Arturo Hilario
El Observador
Writer-director Michael Shanks attends the Los Angeles red carpet premiere for his new body horror film Together. Photo Credit: Jay L. Clendenin / Shutterstock for Neon
Michael Shanks is the writer-director of the new body horror film Together starring real-life couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco. In the film they play Tim (Franco) and Millie (Brie), a long-term couple in a bit of a rut as to their future, who embark on a journey when Millie gets a new job teaching in the countryside.
In the film, we find the couple getting ready for the big move from their small city apartment into a big rural home, with both of them having their doubts and anxieties, but both setting forth together on this new adventure in their lives.
On a hike in the woods near their new neighborhood they come across a strange location that kickstarts the grotesque events of the film. Together is a story of connections, love and as the director puts it, “Most simply, this is a film about how falling in love transforms you.”
Recently we had the opportunity to ask Shanks some questions about the creation of this grisly, but also funny and at times touching story of love, commitment and the supernatural. We get to the details on how his own relationship inspired the story, the way science and 80’s horror inspired the look and feel of the body horror, and how it helped to have real-life chemistry from the leads.
Together is playing now in theaters.
What inspired the story and what was the message or core ideas you wanted to present? Did that change at all from the foundation to fruition?
No, no. The very first idea has really kind of persevered throughout the whole creative process. The inspiration from the story came from the fact that I’ve been with my partner now for almost 17 years, and when I was writing the film, it was probably when we were approaching ten years.
We were starting to live together. And I was having these kind of strange thoughts and anxieties about the fact that, “Oh my God, my partner and I are living the same life. We have the same friends, we eat the same food, we breathe the same air.” I didn’t really know where I ended, and she began.
I sort of was hoping that in some way this would be kind of like a thrill ride as well as having this kind of hopefully emotionally resonant story about what it feels like to fully commit to somebody and the trials and tribulations of the crucible that is commitment.
-Michael Shanks
And I thought, “Oh, that’s kind of an interesting place to start a story,” kind of examining those themes of sharing a life with somebody so fully that what if your life literally sort of started to become one. And then thinking about well, you know, if you share a life, what if you started to share flesh, share blood, share a body. And I thought, “Oh, that could be a body horror movie!” which is one of my favorite kind of sub genres of films.
And immediately I could kind of see this story about kind of real relationship dynamics and like a real sort of relationship drama, but also like, satisfy my kind of like horror, technical filmmaker side of filling that story with like ten of the craziest sort of body horror freakouts that you could imagine.
What was it like working with real-life married couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco, and how did their real-life relationship bond help or inform the film and its development?
Well, I mean, working with a real-life couple was like instrumental and also like a funny parallel to my own life because these characters in so many ways are based on me and my partner Louie. And when I pitched Louie like, “Hey, I think I’m going to write this script.”
She said, “That’s upsetting to me, but it’s a good idea, so you should do it.” And then once those guys were cast, she’s like, “I feel even better about this now, knowing I’m kind of being played by Alison Brie in a movie.” I’m like, “Yeah, that’s pretty cool.” And then having Dave and Alison come on board, it was just amazing because our characters have been together for about a decade, and Dave and Alison themselves have been together for over a decade.
So, we wanted performances that you could feel there was history between these characters, that there’s chemistry. And even though we spend kind of the first sort of half of the movie, they’re kind of at odds and ends, there’s a lot of, like, arguing and bickering, it was important to kind of feel that underneath it there was this kind of, like, long gestating love and affection.
And of course, they brought it. They had extreme chemistry. And on just, like, a practical level, we got them to do things that you could not ever get actors to do if they weren’t a couple. We had a whole day where we were shooting a sex scene for about ten hours in a confined, horrible space, standing up, and they never complained because they had this kind of sort of comfort with one another in that sort of situation.
We had a day where they were they needed to be fully nude in front of the camera for an entire day together. And again, they were just so comfortable with that. We had a day where they had to be joined via prosthetic to the point where they needed to go to the bathroom to pee in front of each other. And you could never ask another actor or another acting pair to do that. But them being a husband and wife and them being producers, they volunteered. They were like, “Oh, yeah, that’s not a problem. Don’t worry about it.”
In terms of the body horror, how did you figure out what worked best in terms of keeping the story true to your vision, but also essentially keeping audiences tense and not wanting to pass out?
That’s really funny. I mean, there’s a couple of moments in the film where I think we sort of subvert expectations. There’s a scene where we build up to what we think is going to be a really gory scene, and we cut away before the gore happens. And there’s another scene where I think we’ve kind of settled into a situation that is very gory, but we’re not kind of showing what’s going on. And then late in the scene, we do show it, and it gets this kind of huge audience reaction, and so that was a lot of fun.
But I never really worried about going too far with it. I sort of was hoping that in some way this would be kind of like a thrill ride as well as having this kind of hopefully emotionally resonant story about what it feels like to fully commit to somebody and the trials and tribulations of the crucible that is commitment. But also was like something where you’d walk away from this being having seen like ten crazy body horror sequences that you’ve just like, never seen before.
What inspirations from science and the natural world helped you formulate the very physical connections we see?
That’s a great question. I’ve never been asked that. Well, really early on, I was looking at remora fish. Whereby in a remora fish, the way they reproduce, the male’s body sort of attaches to the female’s body and the female completely consumes it. It becomes enmeshed within their own body. And I was like, “Oh, that’s kind of like what I want this film to be about!”
So, like, scientifically, that was like a good jumping off point, but maybe less scientifically and more sort of visually, I was obviously so inspired by the body horror films of the 80s, but I wanted us to have a point of visual difference. So, whilst the films in the 80s were very slimy and glossy, and I loved that, but I was like, “As a point of difference, let’s make our body horror a little more like dry and painful and crackly.”
There’s a scene where our character’s hands sort of very unhappily collapse together. And I was explaining that to the practical effects people and the visual effects people of I wanted it to feel like a specific memory of mine when an uncle used to shake my hand so hard as a little boy that all the tendons in my hand would kind of, like, touch each other. And I was like, “That’s what I want it to feel like. That’s what I want it to look like.” And I think they did an amazing job of that.
Last question: What do you hope audiences are pondering after they see Together?
Well, I guess the obvious answer is I hope it makes people think kind of about their relationships, kind of about what it means to fully commit with somebody. And I kind of hope that by the end of the film, you kind of see that even though we meet these characters at a point of sort of dissonance and friction, by the end they’re sort of being open and honest with one another, which is, to me, I think, what is the most kind of fundamental thing of a relationship, to just kind of reveal your most vulnerable naked self to your partner.
But the other thing that I hope that people feel is that they had a good time. Like, particularly with the ending and with the amazing song that I’m so happy that we got for the end credits. Like, we end on this kind of crazy image. We cut to credits with this beautiful song “Another One” by the band Golden Suits, and it’s sort of upbeat, and I kind of want people walking out of the theater saying, “Hey, that was fun. Like, it was scary, but it was fun.”
