Together Filmmaker Talks Alison Brie, Dave Franco Sex Scene

Together writer-director Michael Shanks has been riding high since his supernatural body-horror film debuted at Sundance 2025 to universal acclaim. 

The overwhelmingly positive response has mostly maintained itself now that the Dave Franco–Alison Brie two-hander is in theaters. (It currently boasts a 98 percent score among critics on Rotten Tomatoes.) The warm embrace of Shanks’ feature directorial debut has been so impactful that the New Zealand and Australia-raised YouTuber-turned-filmmaker has already started worrying about the comedown in humorous fashion.

“I’m worried there’s going to be a potential bit of whiplash or a hangover from this year that feels like a beautiful dream,” Shanks tells The Hollywood Reporter. “This chapter is going to close, and I’m going to go back to living in West Footscray [Australia] where I’ll think of it as some weird anecdote: ‘Hey, remember those few weeks where people liked what I was doing?’”

The film begins with Tim (Franco) and Mille’s (Brie) move to the countryside, and unlike the married actors who play them, the couple has been unable to turn their relationship into a proper marriage, largely due to Tim’s floundering music career and unresolved familial trauma. While exploring the trails around their new home, Tim and Millie fall into a relatively shallow cave where they’re forced to stay the night. In the process, Tim drinks some cave water that results in the couple sticking together in ways that become more and more grotesque as the film goes along.

Around the halfway point, the gravitational pull between the recently sexless couple becomes so intense that they have to seize the moment and fornicate in Millie’s workplace bathroom. However, the duo’s bodies inevitably become overly attached to each other. The idea for this intimate scene came from Shanks’ long-term partner, Louie McNamara, and knowing that there’s a recurring online discourse around the necessity of sex scenes in mainstream movies, Shanks remains keenly aware of how essential the scene is to his narrative.

“Our film is trying to paint a holistic view of the romantic relationship experience, and its absence would be notable, particularly with a premise like this that is all about the body and physical closeness,” Shanks says. “It’s certainly not a scene for titillation. It’s a scene of tension and cringe.”

At the last minute, Shanks wanted to up the body-horror ante in the scene by including a shot of Tim and Millie’s genitals clung together despite the characters’ best efforts to release themselves. The finishing touch to the scene that McNamara originated would again be provided by her and her employer at the time.

“It just so happened that my partner was working for a sex toy company at the time,” Shanks recalls. “So she had access to extremely realistic genitalia, and I was like, ‘We can get that for free? Great! Give it to the prosthetics guy.’ He then added a couple of bits and bobs of pubic hair to the free prosthetic.”

The aforementioned example of intimacy is one of many reasons why Shanks believes that he couldn’t have made his film without a real-life couple. As shown in the marketing, Tim and Millie’s arms eventually become merged, and the mutual prosthetic required Franco and Brie to be conjoined for hours upon hours, so much so that they had to take bathroom breaks together. When you add that practical reality to the breakneck pace of a 21-day shoot, it certainly helped to have two actors who already had that degree of familiarity with one another.

“We were demanding that [the actors] go to places of extreme emotional intimacy, as well as physical intimacy, and without a married couple, I don’t think we could have pulled this off,” Shanks admits.

Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Shanks also discusses some of the semi-autobiographical details in Together, before addressing his shared Australian history with the Philippou brothers (Talk to Me, Bring Her Back).

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I kept thinking about Jerry Maguire’s “you complete me” line while watching Together, and the film really does explore that relationship idea quite literally. This was all born out of the collective identity that you and your long-term partner had formed?

Yeah, my partner Louie [McNamara] and I are approaching our 17th anniversary. We met just after high school, and when I was writing the script, we were probably approaching something like ten years together. We were living together for the first time, and I was realizing that we really do live the same life. We have all the same friends, we eat the same food and we breathe the same air. So I was struggling with the idea of losing my individuality at this point of a forever monogamous relationship. I’m particularly somebody who had unfulfilled artistic ambitions, and I’ve had to come to terms with growing old. And having maybe invested too much in the wunderkind identity, I was like, “Hey, this is my life now. It’s not just mine, it’s both of ours.” 

Given the unusual form of intimacy on display in this movie, did you purposefully seek out married actors to play Tim (Franco) and Milie (Brie)?

Yeah, I really don’t think we could have done it without having a married couple at the center of it. From an emotional point of view, Dave and Allison have this chemistry that you can see on screen when you watch the performances. You really feel it, and it’s also a fun meta element to the film. But on a practical level, this is such a low-budget indie film. We only had 21 days to shoot it, and it’s a film with pretty ambitious set pieces and ideas. So we needed two lead actors that already had a shorthand, a relationship and a chemistry. We were demanding that they go to places of extreme emotional intimacy, as well as physical intimacy, and without a married couple, I don’t think we could have pulled this off.

Did Dave and Alison add physical elements that you never would’ve scripted or storyboarded for two unmarried actors? 

Not exactly. When writing the film, I was really loosed from the idea of what the production would be like, and I was just following my instincts as a storyteller. The other way to look at that question is had we not had a [real-life] couple, we might’ve had to remove some of those elements from the script.

