How 'Together' Director Michael Shanks Made an Indie Horror Look Like a Blockbuster

Australian filmmaker Michael Shanks has always lived by “going big or going home”. He’s built his career on squeezing the most spectacle out of any budget, from his comedy work and early YouTube days to his heartfelt short Rebooted and his Blacklist–topping script Hotel Hotel Hotel Hotel. Now he’s gone larger than ever with his feature film debut TOGETHER, the funniest, most romantic body-horror you’ll see this year.

Starring the real-life wedded Dave Franco and Alison Brie, the film explores the idea of two people becoming inseparable and takes it to its most extreme and literal conclusion. But for all its gory, grotesque set pieces, Shanks insists that TOGETHER is, at its core, a love story.

Ahead of its release on VOD, we sat down with Shanks on zoom to talk about creating a blockbuster on an indie budget, drawing inspiration from comedy classics, and why some couples had mixed reactions to the movie.

FARAH SADEK: I can't believe that this movie was made on a low budget, because it feels very massive. How did you manage to make it look so large on screen?

MICHAEL SHANKS: Thank you. That’s always been the goal with everything I've ever made, going back to my YouTube days. I was always aiming to enhance my technical skills as a filmmaker, as well as tell a story. I grew up loving spectacle movies, and not just the ones with big fight sequences, but films that give you unique visuals, where the filmmakers really squeeze every drop of juice from the premise. I get frustrated sometimes with horror films that don’t have enough set pieces that I think you could get out of the idea.

To me, Together was a one-and-done premise, so I didn’t want it to just be two characters in a house going through this. I wanted as many set pieces as possible. One thing that’s helped me with that, as a writer, is that I usually do my own visual effects, and I did a lot of them in this film out of necessity. I was teaching myself visual effects at the same time I was learning how to write and making sketches with friends.

I wasn’t necessarily trying to become a VFX artist, it was more about freeing up my writing. Indie filmmakers often don’t have the budget to go to extreme, crazy places with their stories, and I thought: if writing something crazy only costs me weeks of my own time, then I have the freedom to write whatever I want. I never worry about a producer telling me we can’t afford something, because I’ll just figure it out.

On this film, I did about 170 VFX shots, not the big, flashy ones, but the kind of work you might not even notice, like painting out wires. In indie productions, that can cost around a thousand dollars per shot, so if you do that 130 times, you’ve saved at least $130,000 out of the budget. When you’re working with slim margins, that goes a long way. The alternative would have been to cut shots and sequences, and I never wanted to do that.

There are no deleted scenes in the movie. Because we had such a tight budget and such an ambitious script, in the months before shooting we pared it down to its essential elements, but not too essential, because then we’d lose some of the fun set pieces.

Which you could argue the story would still make sense without them, but you’d lose the ride of it all. So everything we shot ended up in the final cut. We didn’t have the budget for extra shooting days, so rather than film scenes that would get cut in the edit anyway, we just cut them before we shot.

SADEK: You wore many hats for this film. You wrote, directed, did some VFX, and you also had a brief cameo, correct?

SHANKS: I have a little cameo that unfortunately requires no acting, because I just have to pose for a couple of photos and ultimately get my head turned into a prosthetic, which was an extremely claustrophobic experience. But, that’s the delight of making a movie like, this is my first movie, and I never thought I'd be lucky enough to do it that I'm like, oh, I got to show up and that'll be fun.

That'll be like, the one time I get to be in a movie, oh, I get to be turned into a prosthetic. That'll be fun. Then I get to keep this weird prosthetic, which I have in a glass jar in the corner of my room. It was just, I was like a kid in the candy store. Like, every single element of it was just like, Oh, crap. I never thought I'd be able to.

SHANKS: I did. I had a little cameo that, fortunately, required no acting. I just had to pose for a couple of photos and then ultimately get my head turned into a prosthetic, which was an extremely claustrophobic experience. But that’s part of the delight of making this film. It’s my first movie, and I never thought I’d be lucky enough to actually get to do it, so I was like, “Oh, I’ve got to show up. That’ll be fun. This might be the one time I get to be in a movie. Oh, I get to be turned into a prosthetic.” I even got to keep it, I’ve got this weird prosthetic head in a glass jar in the corner of my room now. It was just such a “kid in a candy store” experience.

SADEK: I can also see your Dave [Franco] bust right there.

SHANKS: I got a fun bust of Dave with some rods so you can articulate it. There's a bladder in the throat so you can blow in a tube, and the throat goes like (gargling noises). Shout out to our amazing prosthetics guy, Larry Van Duynhoven.

SADEK: I think of this movie in a very romantic sense. Throughout the film, I kept thinking of the line “you complete me” from Jerry Maguire. Was the film your way of interrogating that idea and turning that sort of longing for closeness into something that is absolutely terrifying?

SHANKS: Definitely. There's so many cliches in our cultural vernacular that speak to people being one another's other halves or completing each other or sticking together. There's, obviously, the Spice Girls song 2 Become 1 or Bryan Ferry’s Let’s Stick Together. So, it felt like an obvious fleshy metaphor for the process of fully committing to somebody else.

