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NEON releases Together nationwide on July 30th, 2025. NYC MOVIE GURU: Between entertaining the audience, provoking them emotionally and intellectually, which of those elements was most challenging to tweak in the editing room? Michael Shanks: What's always important to me in the editing room was to make sure that the film was a thrill ride and a fun experience to view. I feel like the other concerns more commonly came out during the writing process. Once you're in the editing room, it was about making sure that it's snappy, that we've got people's attention, and if we get the good grace of an audience in the first act and make sure that we don't lose their attention in acts Two and Three. NYC MOVIE GURU: How did you decide when and how to incorporate comic relief? MS: That's my background. I come from sketch comedy and a sort of high-concept comedy world. So when I started to write this script, I envisioned it more as a straight horror film, but the more and more we got further down the journey and the more insane things started happening, I just realized that my innate reactions and tried to put myself in that world for real and thought, "What would I do? I would be incompetent. I wouldn't be very good at this." From those sorts of moments, comedy can really come. I didn't go to film school. The thing that taught me filmmaking was watching The Simpsons endlessly as a kid. I feel like the rhythms in this movie, even though it's not a comedy, that are still really informed by things like The Simpsons NYC MOVIE GURU: Do you think that horror is the most visceral genre? Is there a genre that's more visceral? MS: I find it to be the most visceral genre. I don't need to go to horror to see people getting killed; I go to watch the characters go on an emotional journey. If that were just within the confines of a drama, it would feel a little withdrawn whilst in horror it really allows you to go operatic with your characters emotions and just take things to an insane degree. With this premise, once I started writing it, I realized, "This is a kind of one-and-done premise. You can't do this again." So, I was just really keen to get as much juice out of the premise as possible. I thought, "Ok, if this is what's happening to these characters then what are 10 crazy set pieces that you can only have in this movie and not in any other movie?" NYC MOVIE GURU: Hitchcock once observed that logic is dull and that imagination is more important. Do you agree with him? MS: I totally agree with that. I once heard someone write that a great filmmaker is not a filmmaker that doesn't have plot holes; a great filmmaker is a filmmaker that has plot holes that they know the audience isn't going to notice or care about. Ultimately, every film is a fake. I've done my best to make sure that everything is logically coherent. So if you really analyzed it, I'm pretty sure that I covered my bases in that way. I think that it's more important to go with what would emotionally feel right to me as the writer and, hopefully, for the audience. In the final cut there are little moments where I'm like, "I don't like that so much." But then in the editing, we kind of skip over that moment enough that, watching it with audiences, no one else sees it, and I go, "Great, cool, nice!." NYC MOVIE GURU: How did you know when to trust the audience's imagination? How did you decide what to show and what not to show the audience? MS: It's a tricky thing. Without getting too spoilery, I think that there are two moments in the film: one where the audience probably doesn't expect us to show "the thing" and then we show it. Watching that with an audience always gets a huge reaction and it's so much fun. I think that there's another scene, in contrast, where we're building up to something that you're really expecting to see and by subtly cutting away from it to the aftermath, that also gets the second biggest reaction of the film. That, again, comes from my comedy background of building something up to generate shock and surprise. People always say that horror and comedy are interwoven like that. I think it's no coincidence that on set you call a comedic gag or a horror gag "gags." At the core, it's about building something up and then surprising them with something that they don't expect---be it for a laugh or for a scare. It's really fun to be behind the camera and to figure out how to spook people like that. NYC MOVIE GURU: What was the process like to decide when and how to incorporate just the right amount of exposition? How did you decide when the audience should know as much as the characters or be ahead of them? MS: I was keen to avoid over-expositing. To quote the music Urinetown, "Nothing kills a show like too much exposition." I like leaving the backstory of how this supernatural element works kind of in the periphery. I watched Bring Her Back, another Australian horror film, the other day, and I love how they did the exposition in that way. There's this cult, supernatural element and they tell you enough so that you understand the story. By leaving lots of blanks, it makes your mind fill it in and it becomes much creepier. In terms of how ahead of the characters the audience was supposed to be, I think by the nature of films like this, posters, trailers and synopsis, give some indication as to where this film is heading. That said, I was keen to make it not necessarily slow-burn. If what happened to these characters were to happen right at the end of Act One, it would be an untenable film and probably be a flat-out comedy because it would be so insane. By sort of layering it over periods of time, it allowed me to write it more as dealing with a degrading infection or illness which helps to prolong the plot and to give the audience more time for the characters to be at each other's throats as they're trying to figure out the emotional honesty that they need to get to each other. NYC MOVIE GURU: Do you think that Together, like all art, is a form of poetry? Do you think that, like all poetry, it's a form of protest? If so, what is it a protest for or against? MS: To think of it as poetry is very generous. I love that thought. What I feel most poetic in filmmaking, is probably filmmaking without dialogue. We certainly have a lot of that in Together. We have a lot of dialogue in it, but I'm also proud that there are lots of sequences where we withhold the dialogue. The opening prologue is dialogue-free. There are lots of sequences where we're just telling the story with the camera and the visuals. In terms of protest, from an aesthetic point of view, we're trying to protest the aesthetic choices that are purely dialogue-driven and not using the whole range of the cinematic toolkit. On a more literal level, rather than protesting, it's very much a discussion or an examination of commitment, codependency, monogamy, what it means to truly share a life with somebody, and what that commitment might mean if somebody actually pushed that dial of sharing a life to something more operatic and visceral. NYC MOVIE GURU: What do you think are the basic elements that turn a horror film into a classic? MS: I love films with a sense of dread and with a sense of mystery where you have things to fill the blanks with. That's so wonderful about The Shining and Cube to me. Those are both films that I dream about because they're absolutely coherent on a surface level, but there's something kind of sinister that I don't understand about some of the aesthetic choices and the music choices. It's sort of infectious. On a purely shallow level: memorable scares and memorable images. I've never made a horror film before, but I've been a lifelong horror fan, so having a back catalog of, "Wouldn't it be cool to have a horror movie that does this and that and this?" and getting an opportunity to find and deploy those ideas has been great. NYC MOVIE GURU: How important is it for you to take risks as a filmmaker? MS: Completely. I'm not the kind of filmmaker who writes a lot of stuff and tries to sell it based on trends or anything; I tend to be a guy who will sit alone for 6 months and then tell my agent, "Hi! I've done something." It's always specific and always strange. I watch too many films where I go like, "Why did this story need to be told?" I don't feel a passion or a risk there; it just feels kind of ordinary. I don't like films to be purely entertainment---I want to make entertaining films and hope that this one is, but it needs to be expressing something or doing something unique. I want a film to present a mission statement as to a reason why it exists. NYC MOVIE GURU: What film would pair well with Together like cheese and wine in a double feature? MS: Together is a horror film, but it's got some romance and real heart in it. It's very different and very expressionistic, but Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a film that I find deeply romantic. It's kind of similar to Together in a different way---it's about characters who are recursively drawn back to each other. Even if they have flaws, there's something inherent to them that they can't stay away from each other. They can wipe each other away from each other's minds, but still end up starting the journey all over again because there's something innately passionate about the way that they feel about each other. 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