Why real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie just had to do Together, together

The Age

4 days ago

When Dave Franco read the script of Together, a comedic horror film about a codependent couple whose bodies begin to fuse, he was immediately on board – and not just for himself.
'I was blown away by all of these insane set-pieces that were like nothing I had ever seen before, and I turned to Alison and said I think we should do this one together,' he says.
'And then I read the script and was not at all insulted that Dave compared our relationship to that of the characters in the movie,' says Alison Brie, Franco's partner of 15 years and wife of eight.
In truth, she says, she wasn't at all insulted because she felt they were so different from the characters in the movie.
Adds Franco, 'I think if we were struggling as much as they are, we would not have said yes'.
Franco plays Tim, a man in his mid-30s who still harbours a fantasy of making it big with his occasionally gigging band. Brie is Millie, a teacher who lands a new job in the country and thinks of it as the gateway to the next chapter in their lives – the cute house, the small community, the pitter-patter of little feet.
He is, of course, terrified.
After a walk in the woods near their new home goes awry, things get truly weird. Strange smells in the house. Sticky substances that seem to emerge whenever they are close to each other. An inability to leave each other's orbit for very long, or at all.
Franco and Brie met at Mardi Gras in New Orleans. It was, she jokes, 'a one-night stand that never ended'. Though she felt their relationship was sufficiently different to the film's couple, Brie also appreciated that 'the meta quality of us being in a long-term relationship would add a lot to the movie. For us as actors, there was a lot of work that we didn't have to do to have the theme [of codependency] be infused with that history that's already there.'
For writer-director Michael Shanks, though, there was nowhere to hide. Tim is, he readily admits, '100 per cent' him – or at least him as he was in his mid-20s when he first had the idea for what would become Together.
'I've been in a relationship with my partner for over 16 years,' he says. 'We met at schoolies the week after high school – a friend's parents had a little shack an hour out of Melbourne, we went there and drank ourselves into oblivion for a week, and got awfully sunburnt.'
They have been together ever since, he continues, 'and there was a point where I realised we have all the same friends, we eat the same food, we listen to the same music, we breathe the same air, and I started to freak out. I was realising that, without her, I wasn't a complete person any more because we'd been growing in the same direction so much that our lives had become intertwined.'
It wasn't just them, either.
'My friendship group is a series of tragic monogamists, most of whom have been together since high school,' Shanks says. 'Some of those relationships have thrived, and some you look at and go, 'I don't think you guys are still together because you love each other. I think you're just used to each other. You're so intertwined you can't extricate yourselves'.'
When Shanks told his partner, Louey, about his idea, she was taken aback but also understanding.
'She said to me, 'I'm a little upset you're writing this, but it's a good idea'.'
Shanks wrote his first draft of the screenplay in 2019, when he was in his late 20s. The following year, Screen Australia funded a second draft, and in 2021 it funded a third.
(Shanks was already on the agency's radar thanks to his YouTube channel, which had garnered more than 64 million views before going into hiatus; in 2016, the agency backed his self-made Lord of the Rings parody Wizard of Oz.)
That timeline has become critically important in recent months, for reasons that Shanks finds painful to discuss.
The film was shot in just 21 days in early 2024, with the star American couple setting up house in Melbourne. 'We loved snagging that window seat at Napier Quarter,' says Brie of the cosy Fitzroy wine bar they frequented. 'Melbourne makes us feel at home,' adds Franco. 'It's one of the few places we've ever shot that we could actually imagine ourselves living in.'
For the rest of the year, Shanks did whatever VFX work he could manage himself, though the big set pieces were farmed out to Framestore. 'It was amazing to work with real visual effects people,' he says, somewhat modestly. He worked day and night and at weekends. 'And that was the way we managed to get it done in time to submit to Sundance.' The film festival is the world's foremost showcase of indie cinema.
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'I've been a film nerd my whole life, and you dream of going somewhere like Sundance,' Shanks says. 'Making the film was a dream. Getting into Sundance was the next dream.'
Park City, Utah, where the festival has been held, is more than 2100 metres above sea level. It's not uncommon for visitors to contend with altitude sickness – and Shanks had it bad. He had a virus too.