I've been with my partner for almost 17 years, and there is a point where you don't really know who you are without this person. We've shared a life for so long, the same friends, the same oxygen, and the same house. One of the first things that came to mind when I started writing the script was the Radiohead song, Where I End and You Begin, and just the title of that song [got me thinking] I don't know where I end, and my partner begins anymore.

There's this continuum that is us, more so than me and herself; the film is about, particularly in the intro, those anxieties. So, it is like a romcom structure, in a way, where you meet characters at odds, and by the end, they sacrifice everything and say, I do love you, let's go for it. As weird as it is, I think of the ending as romantic because I'm sort of a mushy sentimentalist myself.

SADEK: So, what would a Michael Shanks romcom look like?

SHANKS: I have no idea. I love the romcom genre. It'd be so fun to do. But now that I'm in this very fortunate position where there's a chance to make something else, and people are asking me about what I’d like to do next, I realized that I'm such an effects guy, in a way. I'm so enamored with visual spectacle and the technical sides of filmmaking.

It would be such a cool challenge to write something that takes place within the real world, but I think my instinct is to go towards something that's technically difficult and full of process. I mean, the last short film that I made was about a stop motion animated skeleton that can't find a job in Hollywood.

SADEK: Yes, Rebooted! I was going to ask you what you brought from that experience to Together?

SHANKS: It started with the idea that it would be exciting to celebrate the history of Hollywood, especially special and visual effects, within a live action frame. Our main character is stop motion, but he exists in a live action world. We also have 2D animated characters and an early CGI liquid metal man. I thought it would be fun to play with that, while making sure it wasn’t just a technical exercise but more like a visual patina that I was excited to explore.

I wanted to get into the nitty-gritty of keeping it about someone and about the themes, not just an outdated special effect. At its heart, it’s about a stop motion skeleton who can’t find work in modern Hollywood because he’s just not very good anymore. To me, that’s a story about aging and obsolescence, and at the time I was feeling that way myself—struggling to get artistic projects going and wondering if maybe my career ended before it began.

SADEK: Beyond the obvious body horror influences, I know you mentioned Cronenberg, Carpenter, Shyamalan, but you've also mentioned Peep Show. Are there any other unusual inspirations that you had in mind for Together?

SHANKS: I love that you found the Peep Show quote. It’s my favorite show of all time, along with Star Trek: The Next Generation and Twin Peaks. I love cringe comedy, and there’s a lot of that in Together. Even though it’s absolutely a horror, absolutely a body horror, there’s still a lot of awkward comedy. Even in the opening proposal scene, I wanted to wring every ounce of awkwardness out of this ghoulishly flubbed proposal, which definitely has a Peep Show vibe.

I also think there’s a lot of The Simpsons in the film. The further it goes, the funnier it gets. When I first sat down to write, I thought I’d make a really serious, intense horror movie. But my background is in comedy, and as the premise got crazier, I realized I was getting in my own way trying to make it serious. It felt more natural to let comedy into it. Honestly, if I were in that situation myself, I’d probably act the same way Dave’s character does—like, if my partner and I had to viciously cut our bodies apart, I’d probably need a snack before doing anything else.

That’s the kind of humor I’m proud of, because you don’t usually see it in movies, but to me it feels very Simpsons or Futurama. There’s even a moment in the third act where Millie says, “Now, Tim, don’t you do anything stupid,” and the second she runs off, Tim immediately does something stupid. In my head, I was thinking of that moment when Marge tells Homer, “Now, Homer, don’t you eat that pie,” and then Homer instantly eats the pie.

SADEK: As a Simpsons fan, I love that connection. The snack scene was one of my favorite scenes, and Dave and Allison really made it work.

SHANKS: They’re amazing. They can nail the dramatic stuff, but because of their comedy backgrounds, they had that extra tool in their kit when the tone shifted. They needed very little direction.

Another huge help, going back to your point about being low budget, was that Dave and Allison were on board for about a year before we shot anything. We spent that year on Zoom meetings and read-throughs, so by the time we got to set, the three of us knew each other really well. We all understood the script inside out and already had a feel for the tone of each scene. That was crucial, because we only had 21 days to shoot a really elaborate film. There was no time for endless takes. Their preparation made that possible.

It also helped that they were married. Every night after filming, on the drive back from their Airbnb or hotel, they could run lines and talk through the next day. They already had their own shorthand, and by the end of the shoot, the three of us had built one together. It was really, really nice.

SADEK: Yeah, honestly, that’s something I can’t wrap my head around. You mentioned that if you’re not together, you’d probably end up together by the end, but if you are together, you could actually split up because of how intense the experience is.

SHANKS: Yeah, yeah. But with them, it makes sense because they’re such a perfect couple. They always have each other’s back, and they were just wonderful to work with. I’m honestly sad the project’s over, because I really want to work with them again.

