Together (Photo: Ben King/NEON)
Australian filmmaker Michael Shanks met his life partner of 17 years at what he calls the Aussie equivalent of spring break. “It probably sounds more glamorous than it actually is,” Shanks laughs. “A week after high school, you just go and get drunk with people in a park or something.” For the couple, it was love at first sight, a union that settled into a committed long-term relationship of nearly two decades. “We’ve been together for so long that when we started to live together, I was confronting the idea of sharing a life,” Shanks remembers. “We have all the same friends. We eat the same food, and breathe the same air. I was thinking, ‘Do I know where I end, and she begins?’”
Those reflections became the the jumping off point for the body-horror movie Together (releasing today in theaters by NEON), Shanks’s stunning feature debut as a writer-director. Starring real-life pair (and Together producers) Dave Franco and Alison Brie as Tim and Millie, a long-term couple who move from the city to the country at a treacherous turning point of their relationship, Together explores all the ways in which couples fall into a tricky form of codependency over time, with plenty of sticky, gooey, and bloody VFX and practical effects. Throughout, Shanks navigates the idea of domestic inseparability, quite literally manifesting this concept with smart and fiendishly gory set pieces. Cracking bones, glued limbs, a Chekhov’s gun-style chainsaw, as well as incredibly physical performances by Brie and Franco… Together has it all.
In the below conversation with Filmmaker Magazine, Shanks discusses his genre influences, love of VFX, working with Brie and Franco, and more.
Filmmaker: While Together is entirely its own thing, it wears its genre influences on its sleeve. Throughout, I was thinking of Alien (especially in the cave design), The Thing, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter and more. What were some of the works that inspired you, cinematically or otherwise?
Shanks: The Thing is an obvious inspiration—with the opening scene of our film, we have an homage to it. And I was listening to the amazing Ennio Morricone score a lot when I was writing this. And Cronenberg of course, his whole oeuvre. Definitely Aliens for the design of the cave. I was thinking a lot of the H.R. Giger designs. From like a shot design point of view, I definitely found myself inspired by M. Night Shyamalan, particularly with Unbreakable and Signs—the way he moves his camera is just so expressive. It’s this Spielberg-ian dynamism that I was really kind of keen to put into the film. For the look of the film, I was more inspired by the cinema from the ‘80s and ‘70s. I wanted it to feel rich and colorful in a way that old celluloid would look. There was a trend in the aughts of horror where it was like, “We’re making horror, it’s serious, and we got to pull all the saturation out and make everything kind of gray.” And I was like, no. I want this movie to look saturated. Take the black levels and crush them down. I wanted every shot to be full of contrast and color.
And then there are weirder inspirations, like the Kiyoshi Kurosawa film, Cure. I just love that movie. There’s a sort of weird, ethereal editing rhythm to it that I had in mind for some scenes. For some of the jump scares and scary imagery, I was really influenced by J-Horror and K-Horror. There’s a Taiwanese film called Incantation from 2022 that has this incredibly scary woman’s face in it. There’s a moment in this film where… we have a scary woman’s face, trying to live up to Incantation.
Also [films] like The Ring, obviously, loom large over some of the visual iconography in the film. And I don’t know if I was directly inspired by this, but I’m thinking a lot about Star Trek: First Contact, the classic film by Jonathan Frakes, a movie of my childhood that I was obsessed with. I rewatched it recently after making our movie and felt like, “This is a body horror movie. How did I ever think about that?” It opens with a needle going into Patrick Stewart’s eye. And then there’s all this sexual skin-grafting stuff going on. Maybe this is why I’ve always been kind of obsessed with these types of movies—it is something I consumed vociferously in my youth by just watching Star Trek: First Contact. And even rewatching the Indiana Jones trilogy, there’s so much nasty, gooey, gory stuff in those films as well. They used to make PG-13 movies that really went for it.
Filmmaker: I know that you also have a background in VFX. Were you detailed about all the VFX and set pieces on the page as you were writing the script?
Shanks: Yes, I was pretty detailed. I feel like I do most of my directing on the page and then in the storyboards. And sometimes when I was trying to figure out a scene, I stopped writing and drew a couple of images to be like, “Okay, cool.” That helps me to get my head around things. I learned visual effects at the same time as I was just learning how to write and direct, self-teaching myself from watching. I was internet taught. I was just going on YouTube and watching tutorials and then pirating Adobe software to make little films with my friends. I’ve always thought of visual effects as part of the screenwriting toolkit. It allowed me from a young age to never have to worry about not being able to go to a crazy surreal place. Like, other indie filmmakers I would encounter say, “Well, you can’t write this because you won’t be able to afford to do it.” By learning the grunt work of visual effects myself, it meant that I could always write that thing ’cause it was just going to be my own time that I’d lose by doing it.
My first job when I was 17 was making this very high-class parody web series for an online American video game magazine. Every two weeks I had to write and direct, edit, do the music, the sound, and the VFX of this action-comedy show that I was producing on a fortnightly basis. And it was just this sink-or-swim job, an immediate film school. Doing that for about 18 months of just constant filmmaking, I had to learn how to build props, costumes and so on. So that was a really good first job for me; it instructed me on so many different aspects of filmmaking.
Filmmaker: You have some truly chic and old-school set pieces in the movie. We invest in this couple’s conundrums, and the set pieces really pay off. They seem inevitable. What’s your approach to braiding in the set pieces into your story, and making sure they’re serving a narrative purpose?
