Warning: Spoilers ahead for Never Let Go.

There are a few shocking moments from director Alexandre Aja's latest psychological horror film Never Let Go, but none the more grueling than when Halle Berry's tormented matriarch informs her two boys, Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV), that she has to kill the family dog to, um, eat when the food runs low.

Nolan is, of course, distraught. He manages to save the pup from death after he cuts his mother's tethered rope, severing her ties from the cabin and leading to the film's next big shocker. At a Q&A following the film's screening at Austin's Fantastic Fest on Thursday, Aja and Berry spoke about the intensity of filming the scene after an audience member thanked them for not killing the dog.

"I would have not been able to work in the U.S. anymore," the French filmmaker quipped of the potential consequences. "I would have been deported.”

Liane Hentscher

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Added Berry, "The dog scene was hard for me. It was hard for all of us. Let me tell you a secret about Alex. He has a little dog called Peanut. She’s a little tiny thing. Alex walked around every day of shooting this movie with his dog Peanut in his coat, and her face stuck out. We were all animal lovers, so filming this scene was something that was emotionally hard for all of us."

The scene, shared Berry, "kept getting pushed and pushed" because "we knew how emotional it would be and we knew the feelings it would drudge up and we didn’t want to do it." Alas, when they "finally had to face the day," Berry recounted, Daggs — who along with Jenkins was always a "stellar" professional on set who brought his A game — experienced a bit of an acting block.

"I think it was because he didn’t want to face the dog thing," noted Berry. "It was hard. He knew he had to cry. Whenever somebody knows in a script that they have to cry, they all of a sudden get dry. You can’t cry." The scene was just "not working," Berry recalled, so "I decided to do something that was off-script and shake him up and take him out of his head and out of his fear and out of the dog thing."

Jack Plunkett

"The true testament to their talent was, when I shook them up, everybody just went with it, and Percy’s tears started to flow, and he started to connect to his dog," she said. "It’s one of those moments, as actors, you just hope happens once in a film, where you have a real moment . . . and that’s how we got that scene. I think the one take is the scene that ended up in the movie."

In theaters now, Never Let Go stars Berry as a troubled matriarch who watches over her two boys in a remote cabin in the woods, after an entity she describes as the Evil took over the world. When they forage the surrounding woods, they tether themselves to the cabin for protection. When son Nolan begins to question if the Evil is real, everything comes into question — and a fight for survival ensues.

In recent conversation with Entertainment Weekly about filming in the actual woods (with bears!) and crafting an elaborate backstory for her troubled matriarch for the movie, Berry credited her young costars for helping her tap into her role. "A big part of acting is connecting to that childlike part of who we are so that we can be free and unafraid,” said Berry. “We can take risks and be vulnerable. I love working with kids because they're all of that. I learned a lot from watching them.”

With additional reporting by Tiffany Kelly.