Naomi Watts is a small woman. Filmmakers David Siegel and Scott McGehee loved the contrast between her tininess and the scale of her Great Dane costar in “The Friend,” Bing, who plays Apollo, a dog grieving the loss of his owner (Bill Murray). Iris is also mourning her best friend and mentor, and together, they find some solace. Based on the 2018 National Book Award-winning novel by Sigrid Nunez (also the author of the book that inspired Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door”), the film captures a literary woman’s world without making her pretentious. Like many of Siegel and McGehee’s films (“The Deep End,” “Suture,” “What Maisie Knew”), “The Friend” is sad, witty, warm, and charming, and brings some poignancy along the way.
The trick was moving the movie out of Iris’s head and into a living story. Siegel and McGehee were told the book was unadaptable. “We were attracted to the universal themes of the story, from friendship and love to grief and loss,” McGehee told IndieWire. “Pulling the movie out of the book was a process of trying to figure out how to make things visual and make things an experience instead of an idea. We’re giant fans of the book, but it’s a big translation.”
They wrote the script on spec. When the pandemic shut down the project, they were disheartened and made “Montana Story” instead. And when the time came around again to find financiers for “The Friend,” the filmmakers opted not to take the foreign sales route by selling territories at Cannes.
“We cast the dog before the pandemic, and he’s the only throughline we had,” said McGehee. “He was a little too young when we met him. He was only two, and by the time we circled back, he had aged into the role he was supposed to be — five or six.”
The directors and Watts had to work closely with his trainer and owner because, as Siegel said, “he’s a real character in the movie.” The dog was so sensitive that the filmmakers had to work around his eagerness to please. In one scene, when he trashes Iris’s apartment, she says, “Bad dog!” to Apollo. That would have shattered Bing, so she said it to an empty room, and when he was in the shot, said, “Good dog!”
Watts was able to play both smart and vulnerable. “So the idea of her with this big dog, the physical comedy of that,” said McGehee, “and also her sensitive vulnerability in relation to the larger story of losing her friend, all of that fit her really well.”
Toward the end of the shoot, when the cast and crew were getting off the train on 125th Street in Harlem, Watts realized that she was wrapping her role and would never see Bing again. She turned and ran back to him for a final hug. And Bing howled his farewell to her. When he saw her again in Telluride, he gave her a big slobbery welcome.
Watts was old friends with her “St. Vincent” co-star Bill Murray, so she called him and brought him on board. He’s notoriously difficult to communicate with. “We got him the script quite quickly, and he read it quite quickly,” said McGehee, “and he responded to it. But trying to communicate with Bill, like texting Bill or calling Bill, that’s the tricky part. And he has no rep except his lawyer. So, people talk about having to throw scripts over the fence to get him to read something.”
“But it’s not just that,” added Siegel. “You also have to throw plane tickets over the fence and hope he shows up. He’s a real free agent; he takes care of himself and gets around, and there aren’t a whole lot of people handling Bill. He was present for it and enthusiastic about the film.”
Raising the financing independently with equity investors “was a big swing,” said Siegel. “We’re hoping it pays off. We explored doing it that other way, with a foreign sales agent and and raising money through territories. That always felt to us like we were undervaluing the film; it seemed that those numbers are always betting on mitigating the failure of a film, and people getting out anyway, and it seemed like we believed in the watchability of the film that we knew we could make, and that there was a better way to do this one this time. We just thought we would bet on the upside, not the downside.”
After debuting well at Telluride and Toronto, the filmmakers are playing New York and still waiting for their movie to find the right home.
