If one wanted to make a movie like director Josh Greenbaum’s raunchy canine comedy Strays, it could easily be achieved through some sort of animation process. Or, if you want to go the traditional route, you could use real dogs that are meticulously trained to do things like hump various objects and just animate the voices. Choosing the second option, Greenbaum may have seemed nuts, but he had team as nuts as he was to take on the task of making this upcoming movie .
The man who directed the comedy surprise Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar revealed the tricks of the trade in an interview with EW. Talking about how his crew was in a bit of disbelief about what was asked of them, Josh revealed a moment where he broke the ice with that fact, which led to a big ask:
I mean, there’s multiple humping scenes. [Laughs] But that was an early moment of our shoot, where we literally had four dogs humping lawn ornaments. I think I yelled to the crew at one point, like, ‘Yes, this is really our job. We’re really doing this, everyone.’ But that was another behavior where I said to the trainers, ‘Is this trainable?’ They said yes, and they figured out their different techniques of how to do it.
Dogs have a traditional image of being able to hump anything when they’re in the right mood. However, in a movie that Josh Greenbaum promises was made up of 95% “real dog performance,” that attitude needs to arrive on cue. So how does one convince real dogs to do any of the crazy stuff we’ve seen in the Strays trailer?
Well, much like the answer that Josh got from his trainers, it is a trainable action. Revealing further details in how the Will Ferrell/Jamie Foxx-starring R-rated romp captured such actions on film, the commander of Strays’ bawdy brigade shared one detail in particular that's a laugh riot. Behold, the command that the canine trainers would use on set when it was time for the magic, in an example centered around Jamie Foxx's character, Bug:
At one point, it was 4 in the morning in Atlanta, with a lot of night shoots. Our set was quiet, and we were waiting for Bug to hump the pile of trash, when he is trying to convince these big dogs that he’s crazy. You could just hear the trainer say a quiet ‘humpity humpity,’ which was the command the trainer decided to use as the word. Those are the moments where you realize what you’re doing, and it seems so absurd. [Laughs]
Depending on how serious an animal trainer is about their job, the R-rated antics that Strays required might have seemed ridiculous. Again, based on some of the funniest moments in Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar, some really outrageous stuff was to be expected. Although, when a trainer can issue a command like "humpity humpity" with a straight face, and for several takes, they're probably a-ok with what's being asked of them.
Rounding off his story with this final anecdote, Josh Greenbaum confirmed that the people on his team were absolutely more than game. Better still, there were some specific reasons that the canine trainers were “dying” to take a crack at the traditionally family-friendly genre they’ve worked in for so long:
But I also think the trainers were very excited. When we approached the training team, they were like, ‘We’ve been dying to do this.’ They’ve been doing kid’s movies for 20 years, and they were all thinking, ‘How has no one done this before, a more adult and realistic version of what a dog’s inner monologue might be?’
With all of this focus on just how to get dogs to "humpity humpity" on cue, there’s another question that’s been hidden in plain sight: does this furry adventure make the list of movies where the dog doesn’t die? To learn this and more, you’ll have to head out to see Strays, as it’s set to debut in theaters this weekend. We’d like to bet that the whole crew survives, but this is an R-rated sendup of animal adventures, so anything technically goes.
