at the temperament--it's more about the look, whereas we need both. Temperament, sometimes, is even more important.
|
|
How do you get the dogs acquainted with the kids they'll be working with?
Good question. For us, whatever movie we're doing, we try to get with the actors at least two or three weeks ahead of time. And a lot of times, it's more for the actors than it is for the dogs. Because the dogs will just come through, most of the time, four months of training where we'll take them to any different situation we can. There's no way to really re-create a set atmosphere, so we'll take them everywhere we can--to shopping malls, to theme parks, to the park, to wherever--so that when they show up on set, it's just another place. And we do the same with people. They learn to meet new people all the time so that when they meet the actors, it's just someone new for them. But what that sort of prep time with the actors does is lets the actors get comfortable with the dogs, which sometimes is just as important.
When a dog like the one who plays Friday isn't working, what's a typical day in his life?
He gets to just be a dog. He has no idea he's a star. He gets to hang out in the backyard. He actually lives, right now he's living with one of my head trainers on the show, and in her backyard she has Henry, who is [another dog in the movie]. She was actually the trainer on a TV show called Frasier, so she has another Jack Russell. And all of the trainers, we all have dogs in the backyard that we've done a show with.
In this movie, you have a bulldog who chews up everything, similar to Clyde, who was one of the dogs who played Marley in Marley and Me. Is it hard to find a home for a dog like that?
No. And he lives with his trainer. Clyde, it was more innate in him. We just encouraged it. Whereas with Cooper in this show, we really trained it in him. [His trainer] actually trained him to chew things, and also trained him to tear up things. It was much more of a trained behavior as opposed to just letting Clyde go...It's on a command, which is what we do with a lot of behaviors. We can't really teach manners to our dog as much. Instead, we'll teach them to go ahead and jump up on the couch, but then we teach them "no." So we teach them to jump up on people, we teach them all these bad things, but it's a command.
Is it important that they socialize with other dogs?
Not all the time. On this show, absolutely paramount that they had to be socialized with other dogs. On a lot of shows, it's just one character...That was very important for our hero characters. But with them, we had been training for four months. They had to be next to each other every day from the get go. So that had already been put into them. It was much more important for our big group running scenes. Two weeks out of any of those scenes where we had all the dogs running together, we had very specific training times where we got all the dogs together, starting in groups of ten, and then adding dogs and then adding dogs and adding dogs, just in a big pen. "Everybody just come in and get all your rear-end sniffing out of the way." All of that stuff. And no food--so nothing they can get jealous about.
Did any fights break out?
No, because we did that. We got very...I don't want to say lucky, but it was really one of my big things in the training time: we're going to weed out all the troublemakers so that we don't have any trouble on set when we get down there.
Did a territorial "alpha dog" emerge from your group?
You know, it didn't on this show. It usually happens on shows where we just have like one team of dogs that are not necessarily having to work together. Because what you'll find with a dog...You know, there's thousands of hours that go into training them, you're spending so much time with them one on one, you and the dog become the pack. And so you'll even find that they become more dog aggressive with so much one on one time. So you have to be careful and make sure that you keep socializing them. Otherwise, you may have the most incredibly trained dog in the work, but you are almost training into him that it's "us against the world," because you spend so much time together. So you do have to socialize him as you go along.
What was the hardest stunt to coordinate in this movie?
You know, there wasn't one specific stunt. I would say overall the hardest thing in this show was so many dogs working together. And not necessarily the 60 dogs running down the street, because they're all doing the same thing. Or even all the dogs at the table. They're all doing the same thing--they're all having to stay and wait till they get their cue to eat their food. The hardest thing is when we would have 7 or 8 dogs in a frame all doing something different.
|
|
|
