Editor's note: This story contains major spoilers for Together, which is now playing in theaters.Romance, codependency, anxiety, and resentment are some of the relatable relationship themes explored in director Michael Shanks' Together a gnarly and outrageously wild body horror film about two people who are not only married, but also literally melding into each other, whether they like it or not.The film stars real-life husband and wife Dave Franco and Alison Brie as Tim and Millie, a couple who have found themselves at a crossroads as they struggle to navigate the boundaries of their 10-year-long relationship.From the film's opening scenes, it's pretty clear that there's tension bubbling underneath the facade of their seemingly happy existence. Millie is a teacher and the breadwinner of the relationship; Tim's a struggling musician who is coping with the recent death of his father.When Millie accepts a teaching job in the countryside, they decide on a fresh start and move out of the city, which means leaving their friends and family behind. And even though the move clearly hinders Tim's proximity to local music gigs, he goes along with it anyway, for the sake of the relationship he and Millie have built together.During Tim and Millie's first hike near their new home in the countryside, things take a twisted turn: They stumble into a mysterious cavern underneath a dilapidated church that looks like something right out of an H.P. Lovecraft novel. While trapped in the creepy cave for the night, they drink what appears to be water from a primordial pit. Soon after, their bodies become uncontrollably drawn together by inexplicable forces.The answer to the supernatural phenomenon taking place lies with Millie's neighbor and fellow teacher, a seemingly widowed gay man named Jamie (Damon Herriman). However, it turns out that Jamie isn't exactly widowed. His partner is still with him In a metaphysical sense. A home video showing one of the most bizarre gay weddings ever reveals two men with an uncanny resemblance to Jamie willingly becoming one" as they consume water from the same ancient pit during a cultish ritual.As Jamie warns of the grisly consequences of resisting this inevitable transformation, Millie and Tim are soon faced with an existential crisis: Do they sacrifice themselves or embrace their body-melding fate? Backed by the Spice Girls' "2 Become 1," the couple shares one last dance together, and it isn't hard to guess what happens next. Ultimately, let's just say that the final scene in Together will make you question which pronouns to use when describing the fate of Tim and Millie.There's certainly a lot to unpack in Together, and not all of the lore is fully explained. So, as you can imagine, we had a few burning questions for the director. During an exclusive interview, Shanks tells Out about designing the ambiguously gendered character (nicknamed by the crew as "Tillie"), opens up about the Plato's Symposium mythology that inspired the story being told, and whether Franco's genitals in that restroom stall sex scene were prosthetic or the real deal.Out: The script for Together not only draws from Greek mythology, but it also pulls from your own real-life relationship. Can you tell me a little bit about the epiphany that sparked you to combine all of it into a body horror film?Michael Shanks: It was the premise of the film that came to me first. I was thinking about how enmeshed my own life is with my partner. At the time of writing, we'd been together for about 10 years, and I was thinking about how intertwined we are. So I thought, what if there was a story about people who were so intertwined in their relationship that their bodies started to become kind of intertwined? And that was the jumping-off point for telling the story.And then whilst writing it, I was researching, like, has this ever been discussed before in myths or ancient text? And that was how I came across Plato's Symposium, where Plato kind of hypothesized that humans in their true form were born with four legs and four arms and a head with two faces, and that Zeus split us apart because of his jealousy of our power, dooming us to spend our lives looking for our soulmate. And I thought, wow, this is perfect, like I've got to put this in the film, it's amazing!You landed Dave Franco and Alison Brie as your lead stars, a real-life married couple. Were there any advantages because of that?We couldn't have done this without a married couple because the things that we were asking them to do were not only super emotionally vulnerable, but physically vulnerable, and physically intimate. We had days on set where they had to be kind of fully nude in front of the camera. We had days where they had to be joined via prosthetics. Like, to the point where if they needed to go to the bathroom, they needed to go to the bathroom in front of one another. And you could never ask actors to do that. But with Dave and Alison, they volunteered. They're like, "Yeah, we can do it. That's no problem." So yeah, it was perfect.You seem to lean more towards practical effects. Was it your goal to keep the CGI as subtle as possible?Absolutely. However, I love CGI as well as practical effects. So it was kind of a joy to do both. My background is as a VFX artist. So I did a lot of the VFX in the film myself, probably the more subtle stuff that you'd never notice. The bigger stuff was done by Framestore, an incredible visual effects house. But having practical effects throughout probably 80% of the effects gags in the film was amazing because we'd just be on set and you'd be shooting something in the morning like a dinner scene, and then by lunchtime the practical effects people would be wheeling in puppets, crazy prosthetics or a shoebox full of human genitals.Speaking of genitals and prosthetics, was that really Dave Franco's manhood we saw in that restroom stall sex scene?I think I can reveal that it was prosthetic, but that was such a crazy shot to bring up to the producers. Like, "Hey guys, we need