Reindeers and Writing: Alison Brie and Dave Franco on Somebody I Used to Know

There are many important lessons that filmmakers can learn. For example, if you’re ever going to ask your lead actor to take a selfie with a reindeer, always leave that to the last day of shooting. You know, just in case.

Wait, how do you get a selfie with a reindeer? Well, if you’re filmmaking spouses Dave Franco and Alison Brie, you head to bucolic Leavenworth, Wash. Franco, who directed new revisionist rom com Somebody I Used to Know (on Prime Video now), described it as "a real Bavarian town in Washington State,” filled with alpine-influenced architecture, home to the Leavenworth Nutcracker Museum, and grazing location for a herd of reindeer. That’s where Brie took that reindeer selfie.

It’s the kind of crazy antics that connects Somebody I Used to Know to the grand tradition of rom-coms that inspired the film. Brie said, “We wanted to touch on the tropes of the rom-com, particularly the 80s and 90s rom-coms that we feel a great nostalgia for, but then update the with characters of today, and drop them into that real, conversational space, rather than heightened hijinks.”

In many ways, it’s a classic ‘80s rom-com setup: TV producer Ally (Brie) is facing a career crunch, and so heads back to her home town, where she meets her old boyfriend, Sean (Jay Ellis), only to discover that he's engaged to Cassidy (Kiersey Clemons). But there are still sparks between them, and does she have time to fan the flame of their romance? So far, so cute: but in real life that would make her a psycho homewrecker. That's something Brie and Franco discussed a lot in the writing process, how most classic rom-coms wouldn’t fly in real life. Take Meg Ryan’s character, Annie, in Sleepless in Seattle: lovable leading lady, or Brie said, "When you take her behavior two beats removed from the events of the movie, then her actions don't seem to magical. But because it's Meg Ryan…"

"And she's so charming and wonderful," chimed in Franco.

"... Let her watch him on the beach with his son!"

Alongside that subversion, there’s an element of mumblecore low-key authenticity to Somebody That I Used to Know (no surprise, considering Franco cowrote his directorial debut, vacation home thriller The Rental, with Joe Swanberg). Franco explained that part of his rehearsal process is to work with his actors to strip away anything that feels unrealistic or overblown. That process is epitomized here by a messy scene with a cat with severe altitude sickness, a story “ripped from real life,” shuddered Brie. When the couple took their cat to Oregon to film The Rental, they had a cat-astrophe on their own flight, with puke and excrement everywhere: Franco said, “Some people might see that and think some crazy hijinks and physical comedy, and our approach is still, no, what would actually happen? How would people actually react if that happens?”

But why Leavenworth and its reindeer? Well, Brie explained, it was in part because they wanted to return to the Pacific Northwest after The Rental, “and in part because we have a friend whose family lives there, and we know how beautiful it is.”

As part of its Christmas all day, every day vibe, Leavenworth has a reindeer farm, where part of the experience is a reindeer selfie. “The more challenging part of the task was that we had written that there was going to be a reindeer stampede,” said Franco, “and so we asked the people who worked there, ‘Is this possible and humane?’ ‘Absolutely.’ They just eat these leaves off these branches, and if you put a pile of them across their pen, they’ll come running.”

Part of the stampede made it into the film, but the whole experience was as nerve-wracking as it sounds. After all, the actors were stood between a herd of hungry herbivores and their dinners. Franco said, “You can see, especially in Jay’s eyes, there was real fear as 30 reindeer start charging toward him.”

While the reindeer are “docile and sweet,” Brie said, “they have these giant antlers on top of their head. So even when I went to take the reindeer selfie, they have a lot of protocols to follow. You’ve got to approach from the front, you don’t approach from the side, you’ve got to get a good grip on the head, lift it up fully into your cheek. Oh, and meanwhile you better get a good selfie because that’s what we’re going to use.” Still, she laughed, this was the last shot, “so if something went wrong, we had everything in the can.”

Not that Brie can blame the scriptwriter for putting her in this predicament. After all, she and Franco cowrote the script at their home during the pandemic. Brie described their writing process as organic, spinning out of everyday conversations. “Because we live together and are married, leading up to the actual writing process, there are so many conversations about, ‘What kind of thing do we want to write?’ ‘Oo, we’re tapping into something here.’ We’re brushing our teeth and someone goes, ‘Oh, you know what actually could be funny?”

Then they reach their favorite part (no surprise, since both began as actors) of workshopping the dialog. Franco said, “It’s typically me at the computer and Alison walking back and forth, and me saying, ‘OK, what would you say in this scenario, and she’s just feeling it and talking out loud, and I’m writing down some of what she’s saying. It’s a lot of back and forth.”

“And then it’s Dave continuing to make me write,” Brie added, “even though I’ve said ‘We’re done with writing time,’ and I’m in the kitchen making dinner, and he’s like, ‘But what if somebody said this to you?’”

Still, the couple tried to keep some boundaries and some structure, treating the writing process as a 9-to-5 day job, and even though it could seep into dinnertime, “but then we would stop for the night, watch a movie,” said Brie. “I feel like, lately, we’ve been kicking around a new idea and it’s very hard to set barriers. The fact that we were trapped in our house forced us to set boundaries and give structure to it.”

Not that Franco is too upset by that creep. “Writing is the one thing where I start working at the beginning of the day, and I look up and 10 hours have gone by, and I don’t know where it went.”

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Somebody I Used to Know is available on Prime Video now.