Channing Tatum and his producing partner Reid Carolin make their feature film directorial debuts with Dog, a buddy road trip comedy starring Tatum (“Army Ranger Jackson Briggs”) and Lulu the Belgian Malinois. Both Briggs and Lulu are suffering from PTSD from their time in the military, with Briggs also recovering from a traumatic brain injury that’s forced him to remain stateside.

Briggs is so desperate to get back to active duty that he agrees to drive Lulu over 1,000 miles to her friend/handler’s funeral in Arizona. Unfortunately for Briggs, Lulu isn’t the ideal travel buddy. Her time in the military has left her with severe behavior problems that Briggs is ill-equipped to handle. Fortunately for audiences, the pair’s crazy antics provide plenty of laughs while telling a heartwarming tale of two lost souls who save each other.

Tatum’s always loved dogs and Dog was actually inspired by an experience with his beloved dog Lulu. “I guess the inspiration or the theme of the movie came from an experience I had with my first dog. I had dogs my whole life, but Lulu was my dog that I raised from like six weeks old. She was just a little tiny ball of fur and grew into a big strong, Catahoula Pitbull mix. She lived about 11 years, she got sick, [and I] took her on a road trip in some of her last days. And I had some really profound, sort of lessons in those last days with her of just like surrendering and acceptance,” said Tatum during a virtual press conference.

“I came back and told my buddy about the trip and we kind of started talking about the story. We played around with that actual story of the sort of bucket list trip of a dog and his owners or his buddy and it just was a little too sad. It wasn’t really emblematic of me and Lulu, me and Lulu’s life together. Our life was an adventure,” explained Tatum. “It was joyful and funny and hilarious and crazy at times. And that’s the kind of story that we wanted to tell, so went in this direction.”

Channing Tatum dug up a classic film reference, joking that the relationship between Briggs and Lulu mirrors that of Ryan O’Neal and Tatum O’Neal in 1973’s Paper Moon. “It’s sort of like Paper Moon. She’s like my daughter,” said Tatum, laughing. “No, I’m kidding. Our dynamic is pretty simple. Like in the beginning, Briggs, really, this is not his dog and he is a little bit put out that he even has to do this to get the recommendation that he feels like he overly qualifies for for all the experience that he’s put in as far as his career goes.

He has to do it; it’s his only real option. And then like any good guy that’s going on a road trip, [he] wants it to be fun. He is trying to have as much as fun as possible and Lulu was just kind of becoming an issue at every step of the way.”

Pulling double duty as both actor and co-director – especially when his main co-star was a dog – was a difficult task for the first-time director. Tatum confessed he liked setting things up more than the actual experience of directing. That could be because he spent more time directing the dog while Reid Carolin directed him.

“It was definitely fulfilling,” said Tatum. “I can say I scratched that itch and tried to direct a movie. And if I ever do it again, I definitely won’t be in the movie. Editing, I did not like. There was no enjoyment in editing. I should never edit myself, period. I found out that was mentally an unhealthy thing for me.”

The Dogs of Dog

Three Belgian Malinois take on the job of playing Lulu in the film, with each dog selected for her ability to perform specific tasks or tricks. Britta, Zuza, and Lana share screentime with Channing Tatum, and he describes his canine co-stars as smart working dogs who are “on” all the time.

“Belgian Malinois are primarily – and Dutch Shepherds, which they’re basically the same dog…they’re just different colors – are primarily the work dogs in these high-level, multipurpose canine spots for all the teams, like Navy SEALS, Rangers, and Special Forces. On any of the teams, these are like the ultimate tool.

If you’ve not been around them, they are different animals; they are not your normal dog. It’s hard to describe it. Like their brains, their minds work so fast. I liken it to when a cat sort of sleeps all day and then does something so fast that you can’t even quite understand how they just did it so fast. You’re just like, ‘What just happened?!’ And because a cat can move really fast, their mind works really fast when it wants to. These dogs are like that 100% of the time.

They’re switched on. They love working. They want to constantly be doing something. They’re almost like a shark, sort of just like pace and just be like, ‘What are we doing, what are we doing, what are we doing, what are we doing?!’” said Tatum, laughing.

Tatum owns a Dutch Shepherd now and says her personality’s very much like that of a Belgian Malinois. “You can’t go to the bathroom without her being like, ‘I’m coming with you – this is what we’re doing.’”

The dogs cast in Dog genuinely wanted to do their jobs. “They never got tired. They never didn’t want to do a stunt. They were just ready to rock the whole time,” recalled Tatum. “I’ve worked on other movies that had little moments with other animals that – other than horses…horses are generally amazing to work with – but dogs and cats? No. These are the only dogs I’ll work with.”

Tatum explained Lana was the smallest, Britta was in the middle size-wise, and Zuza was the largest dog playing Lulu. Britta had the honor of being the “hero dog” – the one who did a lot of the acting.

“Zuza does a lot of like the wild stuff. We taught her some of the really kind of crazy pulling on the leash and wild things. Lana was the only one that would lay on her side and lay down. These dogs generally don’t love to lay down and do things like that. So, they all were kind of really specific for how we used them,” said Tatum. “I bonded probably the most with Britta because I had most of the really close acting with her.”

One of the funniest scenes in Dog involves Tatum attempting to grab a quick drink of water from a plastic bottle. Britta had the honor of being Lulu in the scene and did an amazing job of lunging from the back of the SUV through the opening between the driver’s seat and front passenger seat and grabbing the bottle before Tatum can take a sip.

“That was fun because we were losing the light and everybody was saying, ‘You need to get out of here. There’s no time. It’s just too complicated. We’ll never get the dog to do this right.’ And we were with a skeleton crew up in the woods in Santa Cruz [and] the rain was coming.

We were like, ‘Let’s just give a shot. Just set the camera up in the front and hopefully we’ll get [it].’ And, I mean, first take. Done. Second take, done. Amazing,” said Carolin. “And it was really funny.”

“It was wild. I’m so happy I still have my fingers from that one as well. She’s like a rattlesnake. It was crazy,” said Tatum, laughing. “And by the way, still to date, if you have a plastic bottle anywhere around, any time Britta comes on set everybody’s got to hide their bottles because she will snatch it. She’s just like, ‘I know this trick!’”

The Bond Between Handlers and Their Canine Partners

Special ops soldiers provided co-directors Reid Carolin and Channing Tatum with incredible access. Carolin and Tatum’s special relationship with canine handlers began when they executive produced the HBO documentary War Dog: A Soldier’s Best Friend.

“Our friendships with them continued into this movie,” said Carolin. “And those guys were on set with us for a lot of the movie. They’re with us now doing press. Their dogs are always around.”

Reid hopes the film helps people understand just how extraordinary the bond is between soldiers and their dogs.

“[…] One of the things we heard from all the guys in our film, our documentary, is that the dog became more than just a dog. It became a person, a soldier, a brother, a sister. It was not looked at as a dog inside that unit. I hope that by the end of the story, both Jackson Briggs, our main character, and the audience feel that way about Lulu. It’s why we called the movie Dog,” explained Carolin.

Carolin continued: “I mean, I think people look at the title and go, ‘Oh, you came up with it in a marketing meeting or something like that because it tested really well.’ In truth, it’s quite the opposite. It’s about the way we clinically look at these animals; we label them just as animals. And over time, the more extraordinary they become to us, the deeper we see them, the more they become just like us.”

* * * * * * * * *

MGM will unleash Dog in theaters on February 18, 2022.