By Jessica Herndon
One of the most exciting things about the Sundance Film Festival is having a front-row seat for the bright future of independent filmmaking. While we can learn a lot about the filmmakers from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival through the art that these storytellers share with us, there’s always more we can learn about them as people. We decided to get to the bottom of those artistic wells with our ongoing series: Give Me the Backstory!
Filmmakers often demand a lot from their actors. Performers are required to access a wide range of emotions, deliver bloodcurdling screams, and perform gnarly stunts if they’re up for it. The actors who rise to the occasion make magic. Writer-director Michael Shanks cast such artists for Together, his horror film premiering in the Midnight section of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. The movie follows a strained couple, played by married leads Dave Franco and Alison Brie, who experience a supernatural force after trading city life for rural isolation.
“We basically tortured Dave and Alison every day of this shoot — and they didn’t complain once,” jokes Shanks. “They’re incredibly kind, so game for anything, and nobody worked harder on this shoot than they did. Every day we needed them to scream or cry or be thrown around on wires or smash around in cold puddles — the list goes on. But they were indefatigable at every step.”
A sharp exploration into the ways significant others become codependent, Together is the feature debut and the first Fest premiere for Shank, who has collected awards for writing, directing, editing, visual effects, and composing. Below, Shanks talks about how he wants to be remembered, how he overcame budget and scheduling obstacles during production, and the kind of art that gets him juiced.
What was the biggest inspiration behind Together?
My partner and I have been together for 15 years — almost half of my life. I can barely remember who I am without her, and the notion of fully sharing your life with someone is something I was interested in exploring — a film about how falling in love is a transformative thing.
Films are lasting artistic legacies. What do you want yours to say?
That I was cool, funny, smart, and nice.
Describe who you want this film to reach.
I hope anyone who’s been in a committed monogamous relationship can find something to relate to in the film. I also want the film to reach any genre/horror fans as I’m extremely proud of the places we’ve taken the many set pieces in the film.
Tell us an anecdote about casting or working with your actors.
On the final day of shooting, I asked if Dave would be happy to try climbing a rope at the end of a take, “Just get, like, a foot or so up, then I’ll cut away.” He ended up just climbing the whole rope like an absolute machine. After the first take, both Alison and myself were telling him not to do it again, that we had got it, and he should save his energy. The next take, he climbed even higher. It was insane.
The following day, they were flying out from Melbourne, and Alison sends me a photo of Dave at the airport — his hands all bandaged up from severe rope burn.
We put them through hell, and they emerged with a smile.
What was your favorite part of making Together? Memories from the process?
The entire process was honestly incredible. My background is in run-and-gun guerrilla filmmaking, where often I’d be making the props and costumes and really making things by the skin of [my] teeth. Just to have these amazingly talented artists and professionals working on something I had written was something I wasn’t taking for granted. Every time there was a new piece of concept art, a new set was built, a prosthetic, etc., it was like someone had plucked a real physical thing from a dream I’d had.
What was a big challenge you faced while making Together?
The challenge was always that the film was extremely ambitious for the budget and schedule we had. I hope that it feels like a bigger film than it was. We shot it over the course of about 20 days, and every day, there was at least one scene that was incredibly technically challenging.
Even throughout [post-production], I’ve always done my own visual effects, and I ended up needing to do the bulk of the VFX shots across the film, so I’ve had basically no free time this whole year. This freed up our VFX budget so we could put it toward the higher-end VFX concerns, across post, by real VFX artists.
Tell us why and how you got into filmmaking.
I was always fascinated by filmmaking, both the process of making them and the movies themselves. I was a teenager in the sort of early years of YouTube and I suddenly discovered that you could find resources online to teach you how to do things. So, I would spend my evenings watching tutorials on editing and VFX software, learning how to record music, edit sound effects, etc. I was already writing and directing in my school’s theater program, and so I wrote a stupid little comedy sketch and made it with my friends using a camera I had saved up for — a Sony mini-DV kind of thing.
I entered it into an online film festival, and it won. The prize was a job turning that sketch into the pilot of a web series for an online magazine. So, straight out of high school, I had about 18 months of this crash course in filmmaking. I had to deliver episodes every fortnight, so I’d have a couple days to write them, then shoot them with whichever friends were unemployed at the time to begrudgingly “act” and spend every other moment making props or costumes and editing, scoring, VFXing, etc. It was like my own private film school, instead of the film schools I had failed to get into.
If you weren’t a filmmaker, what would you be doing?
I love to play and produce music, so maybe something in that field. At a certain point, I was hoping to pursue both, but being a musician was something I was simultaneously committed to and extremely embarrassed of. I was never cool enough to make it not cringe.
If I hadn’t gotten my first job as a filmmaker in my final weeks of high school, I was planning on going to university to study “computer science,” something that, to this day, I do not know what it is.
What is something that all filmmakers should keep in mind in order to become better cinematic storytellers?
There’s so much more to cinema than dialogue. I’ve made a lot of stuff that was entirely dialogue-free, and, even in this film, there’s plenty of sequences where the camera or the editing is telling the story more than anything that’s being said. The films that get me the most excited are ones that prioritize expression via every tool kit in the toolbox.
Who are your creative heroes?
David Lynch, Thom Yorke, John Carpenter, Peter Jackson, Bong Joon-ho, and M. Night Shyamalan. [I] have always been hugely inspired by the music videos of Chris Cunningham and Michel Gondry [and] any of the writers of the good seasons of The Simpsons.
What three things do you always have in your fridge?
Milk, eggs, and some long-expired weed gummies I’m way too anxious to try.
What was the last thing you saw that you wish you made?
I’m always attracted to big, wacky, pulpy premises. Things like Nope or Trap come to mind. I thought the kind of machine-operated body swapping of Possessor and It’s What’s Inside had premises I would have loved to play around with.
One thing people don’t know about me is _____.
I struggle being around foods once they pass a certain threshold of glossiness. If someone’s eating, like, jam, I’ll find an excuse to leave for a bit.
Which of your personal characteristics contributes most to your success as a storyteller?
I love getting obsessive about a project — any project — from filmmaking, music making, to cooking or DIY. As I’m getting older, I find myself struggling to deal with free time, and that attribute definitely helps when it comes to dealing with the sheer amount of work to do on a film.
Something that has also helped, which seems contrary to what I just wrote, is that I think I’m pretty chill. I like to be around people, and I like to collaborate. Despite the ambition of this production, I was never really stressed, thanks to an amazing team of pros all around me who allowed me to do better work.
Why did you want Together to premiere with us?
I don’t know. It’s just cool. Sundance was always the festival we dreamed of [as] our world premiere, so for it to be actually happening has me floating on a cloud.
Who was the first person you told when you learned you got into the Sundance Film Festival?
I told my mum, who is very excited about her own Sundance debut in her second-long, out-of-focus cameo.
What’s your favorite film that has come from the Sundance Institute or Festival?
That’s an insanely long list of films to choose from, but I’ll say my favorite from last year was I Saw the TV Glow, which really blew me away. Also, a couple of years ago now, but I gotta shout out the Philippou brothers’ Talk to Me as the best Aussie horror in decades.
And maybe Peter Jackson’s Braindead.