to do this shot. Trust me, it's going to work. It's going to be great." We had such a limited prosthetics budget, and that was a shot that I added a little later. I was like, "Guys, we can't afford to add prosthetic genitals." And it just so happened that my partner at the time was the lead designer of a sex toy company, and she was like, "Oh, I've got a bunch of very realistic genitals, just lying around in a drawer in my home office." So, I just took one of those and gave it to the prosthetics guy, and he kind of painted it up. It became maybe my favorite shot in the film.There are some very heavy H.P. Lovecraft vibes in your film: The subterranean pit, the dilapidated church, the mysterious pool of water. Can we assume he was an influence?I think it was like 10 years ago that I borrowed Lovecraft's Necronomicon from a friend of mine and just read all those short stories. The subterranean pit is definitely this sort of supernatural, elder god-style thing I don't want to overly explain this. I just feel like this is something from the deep distant past. Something raw in the deep center of the earth. I feel like it's almost like a pustule from within the Earth's core that's just kind of bursted forth at some point in the distant past. And over the course of things, people have discovered it. And maybe there's other pools of water just like that from the same water source across the world. Lovecraft was definitely in my mind for that whole thing.I want to compliment you on how you handled the Jamie character played by Damon Herriman. The way you handle the reveal that he is gay is so natural. He's just this everyday teacher who just so happens to have a male partner.Thank you so much. That means a great deal. Even when I was writing stupid stuff back in Australia back in the day, I was always keen to write queer characters just as any other character that you would write who isn't queer because there is no difference between us, really.By including that character and that gay wedding scene where he and his male partner take that next metaphysical leap, it just implies that your interpretation of the Plato's Symposium myth about the split four-armed humans searching for their soulmate isn't solely restricted to a male and female, which was often the case if you look at ancient Greek art. That scene just shows that anyone, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, has a better half out there.Absolutely. It's just about finding the person that you love the most and committing to them fully. That's really what the film's about, no matter who you are.As for the big reveal about what happened to Jamie and his partner, is it fair to assume that they kind of became this immortal being that retains the memories and traits of both men in one single vessel? The state of the dilapidated church we see in the present day makes it seem like their wedding could've taken place decades prior.Oh, that's so interesting. That is not how I see that. But I love that interpretation. To me, it's always funny when people interpret things in a film and then the filmmaker comes out and says, "Actually, it means this." But in my head, that cave is a living entity in a way. I sort of thought of it as this primordial giant gut of the earth that is slowly digesting everything around it.So, in my head, it was the idea that the church above this pit was built kind of 20 years before we arrive at the film. And just slowly but surely, it is kind of swallowing it. And that's why by the time we get there, we have pews and sort of like weatherboards, elements of the church, like in the walls of the cave, but right up the top, the bell is still there because it was the highest point of the church.That gender-bending final scene in your film will certainly spark a lot of talk, so I have to ask about the fate of Tim and Millie. Are they an asexual being now? Hermaphroditic? Can they procreate?To me, the logic and specificity of their physicalization kind of falls away in that final scene. It is sort of just purely visually representing the metaphor of absolute cohesion. And, you know, that's the reason why we show that image and we cut to credits, because I think if you continued the film from that point on, it would just fall apart. So it's almost, to me Not in a comedy way, but it's almost kind of like a punchline, "Hey, this is what we've been building to for an hour and a half." And I didn't want to back away from showing the sort of logical conclusion. So it was like, "And here it is! OK, thanks. Roll credits. Hope you had a good time. Bye-bye."When I saw the fate of Tim and Millie, I found myself referring to the blend of the actors as "Alison Franco" or "Dave Brie," because you clearly created a mashup of the two. Can you chime in on how you went about nailing down the androgynous look of their fully fused character in that last shot?You know, you're calling it Alison Franco or whatever. Because the characters are named Tim and Millie, we referred to that character as Tillie. And our visual effects supervisor, Genevieve Camilleri, was on top of that process. So as soon as Dave and Alison arrived in Australia, she took photos of them both. And then on a computer I was saying like, "What would work best? Well, it's going to be Dave Franco's eyebrows, and we'll use Alison Brie's eyes But we'll make them Dave's color, because she's got blue eyes, and he's got brown eyes.We ended up doing some of it in makeup where it's Alison as the sort of base. And she's wearing makeup eyebrows that are like exact matches of Dave's and she's got contact lenses in. But then in VFX, we got Dave to recreate the scene as well. And then in VFX, we cut out Dave's nose and Dave's jaw and kind of stick that onto Alison. After a lot of testing, those were the elements that seemed kind of essential to both of them. I think we all thought that it's so cute. Like, I think they're adorable. I wish that was a real person, because I'd like to be friends with them.Together is now playing in theaters.