With Dave and Alison being real-life partners, did you forgo an intimacy coordinator? 

We did forgo an intimacy coordinator for Dave and Alison, but we still had an intimacy coordinator as part of the film set. This was all new to me as a first-time feature filmmaker. Dave and Alison might’ve had to go have a prosthetic applied for four hours, and during that time, you are setting up the lights and the camera so that you can film quickly once they arrive on set. So we had stand-ins for that, and that’s what our intimacy coordinator was really dealing with. It was making sure that our stand-ins, who are performers in their own right, were comfortable with the situations that they were being put in. 

A few filmmakers have told me that producers will sometimes try to talk them out of practical effects just because there’s no room for error on a low-budget film. If a take doesn’t go as planned, you might not have time to redo the effect in a lot of cases. So were you discouraged at all from incorporating practical effects? 

No, I was really keen to do as many practical effects as possible. I have a visual effects background, and so I love visual effects and have no problem with using VFX. But practical effects were something I was unfamiliar with, and they have this mysterious on-set magic. The ability to have somebody wheel in a puppet that’s a perfect replica of Dave Franco is just such a funny thing to have on set, and it unites the crew to say, “What are we doing here?” 

From a budgetary point of view, yes, practical effects do slow down production, but so do visual effects. When you’re doing high-end CGI like we do in a couple of sequences, it’s still slow and a little painful. You’ve got to bring in those spherical gray balls that you see on set and do all these measurements and markings. The CGI effects in the film were very expensive, and rightfully so, they took teams of people months to develop. So that was the biggest cost from my memory of the effects budget, hence why I had to do so many of the visual effects myself. We put our entire VFX budget into a select few extremely important effects so we could get the most polished results. 

That said, we didn’t have backups for a lot of the practical effects in this film. We just didn’t have the budget for it. So when we were affixing Dave and Alison arm to arm, that was it. We couldn’t damage those prosthetics, and they’re very delicate in that way.

On that note, there’s a prosthetic in the bathroom stall sequence that will likely garner some discussion. 

It was late into production when I finally convinced people that we needed to see genitals in the bathroom sequence, and it just so happened that my partner was working for a sex toy company at the time. So she had access to extremely realistic genitalia, and I was like, “We can get that for free? Great! Give it to the prosthetics guy.” He then added a couple of bits and bobs of pubic hair to the free prosthetic.

I do want to highlight that incredibly memorable sex scene for the sake of how few and far between they are these days. I asked another director recently why they didn’t incorporate one into their film, and they gave the increasingly common refrain that the internet’s vast selection of adult entertainment has made Hollywood sex less provocative now. 

That also seems to imply that the function of a sex scene is always titillation, and perhaps that’s what its function is on the internet. 

Precisely. It just feels so dishonest to not depict the ultimate form of intimacy in certain stories and scenes that call for it.

Yeah, it is so fundamental to life, and it’s why we are all here. Our film is trying to paint a holistic view of the romantic relationship experience, and its absence would be notable, particularly with a premise like this that is all about the body and physical closeness. Shout-out to my partner Louie, who came up with the idea for that sex scene. When she first said it to me, I did think, “Oh, that’s maybe too far.” But then I took a minute and thought, “What do I mean? That’s such a great idea.”

And what’s so great about it is that there’s a range of potential consequences brewing alongside it.

Yeah, it’s certainly not a scene for titillation. It’s a scene of tension and cringe.

The stairway sex scene in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence is one of many examples where I can’t imagine the film without it, given what it says about those characters and the current state of their relationship.

Yeah, particularly how it contrasts that film’s initial sex scene where [Maria Bello’s character] role plays as a cheerleader. By the time they have that second sex scene, their lives and their roles are completely changed. I love that movie.

Tim loses his phone upon falling in a cave, and the demos on his phone were his chief concern, not Millie’s well-being. And as someone with hundreds of demos on my own phone, I definitely felt for him even though the scene is meant to show how self-absorbed he is. That’s why she later makes fun of him for it.

I don’t think that’s an incorrect feeling to have. My heart also breaks for Tim in that moment because I, too, have a bunch of unreleased demos on my phone. I could lose my phone and be fine, but beyond the photos, I would miss all the terrible songs that I’ve written and will never release because they only exist on my phone. So that moment is kind of a joke, but it’s also speaking to Tim’s own priorities. Tim is the self-loathing reflection of my own incompetence as a partner, and that is legitimately how I would feel if my phone suddenly was gone. 

One recurring weakness in a lot of films is the photography that establishes character history or backstory. The photos either look like they were taken yesterday, or the photoshop work is blatantly obvious. However, you got to repurpose real pictures of Dave and Alison for Tim and Millie. Did they provide you a selection to choose from?

Yeah, I got an email one day with a Dropbox link, and it had a hundred photos from the history of their relationship. And from the art department’s point of view, what a boon. We’ve got those photos up in the background of Tim and Millie’s house and apartment, and we even got to use them as a bit of marketing, which was fun. 

