Coming Together with Aussie director Michael Shanks on his new body horror film

Relationships—there’s nothing scarier than them. Even when it’s going well, there’s no denying the uneasy feeling of two people becoming one, giving up your independence and individuality as you meld lives with your significant other. Together brilliantly explores this fear by introducing a body horror element to its on-screen couple, bringing them together in the most horrific and literal way.

DAVID MORGAN-BROWN spoke to its Australian writer-director, Michael Shanks, asking him about his influences for the film, both from other similarly gruesome movies and his own real-life experience of romance.

How was it that you came up with this kind of messed-up concept for such a film? 

The idea really came from just being in a relationship for a long time. I met my partner on schoolies, and I’ve been in my relationship for over sixteen years now. I do think being in a relationship is wonderful. It is. It’s a crucible. This is a film about how love transforms you at its most basic. And that when I was starting to live with my partner, we already had the same friends. We were living in the same house, breathing the same air.

I sort of realised that I didn’t know who I was without her, and she didn’t know who she was without me. I didn’t know where I ended and she began. And that was scary. That can be a beautiful thing, to be so enmeshed with one another. But also the idea of fully giving over your independence to share a life with somebody. It’s a bridge you’ve got to cross at some stage.

So, those themes just kind of fit naturally to me into an idea of, “Well, you already share a life. What if you started to share flesh, share a body,” and how much harder it would be to extricate yourself from somebody if that were the case.

I’ve seen couples that definitely are together because they’re used to each other, and the idea of splitting up is kind of so scary that they just hunker down, even though they know and maybe everybody knows that they’re no longer in love. They’re just so intertwined. It’s hard to imagine being separate.

When I watched the film, I didn’t realise that the actors Alison Brie and Dave Franco are a married couple. So, how was it working with them? Did it make it easier at all for them to act as a couple? Were they able to bring anything from their own relationship into this on-screen relationship? 

It was huge to work with actors who were actually together. Our characters in the film have been together for over a decade, and so have they. They added this kind of veracity to the history of their relationship.

And just like on a practical level. This is a relatively low-budget, independent Australian film for the scale of the film. So we only had twenty-one days to shoot it. So having a couple that knew each other so well and had worked together before, as well as just being a couple, meant that we could get through what was really complicated emotional work and kind of physically intimate work without there being any roadblocks.

And how was it that you cast them? Did you just cast one, and it’s like a two-for-one deal? 

With the casting process, when you are an unknown filmmaker within an indie world, it’s not exactly like getting people lining up to audition for your film. Instead, I had a list of actors that I would dream of working with, and both Dave and Alison were on that list. And then I had a different script that was doing the rounds in Hollywood, and via the heat of that script, I managed to get a meeting with Dave, and I gave him the script of Together, and we really got on. He read it and then looked at Alison, his wife, and said, “You need to read this. I think we need to do this together.” And then within two days, we were on a Zoom, the three of us, and we just kind of thought, “Let’s do it.”

It’s great to see with this film that body horror is back. Were there any films from that genre that influenced you throughout this film at all?

Definitely. Maybe my favourite movie of all time is The Thing by John Carpenter. It was a big influence. I kind of pay homage to it with the opening scene in terms of these dogs that end up in a strange kind of kennel.

But also the entire work of David Cronenberg. Certainly The Fly is his most accessible and maybe my favourite, but also there’s an intellectual rigour in his films that perhaps this film doesn’t have, a coldness to them that I really respect. As emotionally honest and rich as I’m hoping this film is, it’s also really designed to be like a crowd-pleaser. It’s a thrill ride. Hopefully it’s a lot of fun.

Other body horror filmmakers, like Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna, are those body horror guys that I’m a huge fan of. But I wanted to kind of take that body horror and kind of put it in a modern aesthetic of making it dry and painful rather than sort of slippery and gooey.

Who was it that did all the effects in the film?

I did a lot of the visual effects myself because I have that as a background. But for the big transformation and those high-end visual effects, it was done by Framestore Melbourne, and they did an incredible job.

But on a practical effects level, we used Larry Donovan. He was our head of practical effects. Almost every horror moment in this film has a practical effect. It’s either a practical effect, or it’s got a practical effect basis that we then would augment with visual [CGI] effects.