Amy Adams' acting 'freaked out' dogs on “Nightbitch ”set so much they started lunging at her

"It almost ruined the whole shoot. The trainers were like, 'Oh, they thought she was stalking them,'" director Marielle Heller said at TIFF.

Amy Adams let her canine acting skills off the leash on the set of Nightbitch.

The Oscar-nominated actress and writer-director Marielle Heller revealed Saturday at the film's world-premiere screening at the Toronto International Film Festival that making the film with 12 dogs didn't always make for the cuddliest atmosphere on set.

"There's a scene where Amy walks down the steps to all the dogs in the yard, and we'd practiced with the trainers over and over again: She's going to walk on this step and walk down, and you'll all start swarming around her. We did it over and over and over again," Heller told the audience at the Princess of Wales theater, recounting a scene from the film that follows Adams as a new mother who begins turning into a ravenous dog. "Of course, Amy is acting when she does it, so she's doing this weird looking at the dogs [thing], and the dogs freaked out and started lunging at her."

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Adams laughed as she remembered the incident as well, noting that "one dog was like, that's not okay, that's not cool" in her estimation. "It almost ruined the whole shoot," Heller interjected. "The trainers were like, 'Oh, they thought she was stalking them.' Her behavior was too odd and it flipped them. It was wild."

"So, yeah, I freaked the dogs out on the set," Adams added. "We got it under control. We took one off, the one that was still not going to be okay no matter what I did because he didn't trust me after that. He got a rest for the rest of the night."

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Heller pointed out that there were also sweeter exchanges between the human and dog crew of the film, which is adapted from writer Rachel Yoder's popular novel of the same name, including the team's search for a red-haired husky to portray Adams in dog form in a few fantastical sequences.

"We couldn't find one, so they ended up adopting [one] they found in a shelter in California and trained her for many months before we shot the film. She was just the most gorgeous, incredible dog," Heller said.

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Outside of its wilder dressings, the film also explores issues of repressed female rage and "the isolation that comes" for some women after motherhood, Adams observed.

Heller said that making the movie was "cathartic" for her, as she wrote it while her husband, The Lonely Island's Jorma Taccone, was away filming a TV show and she was at home raising their children: "My husband was terrified when he read it," Heller joked.

Nightbitch — also starring Scoot McNairy and Jessica Harper — releases Dec. 6. Watch the film's trailer above.

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