The opening proposal scene is as uncomfortable as any of the body horror sequences. Please tell me that you haven’t actually witnessed a proposal like that in real life.

I’ve not seen something that awkward, but I did once do a fake proposal in front of my partner before immediately revealing that it was a joke. So when I was writing the script, I thought back to it and said, “I don’t know if that was a particularly cool thing to do.” I’m so influenced by cringe comedy. My favorite show of all time might be Peep Show, and when I was writing that scene, I was like, “Oh, cool. This is like a Peep Show scene. It is just mortifying.” I wanted to meet these characters in the real world and show off exactly how tumultuous this point in their relationship is. And having to live in that for 15 or 20 minutes before we go into genre-horror mode, it was nice to have something that still feels kind of horrific and gets a big audience reaction. Even from our first screening at Sundance, you could feel the room holding their breath, and that was one of the first indications that this was working. People were locked into it.

[The following question/answer alludes to a spoiler.] When I first saw Damon Herriman on screen, I thought to myself, “Wow, I can’t remember the last time I saw Damon play a regular guy.” And then I quickly thought, “Wait a second, maybe that’s the whole point.”

Yeah, absolutely. When we went out to Damon to cast him, he was so excited to play this role, and he said, “Mate, I just want to play a normal guy, a normal teacher in a nice tweed coat. God, I’m always cast as serial killers, or I’m wearing prosthetics and being a goblin. Here, I can just be a nice lovely teacher guy.” And he’s so good at it. He’s very charming, and when you meet him in the film, he’s funny and suave.

Prior to this promo cycle, you released a statement that addressed an unfortunate legal situation surrounding the film. As the glowing responses to Together continue to pile up, has that given you some degree of comfort the last couple months? 

The high point of this whole experience was actually making the film, and the second highest point was probably the Sundance reception. That was our debut, and since then, it’s all been so good. It feels a little bit like I’m living a second life. Every time I see the film and do press, it’s overseas from where I live back in Melbourne, Australia. So everything is still very normal back at home, but I then get to travel overseas and go to screenings where there’s people that are excited to meet me, which is very new and strange.

So the feeling has remained extremely strong, and these last few weeks of being in America and doing press have been extremely overwhelming. But there is something isolating about it because I am distant from my partner and my friends and my family. So, in a couple of weeks, when I go back home, the film will be out, and I’m worried there’s going to be a potential bit of whiplash or a hangover from this year that feels like a beautiful dream. This chapter is going to close, and I’m going to go back to living in West Footscray where I’ll think of it as some weird anecdote: “Hey, remember those few weeks where people liked what I was doing?”

Just out of curiosity, has anyone from WME tried to connect you with M. Night Shyamalan? He just went through a very similar situation himself.

No, nobody has connected me with M. Night, which is a shame. I should ask my agents to connect me with M. Night just because I’ve been talking about how much I love M. Night in the press. Signs is often in my top four movies, and there are shots in Together where I was basically trying to do what M. Night would do in the situation. There’s a back-and-forth sequence of two characters, and I framed it in this way so the characters are looking straight at the lens. It’s symmetrical, and the distance between those characters suddenly shifts within a cut. And I was absolutely thinking of the Joaquin Phoenix-Adrien Brody scene in The Village when you suddenly realize that Joaquin’s character has been stabbed. That is just the most elegant filmmaking I’ve ever seen, and I just love his films. 

Unbreakable might be my favorite movie, at least since it came out, so I’m right there with you. 

During my final year of high school, we had to compare and contrast two films in my media class, and my media teacher made it a point of pride to not do what other schools were doing by choosing  movies that might be confusing to teenagers. So she chose X2 and Unbreakable, and those are two of my favorite films to this day.

Lastly, I’ve interviewed the Philippou twins a couple times, and besides being Australians, you guys share a similar YouTube-to-Sundance success story. (Neon acquired Together for $17 million at Sundance 2025; A24 purchased Talk to Me in a “high-seven-figure” deal at Sundance 2023.) Have you crossed paths at all?

We have crossed paths, certainly. We were making YouTube content around the same time, and theirs was much more successful than mine. Screen Australia, which is our government funding body, had a program that brought in people who were making stuff online. They basically said, “We also have more traditional platforms for media. We can either discuss things or maybe fund a web series.” So we ended up going to VidCon together as a Screen Australia thing. We were also on the same sketch TV show once, and I edited a video of theirs for that show. 

There was a Screen Australia initiative called Skip Ahead for online creators that had proven they could find audiences, and they took us to Sydney for a week to hang out with a couple of screenwriting experts. They taught us what long form screenwriting is like, and the Philippou brothers and I were in that class. One of the screenwriting experts was Samantha Jennings, who now produces their films. And the Screen Australia guy who found us and put us in that project is a guy named Mike Cowap. He produced Together, and I hope he will produce my further stuff. 

So we’re all from this tight little Screen Australia-recognized group, and being about the same age and working on YouTube at the same time, it’s really amazing to be mentioned in the same sentence as those guys. They’re certainly my favorite modern Australian filmmakers.

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Together is now playing in movie theaters.