Animal star during the Cannes festival “Anatomy of a Fall” received the Dog Palm – an award for the best performance of a dog. Messi stole the hearts and attention of everyone present at the Oscar luncheon. Ryan Gosling was charmed by him. Some people joked that the dog should be nominated for a golden statuette. But fame didn’t go to his head. According to his owner, Laura Martin Contini, his greatest passion remains playing with the ball.
Seven-year-old Messi played the role of Snoop – a dog supporting the teenage son of the main character of “Anatomy of a Fall”, who suffers from a severe visual impairment. In preparation, Contini watched a lot of training videos about service animals. Before the shooting, they also made sure that Messi got used to Milo Machado Graner, who played Snoop’s teenage owner.
As Justine Triet, the film’s director, recalled, Messi was not “some animal that ran under our feet, but part of the cast, like the other actors.” In an interview with the BBC, she revealed that after 22 days on the film set, the crew gave him a standing ovation as he said goodbye.
Attention! Later in the text, we reveal details of the plot of “Anatomy of a Fall”
Triet had one requirement when looking for a dog actor – he had to be able to play dead and stay in character while being transferred. As Contini recalls, the training took her two months. “We worked on carrying him and making him seem limp,” she recalled in an interview with Variety.
Messi carried out his statement very well. In the above-mentioned scene, he doesn’t move at all and his tongue hangs out of his mouth. It was Contini’s idea. One day the dog got tired while playing with the ball. When he panted with his tongue out, the owner said that it would look perfect in this scene.
“I’m afraid that now they will only cast him in roles in which he will have to die,” Contini said. “They’ve only been commissioning us like this lately.” Messi showed off his “trick” during the Oscar luncheon, which made the stars there nervous. “The dog from ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ (…) pretended to die in the middle of the room. Everyone was concerned, and suddenly he stood up: ‘Oh, hello,’ and then we said: ‘Oh, he’s an actor,'” recalled Emma Stone, nominated for an Oscar for the main role in “Poor creatures”.