Related Articles
Near the beginning of 2020, filmmakers David Siegel and Scott McGehee traveled to Newton, Iowa, to meet a Great Dane named Bing. The pair needed a leading canine for their next movie The Friend, an adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s novel of the same name, and the black-spotted boy looked like a perfect fit. The only problem? Bing was just two years old and didn’t quite have the maturity of the 150-pound five-year-old that Nunez had described in her book.
In retrospect, Bing’s adolescence was a blessing in disguise. Due to the pandemic and strike-related delays, the long-gestating project didn’t start filming until 2024, giving Bing a full presidential term to grow into an imposing yet adorable movie star.
Indeed, under the watchful eye of owner Bev Klingensmith and celebrated trainer Bill Berloni, Bing steals plenty of scenes as Apollo, a Harlequin Great Dane who is begrudgingly inherited by a struggling New York writer, Iris (Naomi Watts), when his owner, Walter (Bill Murray), a literary icon and her best friend, suddenly dies. In the midst of writer’s block, Iris learns to navigate work and grief with a monstrous (also-grieving) new roommate inside her cramped West Village apartment. It’s not long before a special, symbiotic relationship forms between Iris and Apollo — and by extension, between Watts and Bing.
To capture it on camera, Siegel and McGehee leaned on Bing’s obedience and his very game co-star. In a recent joint interview with Rolling Stone, the two shared the unique logistics and experiences of filming with a giant, Midwestern Great Dane in the heart of New York City — and revealed Bing’s special movie-star secret.
You conducted a nationwide search for Apollo. What does a dog interview look like?
David Siegel: It’s really two things. What is the countenance of the dog? What does his face look like? Do you go into his interior life when you look at him? Is he attractive? Does he drool too much? And we were always with our trainer Bill Berloni, who was looking for whether the dog was responsive. Is the dog gentle? Does he seem to like other people?
Scott McGehee: And I would say a third element is: What’s the dog’s owner like? Is this relationship going to be something we can work with? Is this going to be a problem on set?
DS: We wound up with Bev Klingensmith for Bing. She was sort of the special sauce. Bing loves her so much that we were able to use Bev to help control Bing’s eyeline in a really precise way, which was kind of amazing.
SM: Bill said that his normal strategy in a situation like this would be to keep the owner off set entirely, so that the bond that would form between the dog and Naomi would be the most important bond on set. Once he got to know Bev, he changed his mind and invited her into the process.
Were these interviews done in the owner’s homes with a camera? Was this like a typical audition process?
DS: We were shooting a lot with our phones. Sometimes it would be in people’s homes. Sometimes it would happen in the parking lot near the airport. Bing was at a dog training facility.
SM: One dog came to our office — we were pretty serious that it was going to be the dog.
DS: But he almost bit my face off. That ended the interview. No other actor has ever tried to bite my face.
What was it like pitching Naomi a movie that features a dog that could rip her arm off with a sudden yank of the leash.
DS: She’s such a game actor and game person, but I think the notion she’d be working with such an unusual dog was just immediately attractive to her. She loves dogs. She had recently lost a long-lived, important dog to her, and she posted her grief and memories of the dog. So we knew that that was an important aspect of her life.
SM: She has that kind of Aussie girl can-do. You tell her you want her to do something really improbable and she’ll figure out a way to make it [happen].
I read she trained with Bing for six weeks. Did you guys have a similar program to get on the same wavelength?
SM: It was the opposite actually. Bill told us that we were not to touch the dog.
DS: He didn’t tell us that we couldn’t! He wanted the primary relationship on set to be Naomi and the dog. He didn’t want people to be petting the dog all the time. Anyone besides us was really supposed to stay away. It was very siloed that way.
There’s a scene when Bing hovers over Naomi’s air mattress on their first night. How long did some of these intimate scenes take to get right?
DS: The interior of the apartment was a set we built for the movie, and that scene was shot on the penultimate day of the shoot. We were running out of time and we had a lot to do. We had a simple way that we thought we could pull it off, but everyone was in a little bit of a panic mode. And as we started that scene, it went so smoothly and so quickly — we shot that entire scene in about 45 minutes… He never let us down.
SM: Naomi’s ability to interact with a live situation and be game for dog breath and dog slobber and won’t break character — that makes it happen.
Can dogs get camera shy?
DS: I wouldn’t say that I ever noticed that. But Bing could become distracted. That didn’t happen very often, but that was an important thing that we did talk about. It’s just about keeping things simple and quiet.
I heard that if Iris ever had to scold Apollo in the movie, you had to move Bing into another room so his feelings weren’t hurt.
DS: Bev knows Bing so well. She was like, “If [Naomi] says ‘bad dog’ or scolds him, I’m going to spend two days trying to get him to be responsive again.”
SM: It will just bum him out so bad. He’s a pleaser. He wants to make people happy. And if he feels he did the wrong thing, then he won’t want to go back to set.
DS: “Get Bing out of his trailer…” [Laughs.]
SM: The hardest behaviors for him were the misbehaviors. Like when she’s pulling him to bring him out of the cab and he doesn’t want to go, or when she’s trying to get him in the elevator. Those were really tricky things to work out with him.
How did you adjust an Iowa dog to the big city with so much noise and so many other dogs and people?
SM: He’s a pretty unflappable creature. One of the protocols is, before we would shoot every day, he would get to know the set. We would bring him in and he’d sniff around so he felt comfortable and less curious about the setting that we’d be working.
DS: When they’re walking in Midtown, surrounded by scores of people, or when we take them to film festivals like Telluride and Toronto, he would be mobbed by people. He’s just the most nonchalant actor we’ve ever worked with.
SM: The one thing we had to accommodate with him was, we kept other dogs away. We had a team of set PAs when we were outside with Bing. If they saw a dog owner walking a dog in Bing’s direction, they would redirect or have them stop.
It’s funny to think more people on the street were turning their heads at Bing rather than Naomi.
DS: It’s really true. I mean, he’s just magnetic.
SM: I’ve been telling Bev’s secret — she uses a special shampoo for Bing that makes him extra, extra bright. It adds to his star quality. He has this special glow.
On the last day of shooting, how did you get to say goodbye to Bing? Was there anything special that you guys did?
DS: Well, Bev can get him to sing and it sounds sort of like howling. So, when we would wrap for an actor, she would get Bing to sing for them. Naomi’s last shot in this movie was the train scene going out to Montauk. There were a lot of transportation logistics, but then Bing and Bev and Bill were going off, and Naomi was being taken home. Naomi realized that she was going to be separated — Bing and Bev had already walked away. She’s like, “Wait a minute, where’s Bing?” So there was this mad dash down 125th Street and they met on the sidewalk and Bing sang. It was a very beautiful goodbye.
