This report comes from Fantastic Fest 2024, the annual genre film festival in Austin, Texas. We’ll have more reports from the ground throughout the fest.

One of the most fraught scenes in Alexandre Aja’s horror movie Never Let Go puts a beloved family dog on the chopping block. A single mother (Halle Berry, billed as “Mama”) is raising a pair of twins alone in the woods after what appears to have been an apocalyptic supernatural event. They’ve survived together for a decade, in spite of a murderous stalking force they refer to as “the Evil.” But an especially hard winter has left them starving, to the point where they’ve started dining on bark. Mama tells the boys, Sam (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV), that they’re going to have to eat their dog. Events escalate quickly from there. It’s a hard sequence to watch — and according to Barry, such a difficult sequence to film that the production kept postponing dealing with it.

“Filming this scene was, I think, emotionally hard for all of us,” Berry said during a post-screening Q&A at Austin’s Fantastic Fest. “It kept getting pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed, because I don’t think any of us wanted to really face doing this scene. We knew how emotional it would be. We knew what feelings it would drudge up, and we didn’t want to do it.”

Berry says one of the reasons it was hard to deal with the sequence is that Aja in particular is a dog-lover who kept his dog Peanut inside his coat throughout production. Another, though, was that Daggs struggled with the emotions. So Berry herself intervened — aggressively.

“Our young performers were always spot on, they were the most prepared,” she said. “They worked hard, they had an acting coach. They were on time. They were stellar. They’re some of the best acting partners I’ve ever had, if I’m honest. But on this day, for whatever reason, our young Percy Daggs had a little bit of a block. I think it was probably because he didn’t want to face the dog thing. […] He knew he had to cry, and whenever somebody knows in a script that they have to cry, they all of a sudden get dry. You can’t cry. Like, that’s the worst thing you can tell an actor: Now is the scene when you cry.

“So I think he was all locked up, and we were all in our feelings about the dog, and this was not working,” Berry said. “I thought, Oh, this is all gonna be shit if we don’t get this scene right. We hadn’t done the pivotal scene of our movie, and it was all falling apart. And I talked to Alex about it, and I said, OK, it’s going nowhere. Percy’s not ready.”

Berry’s solution was to improvise: “I decided to do [suddenly screaming] something! To, like, [screaming] shake him up! Right? I decided to stand up and do something that was off-script and take him out of his head and out of his fear and out of the dog thing. […] Everybody just went with it, and Percy’s tears started to flow, and he started to connect to his dog, and Anthony sat there with his beautiful, big eyes, as big as saucers, and he just sat there and stayed in the scene. And we got to capture that moment on film. It was just one of those moments that as actors, you hope happens once in a film, where you have a real moment when it’s alive.“

Berry said that take where she blew up at Daggs wound up in the movie: “Right after we tried and tried and got nowhere, we got magic in a bottle.”

“And we knew it was the key scene that was really bringing that whole relation to its peak,” Aja said. “And it was so important […] I was really grateful.”

Spoiler, for those wondering: The dog doesn’t die, but the conflict brings something much worse down on the family. Aja and Berry both laughed wryly about that.

“I [would] have not been able to work in the U.S. anymore,” Aja said. “I would have been deported.”

“We could never kill a dog,” Berry said, laughing. “I mean, here’s the irony — you can kill people. Who cares? But you cannot kill animals [in a movie].”

Never Let Go is in theaters now.