The leaked video was discomforting enough to prompt calls for a boycott: A German shepherd, filming a scene for the coming movie “A Dog’s Purpose,” fought with a trainer to stay out of a pool he clearly didn’t want to go in, then later briefly sank as humans raced to lift him out of the water.

The human behavior in the video, obtained last week by TMZ, was roundly condemned. It was a crippling story for a movie about the love between humans and their pets; dog lovers said they’d skip the movie, and a premiere last week was canceled.

Now, just before the movie is to be released on Friday, several of the people involved in the film are offering more details about what happened in the leaked video. Some of them remain divided between condemning the actions seen in the video and insisting that the treatment of the dog wasn’t quite as bad as it might have looked. They say that the dog was never forced into the water, as the video seems to show, and that the two scenes were recorded at different times.