Shanks: It was all kind of part and parcel of breaking out the story. I did have crazy set-pieces in mind that I wanted to fill this with. The premise of this film is sort of high-concept, one and done. I was like, I can never make a movie with this premise again. So I want to squeeze every drop of juice out of this, and therefore I want to show as much as I can and examine every angle of if this was actually happening to you, what would be these crazy things that happen? And I also knew that if the premise revealed itself too early, I think we would’ve run out of runway of the story. So by starting slow and then amping up with these sequences helped me mythologize the infection. When it was getting worse, we could continually go bigger and bigger until the end of the film. And this is hopefully satisfying: this is what the premise is and we are delivering on it. We’re showing you the goods. I’m so excited about exploring the themes and the emotions of these characters since so much of it is taken from my real life. But I’m also a desperately technical filmmaker—I was just so excited [about the set pieces].
Filmmaker: So let’s get into the details of a couple of them. Fair spoiler warning to the readers, but I want to talk about the ending especially, the kitchen scene with the chainsaw, as well as the hallway scene where Alison Brie and Dave Franco are almost magnetically drawn to each other. They both give incredibly physical performances. What was your balance of visual effects, practical effects/makeup, and then just plain performance? They feel so seamless.
Shanks: It’s a really strong mix of practical and visual effects. I feel like people always give all the credit to practical effects and the practical effects of this film certainly deserve credit. But people don’t always talk about the visual effects—it’s like a dirty little secret. I’m a visual effects guy, and I did a lot of the visual effects in this film. Not the splashy, expensive ones—they were done by Framestore, where they had teams of people working on VFX for months. As opposed to my visual effects, which is just like me and after-effects on an evening. And we had practical effects on almost every one of those transformation moments.
Oftentimes, we’d go in post and fix things up or augment them. I understand visual effects conceptually. But practical effects is something I’ve got no experience with. And so collaborating with this team of incredible artists was amazing. I got to get myself turned into a prosthetic effect for something in the film. So I could have a cameo where I don’t actually have to do any acting and had to get into the chair. They covered me with Goo and they made a plaster mold of my head that I still have in my home office. They made this completely practical, photorealistic puppet of Dave—just shoulders and head, locked in the screaming pose. In one scene, we had to put hair down into his throat so we could yank it out. And it’s just this amazing prop that looks unbelievably real, and it’s in the movie for about one second.
Filmmaker: You mentioned collaborating with the iconic VFX company, the Oscar-winning Framestore. They have countless credits, including Gravity, a favorite. Tell me a little more about working with them.
Shanks: I was really fanboying about it to be honest. It was a huge moment to get to even just visit Framestore. For a film of this low-budget scale, getting access to Framestore was huge. And I think they gave us a great deal on the film because they liked the idea and they had an idea of how they thought they would do it for cheaper. And then they tried that approach and it didn’t work. So they then had to re-engineer a whole process. So it was much more of a challenging job than they were expecting.
Not to get too in the weeds with it, but they had just done the visual effects for Deadpool & Wolverine, and there is some sequences in that where a character is putting their fingers, like, underneath the skin of somebody else. They thought, “Okay, we have that tech, we’ve developed it, we can probably use it.” But then it didn’t work at all. It’s conceptually kind of close, but not close enough. Because it’s a lot of bones, subdermal skin simulations, fabric seams on top of animated bones and muscle. It’s just so in depth.
Filmmaker: Dave Franco and Alison Brie are obviously a real-life couple, and they’re also producers here. What was the collaboration process like? I know the film is inspired by your experiences, but I am wondering what they brought from themselves as a couple in a committed, long-term relationship.
Shanks: They were honestly incredible to collaborate with. They certainly brought some ideas to the table in terms of kind of making some tweaks to the script and also helped me de-Australianize it. I’d initially written this to take place in Australia. I was probably a bit nervous about the fact that they have such prodigious careers both in front of and behind the camera. They’re both written and directed films. They were incredibly generous with their trust and were passionate about the project. And on the set, they were like, “Whatever you want us to do, we will do.” We demanded such intimacy from them, emotional as well as physical. And they let me play with them. The amount of physicality in this film is insane. And we only had about 21 days to film it. So every day, there was some sort of stunt sequence or prosthetics-based sequence. And luckily, like they’re extremely fit and Alison has a wrestling background from doing Glow, and they were really happy to do quite a lot of their own stunts.
There was one scene where we had a stunt performer doubling for Alison where she has to run into a glass wall. And we did and then Alison said, “She’s not going hard enough into that wall. Give me a go.” And then Alison sprints into it and almost smashes this wall. And she was like, “I’m fine.” I think she bruised her nose. But that’s the take that’s in the movie because she just like went for it. There was also a scene where Dave’s running out of a cave and the character should climb up a rope to get out of there. We do the scene and he just climbs a rope with no practice, a thing I didn’t know was physically possible. And this was on maybe the last or the penultimate day. Then he climbed even higher in the second take and completely ripped his hands to shreds. So they were burnt and bleeding from rope burn. They were leaving Melbourne the next day and they sent a photo of Dave at the airport, with his palms to camera just covered in band-Aids getting onto the flight.
Filmmaker: Have you learned anything new about relationships after making this very intense movie about codependency?
Shanks: I been thinking and talking about these themes [both] in my private life and work life [for a while now]. And all of this is coinciding with getting a little older and feeling much more at ease at being very settled. My partner is currently pregnant and so we’re about to have our first child. That feels like a nice little sort of dovetailing—we’ve just made this film about our relationship and our fusion together. We’re at this point now where we’re going to be having this child, which is about as connected and fused with somebody as you can possibly be. And that the due date is at the end of this press tour. So it’s like, this film is this celebration and examination of my fears and anxieties about fully committing to somebody. And now the film is done, I can put it slightly behind me as I’m more connected and committed to this person than ever. So there has been a weird sort of poetry in the timing of it all.
