My Dog Tulip, an animated film directed by Penn Design professor Paul Fierlinger, opens today at the Ritz. Based on a memoir, the narrative follows the relationship between an older man and his “bitch” German Shepherd, Tulip. But beware, 101 Dalmatians this is not. Fierlinger shows us the true costs of owning a dog, highlighting often-ignored aspects such as feces and sex.
We chatted with the professor about hating Disney, independent animation and a not-so-polite Christopher Plummer.
Street: Have you ever owned a dog? PF: I’ve owned anywhere between 15 and 20 dogs, so I know them well. […] We have a German Shepherd mix at home. It has a perfect German Shepherd head; it just has shorter legs. But it has the personality of a German Shepherd. She’s a bitch also. My neighbor called her a “low-budget Tulip.”
Street: Disney portrays dogs as cute, but you take a very different approach. What is your attitude toward Disney? PF: I hate it.
Street: What are you trying to correct in your portrayal? PF: The public perception of dogs. You’re right in using the word “correct.” There are a lot of people who are thinking of getting a dog. And when they are thinking of that, they don’t realize it but they have a vision of one of the 101 Dalmatians. They have no idea what they are getting themselves into. Animal shelters are filled with these dogs that are abandoned by people who had no idea what it takes to own a dog. That’s why there’s so much of that natural dog behavior in the film.
I want dog haters to show the film to their families and friends and say, “If you want to know why I don’t like dogs, look at this here.” And by the same token I want people who love dogs to do the same thing. They will pick up the DVD and say, “If you want to understand what I love about dogs so much it’s all in here.” It works both ways, and that’s what we were going for.
Street: Have any animators or filmmakers influenced you directly? PF: No - mostly illustrators or writers. To make an independent animated film, our lifestyle is much closer to the style of an author writing a novel than a filmmaker. It’s more facing the white page every morning than setting up gear and working with a team and getting along and planning. It’s very solitary work and I have a lot of empathy with writers. I have the same problems they talk about when they’re interviewed. Much less with filmmakers.
Street: What was it like working with Christopher Plummer? PF: He was mean in the beginning. I’ve been told by my producers not to bring it up. I actually did bring it up a couple of times in interviews during the Toronto Film Festival. We were set up for a whole chain of interviews and it was all because of Plummer. Plummer didn’t show up on time because his flight was delayed, but we had to go through the schedule, so they interviewed me. In a couple of places I told this story about him, how he treated me in the beginning. Then when he joined me and we were doing this together, he would go first, and he said only the nicest things about me. He never brought that up. After about three of these I said, "I have to tell you something, because it’s going to come out anyways. You’ve been saying such nice things about me, but I’ve told about how I read your lines, about the incident." And with a big smile he whipped around and said, “Good! Keep telling that story!”
What I did was I read his lines to him, and that’s apparently a big taboo among certain actors. If you want him to do something a certain way you explain it to him; you don’t read his lines. And he had a fit, a real fit when I started off that way. He banged the table and paced around the studio. He treated me like a very inexperienced person. There were two days of recording so then he began to understand, and we worked fine. He could see that I wasn’t doing this for the first time, so he talks only about that – about what a good professional relationship we had. What I did was considered very unprofessional. […] A year and a half later he came to the studio to pick-up some lines. He said, “This went very well. This was enjoyable.” And I said, “Yes, comparing it to our first day.” And he said, “Well of course it helped that I’m sober today.” So he admitted that he was drunk the first day. This was 10 in the morning!
