Together’s Michael Shanks didn’t think he’d make something so personal

Michael Shanks and his partner are the closest you can be to high school sweethearts without actually cosying up in a classroom. They met at Schoolies.

Sixteen years later, his experience of his relationship became the jumping off point for the body horror film Together, with Dave Franco and Alison Brie in the leads.

When he first told his partner the idea – a couple moves to a rural area and after an encounter with a strange body of water in the woods, they begin to physically fuse together – she told him that she was maybe upset about him mining their relationship for the story, but that he had to do it anyway.

Originally, Shanks thought he was exploring the push and pull of independence and co-dependence in long-term relationships, but when he started writing the script, he realised he was using a lot of specifics from his life.

“When I was writing, I would knock on her office, we both worked from home, and be like, ‘Hey, that argument we had two years ago, and you called me a piece of sh-t, why was that? What was the worst thing I did?’. ‘OK, cool. I’ll put that in,’” he recalled to The Nightly.

“And trying to make it sort of authentic and nasty, all the negative stuff in a relationship.

“But also trying to find that hopefully these characters might work things out, and that we could hopefully hold on to the idea there might some sort of romantic and loving resolution to it all.”

Yes, Together is a scary movie, and while it, of course, has the body horror elements that make you cringe or gag, the depth of its discomfort comes from the common fear that we lose something of ourselves when tethered to another person.

That anxiety is more primal than bumps in the night. It’s existential.

Shanks knew it well because he went through it. When he and his partner moved in together, he wondered if his independence was falling away, if he would become “half a person and the two of us would cease to be individuals”.

An even more fundamental question is whether they should. He had seen in his friendship circle, which had produced an unusually high number of long-term couples, some who had been together since year seven, pairings that were more “used to each other” than genuinely wanting to be together.

At the start of Together, Millie (Brie) and Tim (Franco) seemed to be in the latter group. On the surface, they didn’t seem to be on the same wavelength, sniping over small things, at odds over decisions big and inconsequential. Over the course of the film, that will shift back and forth, as audiences are asked to reckon with their own roles in relationships present and past.

Working with Brie and Franco, a real-life married couple, made the whole production experience a delight. It was very convenient when there would be hours of complicated prosthetics that tied the two actors literally together.

“They couldn’t break it, which meant that they would need to go to the bathroom together, they would need to literally do everything together,” Shanks said.

It was also the ease of two actors who were so comfortable together and already had that shorthand of open vulnerability, invaluable on a 21-day production schedule.

Shanks said he had come from a comedy sketch background, and was used to writing more ironic stuff, so was surprised he penned something so personal.

In particular, Tim, with his thwarted musical ambitions and resentment, was a “dark reflection of who I was really worried I was turning into”, he said.

“I’d written the main character as this personally cathartic, worst version of myself, the person that I was worried everybody said I was behind my back. Who knows, maybe they were.”

But the feedback he got about Tim was that he was too much of a bad guy, and Shanks ultimately had to soften him up so the audience understood why Millie was even with him. It also made Tim and his malaise more relatable.

That Together had such personal origins for Shanks is important. He, Franco and Brie are being sued by the producers of 2023 film Better Half, with the plaintiffs alleging that Together had “ripped off” their film.

In June, Shanks released a statement that said the accusations have been “deeply upsetting” and “entirely untrue”, and pointed out that his first completed draft of the screenplay had been registered with the Writers Guild of America in 2019, the year before the Better Half filmmakers claimed they pitched their film to Brie and Franco.

Shanks also received development funding from Screen Australia for his Victoria-shot film in October 2020, so there is an identifiable paper trail.

“To now be accused of stealing this story – one so deeply based on my own lived experience, one I’ve developed over the course of several years – is devastating and has taken a toll,” he added in that statement.

Due to the legal kerfuffle, Shanks couldn’t elaborate further, but it’s clear that the distraction has been a bummer for what should’ve been a triumphant moment.

Together premiered at Sundance Film Festival in January, an exciting launchpad for the Melbourne-based filmmaker.

It was euphoric week but he had also been in the emergency room hours before the gala screening, extremely ill from a combination of norovirus and altitude sickness. His partner was there on the ground in Utah, as was his mother and sister.

American distributor Neon bought the film for $US17 million, the most expensive deal of this year’s festival.

In time, perhaps the copyright lawsuit will be just a blip, and Together will be remembered for its real legacy – the horrors of toxic co-dependency in a long-term relationship.

Together is in cinemas on July 31