![]() ![]() I wanted to make it one long sweeping shot, and we see the dog out one window. Kevin Zegers, the boy, is arguing with his mother in the living room about whether they're going to keep the dog. The basketball sequences were tedious because you have to build so many different shots. What was the hardest scene in the movie to shoot? He was really obsessed with playing with tennis balls, any kind of ball. If there was a ball anywhere in the room, he wouldn't pay attention to anything else. They tried to get the dog to make a basket, which actually didn't work that first time. ![]() I met them outside the production company's offices and got to know the dog. Kevin thought, "If I lob it to him on an arc with my back to the basket and he jumps up and tries to bite it, maybe he'll knock it into the basket." The secret was in the way he stood and the way he threw the ball to the dog. But the ball was too big to get his mouth around, so the ball would squirt away. Apparently when Kevin was dribbling his basketball, the dog kept trying to grab it. Kevin was playing basketball in his front yard, and Buddy, like most Goldens, was really obsessed with playing with a ball. ![]() Kevin DiCicco had found Buddy as a stray. When you first met Buddy, the dog in the movie, how did that meeting go? They have an innocence and a purity that human characters don't have. You always get an honest performance out of an animal. I find animals fascinating to make movies about. The boy just loves the dog and the trick ends up coming in between them. The boy doesn't love the dog because he can do this trick. I thought, well, make it like a circus dog that does this trick, and the trick is what takes the dog away from the boy. The dog had no idea he was making a basket, of course. What really made it work for me was this dog really did the trick of making baskets. I worked with and we completely revamped the script to make it more of an honest boy-and-his-dog relationship movie. I went back to Bill and said, "If you let me work on this and turn it from a gimmick movie into a really honest story of a boy and his dog, with no CGI, nothing fake and we emphasize the boy and his dog, I would be willing to do it." I started thinking about the dog playing basketball. Bill kept checking in and seeing how I was doing. I was directing Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A dog playing basketball? But Bill and I remained friends. Related: An oral history of the incredible cake scene from Matilda Would you be interested in looking at it and maybe directing it?" knew I was a director and he said, "We've got this movie about a dog that plays basketball. I got to know the producers, particularly Bill Vince and his brother Robert Vince. I was acting in a film being produced in Canada, a cop movie. How on earth did you get chosen to direct a movie about a dog who plays basketball? This month marks the 20th anniversary of Air Bud, so we tracked down Smith and asked for the inside story of how a low-budget flick about a basketball-playing dog blossomed into an unlikely Disney classic-or how it even got made in the first place. "Isn't that crazy? It's by the same author that did A Dog's Purpose. "I'm about to make another dog movie, crazily enough," the film's director, Charles Martin Smith, says. The movie was Air Bud, the dog was a talented Golden Retriever named Buddy gifted with the genuine ability to shoot hoops, and the director-well, what do you do with your career after directing a movie like Air Bud? In a distant epoch recognized by historians as "the nineties," millions of American children were delighted and charmed by a surprisingly stirring film about a dog who played basketball.Įither that, or it was just a mass hallucination we all experienced in between episodes of Doug and clips from the Clinton impeachment hearing.
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