Dave Franco reflects on Palo Alto roots, marriage with Alison Brie and their new film ‘Together'

San Francisco Chronicle​

5 days ago

Dave Franco has been in the acting game for two decades, but he was once a sports-obsessed kid growing up in Palo Alto, with posters of heroes such as Giants slugger Barry Bonds and NBA star Vince Carter affixed to his walls.
He's reminded of that whenever he visits his mother, author Betsy Franco, and sleeps in his old room.
'She hasn't touched my room since I left,' Franco told the Chronicle during a video interview. 'I still have a bookshelf with my old sports trophies and some of my stuff.'
'And sports cards,' chimed in actress Alison Brie, Franco's wife. 'I can confirm this, as I've spent many nights in Dave's childhood bedroom.'
Franco, 40, has left childhood far behind. He and Brie, 42, have been significant others for 13 years and married for eight, and they have put that relationship to the test in ' Together,' a most unusual horror film about a couple whose decade-long relationship is disintegrating — until a spectral force physically propels them together.
Michael Shanks' feature directorial debut fits in the body horror genre, but it is a sly commentary on the ups and downs of relationships, dysfunctional and otherwise. In praising the film for the Chronicle, critic Bob Strauss likened it to 'an Ingmar Bergman scenario directed by Sam Raimi.'
'The monster in this movie, if you will, is an internal force,' Brie observed. 'It's not the type of horror movie where we're running away from an axe murderer. It's a push-and-pull within our own bodies.
'So many of the scenes,' she continued, 'the physical side of it for us was creating that internal tension and that pull, and some of it was established by actually tying ropes and wires around our waists or ankles and pulling us.'
'Together,' which Brie and Franco also produced, is the pair's fifth collaboration. They acted together in the 2017 comedies 'The Little Hours' and ' The Disaster Artist,' and Franco directed Brie in the horror film ' The Return ' (2020) and the rom-com ' Somebody I Used to Know ' (2023).
In a separate interview, Shanks said the couple's 'passion and enthusiasm' was crucial to keeping the low-budget shoot on track during the 21-day production schedule in Melbourne, Australia, helping him realize a lifelong dream of making feature films. (The filmmaker previously spoke up to blast a copyright infringement lawsuit surrounding the film last month.)
'It's not just what they bring to the table as actors, but also as producers and as champions of independent filmmaking,' Shanks observed. 'Every single day on set, we were torturing them, having them do this intense physical stuff throughout this film, and they just never complained. We had somebody on the crew who's been working in the film industry for 40 years lugging lights around, this crusty old Aussie guy, and he came up to me and said, 'I've never worked with better actors than these guys.'
'If we were running late, struggling to get shots in, and something needed to be moved, like a light or a prop, you'd turn around and Dave would be there lugging one of the lights around, just totally collaborative like that,' he added.
Franco's passion for movies began during a stint at a video store in Palo Alto at age 14 while he was a student at Palo Alto High School. The working age in California at the time was 16, so he toiled for free.
'They essentially paid me by allowing me to take home as many movies as I wanted,' Franco recalled fondly. 'It was the year 1999, which is now regarded as one of the best movie years ever. So I was taking home classic films, as well as very seminal films like 'The Matrix,' 'Fight Club,' ' American Beauty,' ' American Pie,' ' Being John Malkovich,' ' The Blair Witch Project.' It was my initial film school.'
Around that time, his older brother James Franco was knocking on doors in Hollywood. A few years later, Dave Franco decided to become an actor while at USC. (Another older brother, Tom Franco, has dabbled in acting but is mainly known as the artist founder of Berkeley's Firehouse Art Collective.)
Dave Franco had small roles in films such as ' Superbad ' (2007) and 'Milk' (2008) before breaking through with key supporting roles in ' 21 Jump Street ' (2013) and 'Now You See Me' (2013), which launched a pair of sequels (the third film, 'Now You See Me: Now You Don't,' is due in theaters on Nov. 14.).
He met Brie at a Mardi Gras party in New Orleans in 2011 when the actor was in the middle of her run as part of the cast of ' Mad Men ' (2007-15), and they have been inseparable ever since — well, not as inseparable as their characters in 'Together.'
'We're very happy to say that our relationship is nothing like the relationship in the movie,' Brie said with a laugh. 'But just having been together over 13 years, having that shared history, being in love, we knew that would naturally find its way into the script.
'I realized afterward that this shoot made us possibly more codependent than we had been going into it.'
Franco agreed.
'Yeah, the whole experience has made us analyze our own levels of codependency, which are probably pretty high,' Franco said.
'I think this movie has a way of really holding a mirror up to the audience and reflecting back to them their feelings about relationships,' Brie added. 'It's already been exciting to see audience reactions. They're all walking out with something different depending on how they feel about monogamy.'