The Truth About Kids and Dogs
Jay Russell and My Dog Skip

By Ted Elrick
Photos by Jeanne Louise Bulliard
©2000 MDS Productions, LLC

Jay Russell with Frankie Muniz

There's the old adage that you never want to make a movie involving kids and dogs. For My Dog Skip, director Jay Russell took on both. With a $5 million production budget, the film took in nearly $35 million at the box office and is expected to do quite well on its recent home video and DVD release.

Russell said that he feels as if he broke every show business rule in the book on Skip. "I feel like I kind of paid all my dues at once with this movie because I worked with kids and a dog, plus I did a period piece and all on a very low budget," he said.

Yet the story was such that Russell, whose background includes directing tourism commercials for his home state of Arkansas' Department of Tourism for his then boss former Governor Bill Clinton, felt compelled to make the movie. Based on the autobiographical book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Willie Morris, My Dog Skip is the story of a sheltered 9-year-old boy who grows into manhood with the help of his best friend, a terrier named Skip.

"There's something about a boy and his dog," Russell said. "It's one of the few types of stories that allow men to be emotional. There's also something about the bond between people and a dog that really allows us to contemplate larger and more universal themes. That's why these movies tend to work on us. All of us who saw Old Yeller as kids, we just can't get it out of our minds and more importantly our hearts."

But to bring the story to film required that Russell tackle actors, human and non-human, that many would like to shy away from. Russell feels that his greatest asset might have been his own naiveté on the problems of directing children and dogs. "I armed myself with ignorance. I would say, 'Let's have the dog drive the car.' I didn't really think about all the problems that would be associated with it until we really got into preparation."

By then Russell had decided that he wanted to make the scenes with the dog as realistic as possible and wanted to film the dog in a different manner. He felt that audiences had become used to seeing a dog's actions and reactions as a series of individual tricks, of little bits and pieces edited together to create a performance.

Russell decided he wanted as much done in wide shots as possible. "I felt that psychologically we would really begin to believe that Skip is really this dog, that he's not a trick dog; that he is this boy's dog. If we could really buy into all of that, it would endear us to him and the boy even more, so that by the end, when Skip gets dangerously close to leaving this world, we would be locked into him."

For these latter scenes, Skip was played by Moose who is best known for his role on Frasier. For the majority of the film, Skip was played by Enzo, Moose's son. There were also a stunt dog and several puppies to play a very young Skip.

"It was a really tough job for the dog trainer, Matilde de Cagny. Some of the really difficult scenes became two or three-trainer shots. One of the more effective ones is at the very end of the movie where you have the old Skip going toward the bed, then putting his paw up on the bed. That's a three-trick shot. We had two trainers working at once.

"The arthritic walk is one trick, then going to the bed is another, putting the paw up on the bed is another. You try to shoot all of them without the dog looking at the trainers off camera. We had one trainer off to the right of the frame giving him a verbal command for the arthritic walk. Then we had another trainer ­literally hanging off the side of the house just outside the window giving Moose a visual cue to put his paw up on the bed.

"The trainer told me there was no way we were going to get this in one shot. But we did. We worked the same way for the scene where Skip runs out onto the football field, grabs the football and leaps up into the boy's arms. That would ­normally be done in two shots, but we got it in one with two trainers off camera giving different commands."

Another hurdle was finding an actor to play young Willie Morris. After lengthy casting sessions in Los Angeles and throughout the South, Russell was nearing

 the start date of the film and he had yet to find an actor he felt could play the role. Then he received a videotape from a casting agent in New Jersey. There were 20 different actors on the tape and he began to fast forward through thinking there wasn't anybody.

"Suddenly, there was this little unique face that just stopped me dead, even in fast forward," Russell explained. "I watched his reading and it was really wonderful and simple. I sent the tape over to [producer] Mark Johnson and said, 'I think we found our boy.' He said, 'Great, which one is it?' And I said, 'I'm not going to tell you.' And I had Mark watch the tape and he stopped right on Frankie Muniz too."

They immediately flew Muniz and his mother out for a reading and screen test. Russell decided he'd pick them up at the airport so that he could have some time with them before the test. "The reading was down in Santa Monica. Frankie had never been to California so we had lunch down at the beach, walked around the beach, and I felt even stronger that he was going to be our lead. We got to the stage where we were going to shoot the audition and I found out that Frankie and his Mom didn't realize I was the director of the movie. They thought I was just some guy driving them around. I found that even more endearing because I realized I wasn't getting an act, I was getting the real people. It's been fun to see everyone else fall in love with Frankie the way I did when I picked him up at the airport that day. He has a huge hit with Malcolm in the Middle and I hope he is able to stay as genuine as he is."

Russell immediately put Muniz and Enzo together to help them get more comfortable with each other. "Frankie had never really been around a dog before. He was quite scared of the dog initially," he said. "We had Frankie working with the dog for about three weeks getting comfortable with him and once that was done he learned little commands that he could give the dog himself while doing the scenes. An amazing part of Frankie's performance is that inside the scenes, even the emotional ones, what the audience is not hearing on the track is that between every line there is a dog trainer saying, 'Stay' or 'Sit.' This kid is giving a great performance not only with the normal distractions of filmmaking, but also the dog trainer commands. It's very distracting and I worked very closely with him as an actor to help put that dog trainer out of his head so he could stay focused. It's a very difficult thing for an actor of any age to stay inside the scene with all that going on. For me as a director it was the most fun I've had in my life because it was so rewarding to see it come off."

Because the film was low budget, Russell only had one week to rehearse the rest of the kids in the film. He had no rehearsal time with the adult actors and, in fact, only had Kevin Bacon for six days of shooting and Diane Lane for eight. "But they're such pros that we were able to do some rehearsals on the set before we shot," Russell explained. "Most of the kids had never really done anything before, so it was a real delicate balance to have some rehearsal so that they would know what they had to do but at the same time, since they were non-actors, not lose their spontaneity."

Russell did talk with other professionals who had worked with kids before and confessed that, at times, he would get frustrated because the kids would simply lose it at a certain point.

"They would lose the focus and want to horse around," he said. "You can get frustrated and want to snap them back as they did in the old days, but I would remind myself that these are kids and they deserve the opportunity to be kids. As a director, I had to make a judgment call on a sometimes hourly basis. 'When are they done? At what point is it diminishing returns?' Some days they could go all day. Other days about half way through I'd have to turn to my production manager and say, 'How about some dog shots? Let's go get some second unit stuff.' There were points when they would not be professional actors and turn into kids and I tried to respect that. I still say that making this film with kids and dogs was the most rewarding experience of my professional life."

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