Source : the age
Two years ago, Australian YouTube stars Danny and Michael Philippou triumphantly moved to filmmaking with their horror hit Talk to Me. Now, another Australian YouTuber, Michael Shanks, is following in their bloodied footsteps with his own horror film.
Shanks wrote and directed Together, which, after world rights sold in one of the richest deals in the history of the Sundance Film Festival, will open in cinemas internationally in July and August.
Michael Shanks’ debut film Together will open this year’s Sydney Film Festival.Credit: Jason South
But before that, Sydney Film Festival will announce on Wednesday that it will screen on opening night in June.
Shanks, 34, shot Together in Melbourne, where he lives, as his feature film debut after notching up more than 65 million views for his shorts and a web series on YouTube.
He described himself as “overwhelmingly happy” at the festival selection.
“The film has played at a couple of places around the world but I’m so looking forward to it playing here in Australia,” he said. “I’m jazzed.”
Together stars Americans Dave Franco (The Disaster Artist) and Alison Brie (Promising Young Woman), who are married in real life, as a dysfunctional couple who have a supernatural encounter after moving to the countryside.
American reviewers delighted in Together when it premiered at Sundance in January, with Variety calling it “a squishy, fleshy, scream-worthy body horror movie” and The Hollywood Reporter saying it had “more bone-crunching contortions, sticky goop and subcutaneous disturbance than you could dream of”.
American distributor Neon, whose releases include Oscar winners Parasite, Anatomy of a Fall and Anora, reportedly paid more than $US15 million ($23.3 million) for world rights.
While not confirming the price tag, Shanks said it “far exceeds” the film’s budget.
What is almost as surprising as a bidding war for a first film from an unknown Australian is that the script for Together sat in a drawer for years after Shanks wrote it.
It was only taken out and circulated when another of his scripts, Hotel Hotel Hotel Hotel, was included on the Black List, an annual list of the best unproduced screenplays in Hollywood, in 2021.
“Riding off the heat from that script I got set up on a random meeting with Dave Franco to meet generally,” Shanks said. “I’d been a big fan of a horror film that he’d made called The Rental, which Alison is also in.”
After that meeting, Shanks sent Franco the script for Together, hoping he might like it enough to want to write something together.
“A day later I got a call from my agent saying, ‘Hey, so David loves it and he also got his wife, Alison Brie, to read it. She loves it, too. How would you feel about those two coming on?’” Shanks said.
His response: “Yeah, I think that would be OK.”
“More bone-crunching contortions, sticky goop and subcutaneous disturbance than you could dream of”: Alison Brie and Dave Franco in Together.Credit: Sydney Film Festival
Franco and Brie co-produced the film and Shanks shot it at Docklands Studios, the Dandenongs and other locations around Melbourne.
His path to filmmaking was discovering YouTube in high school.
“YouTube was such a great Petri dish for me, where I got to make my own little things completely unmoored from any pressure, then put it out,” he said. “Every few months when I put a new video out, it would reliably end up getting some eyeballs on it, which gave me the confidence to keep going and going.”
Shanks said he felt a kinship with the Philippou brothers, whose second film, Bring Her Back, opens in cinemas next month.
“We came up in YouTube around the same time, although them much more successfully,” he said.
They were in the same year of YouTube and Screen Australia program Skip Ahead, designed to teach creators the skills to make longer-form work. They also both worked briefly on Foxtel sketch show The Slot.
Shanks said the success of Talk to Me, which American distributor A24 released in the US after an earlier bidding war at Sundance, was inspiring.
“There’s such a burgeoning new wave of young exciting horror creators out of Australia,” he said.
Having been to the opening night of Sydney and Melbourne film festivals, Shanks said it had always been a dream to have a film open one “and bring Mum along and say, ‘Mum, I’m not crazy. I did it’.”
When Shanks’ mum came to the Sundance premiere, he thanked her in his introduction “for flying across the world to watch this film that you will almost certainly hate”.
“Then, after the film screened, she came up and said, ‘Well, I didn’t hate it. I thought it was quite good.’ That’s high praise for my mum, whose favourite genre of movie is ‘Judi Dench’,” he said.
