John Wick 4 Kept A Gag Improvised By One Very Good Dog

I always feel conflicted about the use of animals in film, especially when it comes to action sequences. They never asked to be in show business, and though they are trained to participate in these set pieces, there's really no true way to know how the animal feels about it. And I'm not even talking about the times where animals have been deliberately mistreated to service a movie — I'm talking about animals with caring owners and trainers. Even they still have no say in what they are going to do on screen.

Well, that's mostly true. Animals work on instinct, just as humans do. If they are put in a certain circumstance, they will behave in a way that comes most natural to them. For instance, if I am at a party or something where food has been laid out, I will naturally find myself standing next to that food table the whole evening. I have to consciously tell myself to stop eating in order for me to do so.

In the case of dogs, you can do a whole lot of training with them, but you can't get their instinct to totally wash away. When it came to making "John Wick: Chapter 4," the filmmakers certainly learned that firsthand. Dogs are a big part of the "John Wick" universe, and starting with "Chapter 3," they began implementing dogs into the action. Well, for the latest entry, they learned that the dog they had enlisted for action scenes really enjoyed doing one specific piece of action, and that was about all it was going to do. Luckily, it was an effective maneuver: This particular dog was particularly keen on crotch bites.

When deciding to use animals in your film, you aren't just going to have one animal for the whole shoot. In the case of Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood," three different dogs were used for the character of Brandy, the faithful companion to Brad Pitt's Cliff Booth, and each of them had a different speciality for what they'd do on camera. But there's always going to be the one dog considered the principal, and for "John Wick: Chapter 4," that was a dog named Britta. Speaking with The Ringer, director Chad Stahelski explained how Britta's action instincts dictated her scenes:

"Our lead dog — her name's Britta — for whatever reason, she was a crotch biter ... We had all these other gags planned, and she's like, 'Nope. Right for the crotch.' We're like, 'OK, I guess that's our character; we're doing crotch biting.'"

Dogs biting crotches is always a good gag. The aforementioned Tarantino film does it, too. There's a pain in that move that so many people in the audience can understand. The mentality of harnessing that feeling made its way over to the film's lead star Keanu Reeves as well, when he improvised a crotch hit with nunchucks in the Osaka action set piece. "I'm like, 'OK, I guess we're groin hitters today with the nunchucks.' It's always interesting," Stahelski says of the gag.

Yes, it's a cheap shot, but its cheapness never quashes its effectiveness. Without exception, someone in the audience is going to let out an involuntary audible reaction to those hits and bites, even if you see it coming. And in the case of Britta the dog, watching her maul the crotch of the guy who was going to shoot her earlier in the film is immensely cathartic.