Interview: Boaz Yakin and Josh Wiggins of “Max”

Boz Yakin wrote and directed “Max,” the story of a weapons-sniffing military dog whose human partner is killed. So traumatized he can no longer work, he goes to live with the grieving family and is cared for by their younger son, played by Josh Wiggins. I spoke to Yakin and Wiggins about the film and got to see Jagger, one of the five dogs who play the title character, too.

“I felt like it had been a while since someone made a movie about the human/animal dog human bond in particular,” sais Yakin. “A story that was was exciting and adventurous and harkened back to some of the things that excited me when I was younger. I wanted to make a family movie but not just for kids. I approached my friend Sheldon (co-writer Sheldon Lettich), who was a Marine and a Vietnam vet. He brought the idea of making it about a MWD, a military working dog. Once that came in the family that Josh is apart of and all that just kind of started to create themselves and it all started rolling from there.”

Josh Wiggins is also experienced with dogs and has three dogs himself, a Rottweiler, a Lab and a little Chihuahua Wiener dog mix, “every level, small, medium, and large.” His father is a K-9 dog handler, who trains dogs to locate bombs. “Before I left to go shoot for the video I ran the dogs and it helped a lot. You learn how to hold the dog and how to compose yourself and stuff like that.” Then he spent some time with the dogs in the movie so they would be comfortable with each other. “Before we started shooting I went to this facility where they were training. We would run around on bikes and get into cages with them, run around trees back and forth. I love dogs, so I was very comfortable bonding with them. It’s just like with a person. When you spend months and months with someone you get pretty close to them.”

Yakin said the dog trainers were as much a part of the making of the movie as the cinematographer and stunt coordinator. “They train a lot of the animals you might see in a lot of movies. And they’re just so specific and so well organized and it really makes your life easy. The dogs respond to that kind of environment so well. It really was remarkable for both of us to see what they were able to make them do.” The two main dogs were named Jagger and Carlos, but each of the five dogs used to play the role of Max had special skills. They had to use a female dog to play Max in the fight scenes because males are not permitted to fight each other. Carlos was unpredictable but uncannily was the best “actor.” In one scene, he had to convey a new sense of respect for one of the characters and he added tip of the head that was all his own. And “there was a moment at the beginning of the movie where in order to show that he’s found the weapons, he is supposed to just sit where they are. So Carlos comes and sits and does this with his head and I was almost tempted not to yell. Like people are going to think it’s like cute dog added right you know. But in fact Carlos was just his jittery self got on the thing and went here ok and sat down on it and I went man this dog is unbelievable. He kept doing stuff like that throughout the film. So a lot of what gives Max his personality is Carlos’ personality.”

Wiggins is terrific as Justin, an unhappy kid who resents his father (Thomas Haden Church) because he is demanding and undemonstrative. And because Justin blames his father for sending his older brother, Kyle, to war. “He’s definitely overshadowed by his brother but I think there is definitely some jealousy, whether he would accept it or not, because his brother is kind of his dad’s perfect image of what a son should have been and Justin is not like that. So I think there is definitely some jealousy. I think Kyle fits in much better with his family than he does. But that doesn’t mean there is resentment towards him. It’s jealousy you know, not resentment. He has to find himself.” There are a lot of stunts in the film, as Justin and Max get involved with illegal weapons dealers. There were stunt doubles, but Wiggins said, “I did a good amount of the bike riding. All the jumps and stuff were my stunt double, Keith Schmidt, Jr., and did an awesome job with it. Of course I’m a teenager, I’ve ridden a bike before but nothing to that extent , with rocks and tree branches and all that. It was really cool to be able to go outside of my comfort zone a little bit which is the cool thing about acting. You do a lot of stuff you really wouldn’t do otherwise.”

Television veterans Church and Lauren Graham (“Gilmore Girls”) play Justin’s parents. Yakin talked about working with them. “Thomas is so close to this character. He comes from Texas and his father who is a “Great Santini”-like a military man. So in some ways the challenge for Thomas was to make something imaginative for himself in that space. For Lauren coming from where she does feeling like a part of this family was a little bit more challenging. She felt a little bit more like an outsider. It was a little bit less clear to her how to get into it. I think she marvelously managed to work her way into this situation.” But, “the whole movie hinges upon Josh,” he added. “With a movie like this it’s easy for it to slip into sentimentality in the wrong situation. You know you want it to be emotional but not sentimental and when we saw Josh’s work one of the things that really stuck me about it was that it’s perfectly appropriate for the scene, it’s honest and it has emotion in it but it never tries to hand it to an audience and it’s never sentimental. Once we know that we had that core we can cast the other kids around him.”

The movie raises some important issues about families and about the military. Yakin wanted the movie to be more than just a boy and his dog. “For me the exciting part and the challenging part is making a family movie that provokes and challenges kids to think about and feel things that they aren’t necessarily asked to think about and feel and that allows adults to enjoy it even though it’s a movie that a young person can see. It allows adults to enjoy it for what it is without just feeling like they have to be there for their kids. So we’re trying to make a movie that can provoke and challenge while entertaining because it’s an adventure movie. And this country has been at war for how many years since 1991, and it’s a pressure that’s laying over everything that we do and feel about all the time. It’s always there and while trying to make a movie that’s entertaining and fun to a degree you know this war and the pressure of what it means to be a man, an American man in an environment where your manhood and masculinity are defined by how you react by this particular stress is always on you. That to me was interesting. Making the movie, it’s a family movie and I’m not trying to lay it on too thick but being an American man in the age of constant war. What the choices are in within the Justin character. That’s what the movie is about.”