By Zach Johnson

Buck embarks on an incredible journey in Twentieth Century Studios’ The Call of the Wild—and the story of how the dog’s real-life inspiration found its way into director Chris Sanders’ life is just as incredible. “Oh, he’s real!” Sanders says. “I actually live with him.”

Terry Notary served as the live-action reference for Buck, who was digitally animated onscreen opposite Harrison Ford and the rest of the cast. “When we first started the film, we cast every dog and we scanned every dog as a shortcut to building them and to making them believable,” Sanders recalls. “But the only dog we were struggling with was the lead, Buck. He’s a very specific mix of two breeds, as described by Jack London in the book. We were trying to build him from scratch and we were struggling.”

Finding an actual St. Bernard-Scotch Collie mix was proving difficult, so at one point, Sanders recalls, “We even tried to make him look a bit like a Bernese Mountain Dog.” Dejected, he admits, “It was beginning to look like that dog was not ever going to work.”

As luck would have it, and while production was already underway, Sanders’ wife found the perfect dog online. “She called and said, ‘Oh, my gosh! I just found a dog that is the exact mix of the two breeds that is described in the book. He’s in a shelter in Kansas, found as a stray wandering the streets. And they named him Buckley.’” (Anyone else getting goosebumps?) So, she drove two days to Kansas to pick up Buckley. Says Sanders, “Then she bought him for $25, because he was marked down. He was on sale! She drove back and she walked onto set with him, and everybody took a look at him and said, ‘If that’s the same dog from the story, let’s just make him that dog.’ So, we took him down to Gentle Giant Studios and we scanned him—and that’s him in the film!”

The real Buckley is “so sweet,” Sanders adds. “He’s a big baby. If you leave for too long and come back, he needs to work out his feelings.” Like the character whose look he inspired, “He’s very good-natured. People just fall in love with him when they see him.” Unlike Buck, however, he hasn’t heard the call of the wild: “He likes the call of the nap!”

The Call of the Wild opens in U.S. theaters today.

By Zach Johnson

In many ways, Harrison Ford and John Thornton are one and the same. “That’s the edited me,” Ford says of his character in Twentieth Century Studios’ latest adventure, The Call of the Wild, opening in theaters February 21. “That’s curated aspects of my personality, my understanding, my conviction. That’s not always what you’re getting in the portrayal of a character, but happily, that’s the fit in this case. And it fits like a glove.”

Ford leads an all-star ensemble that includes Omar Sy (Perrault), Cara Gee (Francoise), Dan Stevens (Hal), Bradley Whitford (Judge Miller), Michael Horse (Edenshaw), Karen Gillan (Mercedes), and Colin Woodell (Charles). The Call of the Wild, adapted from Jack London’s classic novel, follows Buck, a big-hearted dog whose idyllic domestic life is turned upside down when he is suddenly relocated from his California home to the exotic wilds of the Canadian Yukon during the 1890s Gold Rush.

Terry Notary did the live-action reference performance for Buck, who was digitally animated onscreen. “We had no ‘dog’ in the movie, but we had a wonderful actor and former Cirque du Soleil gymnast who was an emotional presence for me to relate to,” Ford says of Notary. “To have him there, to be able to scratch him behind the ear and rub his shoulders… that seemed a little weird at first. But we got over it. Or I got over it.”

Director Chris Sanders, who previously created and voiced Stitch in the beloved 2002 Disney film Lilo & Stitch, says the combination of live-action performance and computer-generated imagery makes for a “fairly magical” experience. Still, he admits, “My great fear about doing live-action—and I had stayed up nights thinking about it—was, ‘What if we do a scene and a week later I realized I forgot part of it?’ But my producers assured me, ‘That won’t happen, and we’ll all be there to make sure you don’t forget something.’”

It helped that they filmed on practical sets in Santa Clarita, California, Ford adds. “That was of great value to the actors and to the telling of the story. Because we weren’t in the Yukon, we could then add the Yukon above the first story, which was the practical set. It gave us artistic opportunities we would have had a very hard time getting,” he said. “I was very pleased with how it turned out.”

Filming that way also allowed the actors to stretch their imaginations. In one scene, for example, Buck is leading a team of sled dogs—and Perrault and Francoise—when an avalanche strikes. In reality, Gee recalls, “We shot that in a studio inside. Omar and I were sitting on a sled that was in the middle of a room with nothing around us. The director would say, ‘Now you’re going around a corner,’ so we’d be like, ‘Woah!’ It’s all pretend—all imagination. I was like anyone else in the audience watching it for the first time, like, ‘Oh! That’s what it looks like!’ It was very, very challenging and very cool.” In the case of the avalanche, Sanders adds, “There’s no way you can really describe the scale of it, so they just had to do that themselves and fill that in. They did a great job.”

Another example of movie magic comes when Francoise falls through a sheet of ice and nearly drowns. In preparation for the daring scene, Gee became a certified scuba instructor. “It was a really physically demanding acting role, for sure,” she says. “We were filming in a shipping container full of water. It was really hot out when we shot that scene. The water was actually really refreshing—and in fact, when we wrapped for the day, Omar took off his microphone and jumped in the water because it was so hot out!”

 While there are plenty of bold action sequences in The Call of the Wild, at its heart, this is a story about resilience. “The human spirit is often indomitable, and I take that to be a gift of nature or of God,” Ford explains. “For me, they’re the same thing.” To illustrate that, the screenwriters “took some liberties” with his character, giving him a more well-defined backstory that mirrors Buck’s journey. “As Buck was gaining the confidence and the courage to face his natural self, Thornton was finding the courage to go back and face a life he had run away from, and I think that was an important emotional element.”

In a similar vein, The Call of the Wild also touches on the seasonality of some relationships. “This is an interesting study in how chance encounters can change your trajectory,” Sanders explains. “Different people mean different things to Buck. For example, Thornton is like a father to Buck, so he has a more intimate relationship to him. In fact, at one point he says, ‘I’m not your owner!’ Perrault is more like a teacher. Perrault teaches him a trade and teaches him to grow up. He gives him responsibility and believes that he can do these things. Later on, you look at the journey you’ve had and you wonder, ‘What if this chance encounter hadn’t happened? Where would I be now?’”

The Call of the Wild is in theaters Friday.