SADEK: You’ve talked a lot about where the practical effects stopped and the VFX began. I want to ask about something specific: Jamie and his partner. The younger versions of them are played by two different actors, so why did you decide to cast two different people instead of going the CGI route, like in the ending?

SHANKS: Well, doing a full visual effects version of that would’ve been way too expensive. The effect you’re talking about at the end is pretty simple. It’s not really CGI. It’s compositing: Allison with some makeup, plus 2D elements of Dave layered onto the character. There’s no 3D rendering or generated content involved.

But with the young Jamie sequence, we’re showing those characters from all sorts of angles. That would’ve required full 3D work, which was much more complicated. Instead, in the script it was written that the two actors would each share half of Jamie’s features, building toward the reveal.

We had some interns from a local university helping in pre-production, and one day we asked them to search Star Now, which is basically a talent registry for unrepresented actors. They went page by page making a shortlist of people who looked a little like Damon Herriman, who plays Jamie. From that list, I found two guys who both had some resemblance.

We then created a still photo of them where I Photoshopped Damon’s eyes onto one of them and Damon’s mouth onto the other before they appear in the video. I thought of it as programming the audience: you see that still image a couple of times, so by the time they show up in the fuzzier video, you’ve already subconsciously accepted that they look like Damon.

And it worked. I’ve had a lot of questions about how we pulled it off, but really it was just about creating that still image, priming the audience, and then casting two guys who did the job really well.

SADEK: You mentioned that you brought in a contortionist for Allison, but not Dave. So, what are the physical demands that were more on her side?

SHANKS: It really comes down to that hallway sequence where we mainly used the contortionist. Since the scene is anchored from Dave’s perspective, what’s happening to him is already crazy, but it’s only at level one out of ten. By the time he stops himself, we needed to keep amping things up. So when Alison’s character is revealed, she had to be going even crazier than him for the tension to keep building.

That’s why we brought in a contortionist instead of using digital doubles or anything like that. We found Gemma, who is an amazing contortionist, and it was actually her first film. In her audition tape, we just asked her to send over something of her doing wild contortions across the floor. She did this incredible back arch, and it basically choreographed the scene for us. It was perfect.

On set, we filmed Gemma performing the full-body movements, and then had Allison do her best to recreate them. Obviously she wasn’t as flexible, but she did a great job. For Allison we shot tighter on her face, so you can cut between the two.

There’s also one other moment where we used Gemma for Alison when Allison’s character is being dragged along the driveway toward Dave toward the end. I thought it would be fun to twist the knife by having her hit a log so her back bends horribly over it. It’s such an unnecessary moment, the kind of thing you could cut to make the scene simpler, but that’s where the joy is for me. The situation is already a disaster, so why not make it worse? Like, on top of everything, your back gets fractured, how annoying is that?

SADEK: I love that you can tell that Allison did a lot of that herself as well.

SHANKS: Allison did so much. That’s another reason they’re both so good in these roles: they’re incredibly fit. Dave’s a total freak when it comes to sports. There was one scene where Tim was supposed to run out of the cave and start climbing a rope, but originally we were going to cut before he actually climbed it. I asked Dave if he’d try it anyway, just so we’d have a little more to cut with. He said, “Okay, I’ll give it a go,” and then he just climbed the whole rope. We did a second take, and he actually burned the skin off his hands, but I couldn’t believe he could even do it.

Allison’s the same. She’s obviously got that physical background from GLOW, so when it came to stunts, she did a lot of her own. There’s one big jump scare where her character runs into a glass wall. We had a stunt performer doing it a few times, and Allison was standing next to me at the monitor watching. She finally said, “She’s not doing it hard enough. Let me try.” And then she just ran and smashed into the wall herself. That’s the take that’s in the film. The next day she had a bruise on her nose from it, but she just went for it.

Both of them throw caution to the wind with that kind of stuff, and the film’s so much better for it.

SADEK: The reactions to the movie have been really interesting. I’ve seen some very funny comments, especially from couples. Have you come across any bizarre reactions on social media that stuck with you?

SHANKS: Ones that stuck with me. Pardon the pun. Yeah, a few critics called it “a compelling argument for staying single,” while others have said it actually helped them and their partner get closer. And I’m like, how? I don’t totally understand that, but there is a romance and sweetness at the heart of the film.

I’ve mostly stayed away from social media, but friends keep sending me funny TikToks people have made. What’s really stayed with me, though, is touring with the movie. After screenings, people come up and share these really personal things. At Sundance, after the second screening ever, a guy came up and said, “My wife begged me not to talk to you, but I have to. This movie is about me. I don’t think I’m going to make it as a musician anymore, and maybe my wife is holding me back. What should I do?” And I was just like, whoa, that’s way too intense for me to answer.

But overall, it’s been strange in a lovely way. Traveling with the film, seeing people so excited to talk about it. It still feels unreal. In my head, it’s this project I wrote in my office in Melbourne seven years ago, shot down here, and edited with two editors in a room for months. It felt like a secret little group project. And now it belongs to the world. As cliché as it sounds, it really is humbling.

TOGETHER is now available to rent or buy on VOD.