'I spent two days leading up to the screening just vomiting, unable to keep food down. The day of the screening, I was in an emergency room and had a drip and oxygen – it was awful,' he recalls.
Somehow, he forced himself into the 2000-seat cinema where he was due to introduce his film. 'And as soon as I walked into that room, the adrenaline hit.'
Only a very small group of people – producers and editors and a handful of crew – had yet seen Together. They thought it was 'quite good', but no one knew how it would play to an audience.
'My partner had flown over for it, and my mother had flown over to see a film she was almost certainly going to hate – it's sticky and gross, and it has some nasty moments, and she typically doesn't watch any film that doesn't star Judi Dench.'
Five minutes in, he got his first laugh. After another five minutes, the film's first scare landed too. 'And from then, they just reacted exactly the way we always hoped they would.'
At the after-party, he was mobbed by well-wishers while Louey was playing dice games with Brie and English actor Dan Stevens. Even his mum liked it … ish. 'She came up and said, 'I thought that was quite good'.'
Within hours, a bidding war broke out for the film, which cost about $US5 million to make. Two days later, distributor Neon landed it – reportedly paying $US17 million for worldwide rights, the biggest sale of the festival and one of the biggest in its history.
And that, more or less, is when the trouble began.
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According to a lawsuit filed in May, Jess Jacklin and Charles Beale, producers of Better Half, were alerted by friends about alleged similarities between their movie and Together.
They attended a screening of Shanks' film on January 30 'to assess the extent of the similarities. As the audience laughed and cheered, Jacklin and Beale sat in stunned silence, their worst nightmare unfolding,' the suit claims. 'Scene after scene confirmed that Defendants … stole virtually every unique aspect' of their film.
The lawsuit lodged on behalf of their company, StudioFest LLC, claimed that Patrick Henry Phelan, the writer and director of Better Half, had sent his screenplay to Franco and Brie via their agents, WME, in August 2020.
Shanks and Franco first met on Zoom in 2021, after another Shanks script, Hotel, Hotel, Hotel, Hotel, was included on The Black List 's annual roundup of Hollywood's best unproduced screenplays. During that meeting, the pair bonded over a shared love of horror, and Shanks mentioned another screenplay he had written, Together.
'I wasn't thinking he would turn around and say, 'I want to be in it',' says Shanks, 'more that he might read it and go, 'Oh, this guy can write. Maybe we can write something together'. But obviously, secretly hoping he'd be like, 'Yeah, I want to do it'. And then, even more absurdly, secretly hoping he would show … Brie the script, and they might want to do it together.
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'I didn't even dare think that was a possibility,' he continues. 'But two days later, I got a call from my agent saying, 'hey, just so you know, Dave wanted to ask, how would you feel if he starred in the film, would that be OK with you? And also, he gave it to his wife Alison, and she really loves it, and how would you feel about them coming on and doing it together?''
'OK, yeah, I think that could work.'
Shanks can't really talk about the lawsuit other than to say he thinks it is easily disproven by a fully documented timeline (which establishes, among other things, the existence of his first draft long before the agents for Franco and Brie were sent, and rejected, Phelan's screenplay).
But he will talk about the impact it has had on him.
'It's been a real bummer, to be honest,' he says. 'I sort of sank into a bit of a depression. This is such an indie film. It was made for no money, Dave and Alison and myself did it gratis, almost, because we believed in the project. And then to have some stranger that none of us ever met or heard of turn us into these public villains, it's been very emotionally challenging.'
At the end of the day, though, the lawsuit and the online venom it spawned is but 'a minor roadblock'.
'Now that the film's coming out, we're remembering, 'Oh my God, we've made a movie that people really like, it's 100 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, people bought it because they know people are going to watch it',' he says.
As for Tim, the commitment-phobic antihero of his film, Shanks admits 'I wrote him as a therapeutic, dark reflection of myself. We've all got that friend who still thinks they're going to be an actor or a rock star in their early 30s'.
Or a filmmaker?
'Exactly,' he says, laughing. 'They're the last person to know that they should give it up, to realise there's actually more to life than these fantasies.'
But aren't you glad you didn't give it up?
'Oh my God, yeah.'
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Together is on general release from July 31.