NEW TRICKS

An animal trainer to the stars prepares a Great Dane for his film début.

- NICK PAUMGARTEN

David Siegel and Scott McGehee, filmmaking partners for three decades, both read and loved the Sigrid Nunez novel "The Friend" when it was published, in 2018. They took Nunez out to coffee, then optioned the film rights to the story, wrote a script, and began making plans to produce it.

The novel, which won the National Book Award, is narrated by an unnamed writer in Manhattan whose friend and mentor, a more famous writer, has recently died by suicide. She inherits his dog, a Great Dane named Apollo. "The Friend" is about a lot of things-grief, memory, loneliness, goatish men, writing, teaching, kids today but it is, fundamentally, a love story between two bereaved creatures, writer and dog, seeking consolation and companionship in a treacherous world.

Siegel and McGehee had actors in mind for the narrator and the mentor, to whom they gave the names Iris and Walter, respectively. Now they needed their Apollo. In the fall of 2019, they reached out to the prominent trainer Bill Berloni, who has been supplying, hiring, and coaching animals for stage and screen for nearly fifty years. Berloni asked if it had to be a Great Dane. "Great Danes are big, dumb, and lazy," he told them. (Or, as he prefers to put it now, "They are sensitive, and not known for their obedience training.") "Can I talk you into another breed?"

The filmmakers insisted. The unwieldy size, the inconvenience, the majesty, the mournful bearing: these elements were essential. Plus, the cover of the novel had an illustration of a Great Dane on it-a Harlequin Dane, white with black spots, in a red collar. Film is a visual medium, and its practitioners are visual people. That image, as much as any description on the page, had captured their cinematographic imaginations.