Inspired by the beloved the beloved book character created by author Norman Bridwell, the family adventure comedy Clifford the Big Red Dog follows middle-schooler Emily Elizabeth (Darby Camp) as she meets an unusual little red puppy that she just wants to take home and love. Very unexpectedly and literally overnight, Clifford turns into a giant ten-foot dog that no longer fits in a small New York City apartment and can’t go anywhere without everyone noticing, so she must enlist the help of her impulsive uncle Casey (Jack Whitehall) to figure out what comes next.
At the film’s virtual press day, Collider got the opportunity to chat with director Walt Becker and producer Jordan Kerner about the key to making a character universally accessible and relatable for audiences, having a very strong emotional core to their story, the fun of working with so many talented comedic actors, and their favorite scenes in the film.
Collider: This movie was so much fun. What is the secret or trick to telling a sweet, nice family story that makes you root for the characters and cheer them on, and that somehow manages to do so without being cynical or mean or too sugary? How do you find that perfect balance?
JORDAN KERNER: First you start with a great piece of underlying material. Norman Bridwell was an imp as a human being. He was funny and warm and fantastic, and he created these black and white line drawings with one character colored in, in red. But at the core of those books was unconditional love between Emily Elizabeth and Clifford. I think that’s something that applies to all cultures, everywhere in the world. To translate that into the secret sauce, if you will, of a movie that is photo real, it actually allows the audience, and we hope most of the people in the audience are gonna have these creatures living in their lives that are dogs or cats or birds or whatever it might be, who have an uncanny knowledge of what we’re thinking, as we do about them. Therefore, Clifford himself needed to be something that we wanna hold and we wanna play with and we wanna love. It allows us that accessibility to that kind of character.
Walt, as the director, is that something that you felt was there on the page in the script, or was that something you kept fine-tuning throughout making the movie?
WALT BECKER: We went through a lot of different drafts, but the good news was having a very strong emotional core to the source material without having to follow a specific story from the book. They really were more vignettes. They were about feelings. So, we had a wide open space. I’m such a huge Amblin fan, so for me to make live-action, four-quadrant adventure movies with a little bit of magic realism, they’re just throwbacks to these great movies from the ‘30s and ‘40s that I used to watch. The family movies of those eras, like The Wizard of Oz, or even [Steven Spielberg’s] E.T., which shares a lot of the same DNA. At the core, it’s about young protagonists who have this hole in their lives, and then this magical creature comes in and they bond together and they express this inter-species love and go on this crazy journey and help each other. I felt that was a really good spine for our Clifford story, especially doing it in this live-action world. And then, we got John Cleese and created a nod to the books with Mr. Bridwell. He’s our wizard, giving it a little magic. That pushed it over the top for me, in terms of where we wanted to go with the movie.
As a director, what’s it like to work with so many great comedic actors? Is there a temptation to just let them do their thing, or do you have to actually keep them focused to get through the scene?
BECKER: I always go, “Make sure we get what’s in the script because we have pondered this for a year.” So, we always try to get that. There’s nothing that an actor could tell me they wanted to try that I probably wouldn’t do. You draft the best actors you can, and when you have a bunch of really talented comedic people playing off each other, it’s amazing to see how elevated the script gets, by letting them improv just a little bit. Suddenly, one plus one equals three. Jack [Whitehall] was quite good at that, and so were John Cleese Darby [Camp]. And then, you have some of my heroes, like David Alan Grier from In Living Color, and Paul Rodigruez, and Russell Peters, a comic I watch all the time on Netflix, or Kenan [Thompson] from Saturday Night Live, or Rosie Perez, and it’s nice. You get what’s on the page, and they always come prepared because they believe in the script too, and then it’s always nice to just give them leeway to try things in different ways. I think you always get the best side of people that way.
KERNER: After reading the script, all of the actors really wanted to be a part of it. Choosing people that seeped in through many years of watching them on television, or seeing them here or there, it automatically felt like a family. The community of Harlem is so diverse and that’s why we had to cast in exactly that way. It somehow felt like they’d been together for 15 or 20 years, and Emily being new to the community has already begun to fit in and already become a part of this group. I think that the improv that Walt is talking about and the beautiful comedic timing of people like Kenan and others from Saturday Night Live, who are used to working together and playing off each other, really came through very quickly.
It seems inevitable, when you have a movie about a gigantic dog, that you’re going to have zany, fun, wild, crazy moments going on, and I especially loved the whole sequence at the vet. Do you guys each have a favorite moment or scene in the film that really stands out for you?
BECKER: It’s funny that you say the vet because that’s probably my favorite, when they’re talking about taking Clifford’s temperature. I just thought Kenan was so good in that scene. When we set out to do this, we said, “We want Clifford to be a real dog, plus 30%.” We wanted him just ever so slightly a little bit more sentient than the average dog without talking. That’s one of these great moments in the movie where you get a sense that he’s in on this whole joke as well, with the thermometer. Comedically, that’s one of my favorites.
KERNER: Having worked with Kenan since he was nine years old in The Mighty Ducks, I love Kenan and I said to Walt, “You’re just gonna love him. You’ll both love each other.” And they did. It was great. It was literally the last day of shooting. I said, “When Kenan walks onto the set, you’re gonna feel the energy and the sweetness,” because that’s who he is, as a person. It was like bringing up the grand slam hitter with two outs at the bottom of the ninth. You just bring him in and let him go, with Jack and Darby and Izaac [Wang] and everybody. He was just fantastic in that.
But the scene for me that got me the most and that I feel really the most moved by was the scene on the dock when Clifford gets small and he’s gonna have to leave the person that he loves the most. I loved that. Walt was the savior on that. It was originally written just the way it was, and then for budgetary and other reasons, we ended up having him coming out of a van because the dock and boats and tugboats and all of that was so expensive. But as a little miracle, and we had a lot of little miracles in this movie, we went out to a location and we saw this dock with this tugboat, and I turned to the owner and said, “Hey, could we use the boat in this shot?” And he said, “Yeah, for 300 bucks, we’ll get a guy out to pilot it.”
We started shooting the scene and we realized that, in the harbor, there was this huge freighter right off our dock. We had never seen it before, on any of the prep or anything else, and that freighter ended up staying there for four nights. We were able to shoot it with this beautiful freighter that our tugboat was going to, to take Clifford away. That scene was full of little miracles that we never expected, and therefore, for me, has the emotion of the scene, but also the emotion of the miracles.
Clifford the Big Red Dog is in theaters and available to stream at Paramount+.