The Robert Downey Jr. Film Guide: Pound (1970)

Dad got a grant to make a film about dogs. He said it would be more realistic if he could have actors interpret what the dogs were feeling. So one guy had on a silk robe, and he was a boxer. And another guy had short hair, and he was a Chihuahua. I was a puppy who gets adopted by this bald guy ... Pound is about how everyone’s basically waiting to die. [My father takes] kind of a dark comedic attitude toward very real issues that some people don’t even touch on ... I played a dog in a pound. We were all going to get gassed unless we got taken, so that was our motivation! It was a real art piece ... I couldn’t understand why we had to shoot scenes over and over. It was disconcerting and rather boring ... [A crewmember on The Shaggy Dog] came up to me and said, “I used to baby-sit you when your dad was making Pound. I know what it was like back then.” And he handed me the slate from Pound which was the first movie I ever made, and it said 3/17/70, so it was literally like 35 years ago. It looked like something the art department had come up with to look like a period collector’s item, like Sotheby’s from The Fortune. So lately there’s been a whole sense of closure.

1. You’ve always wanted to know what dogs were thinking.
2. The cutest little film debut ever.