Your Place or Mine director gave Ashton Kutcher and Reese Witherspoon reading assignments
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Getting an offer to star in a movie can come with any number of things — a generous salary, top billing, or a cozy, personalized trailer.
But when it came to starring in Your Place or Mine, Ashton Kutcher and Reese Witherspoon were given something unexpected — homework.
"I gave Ashton books that I thought Peter would have and would have read and have a point of view on," says writer-director Aline Brosh McKenna. "With Reese, I gave her a bunch of books that I felt like Debbie had collected over the years — some first editions, some beat-up paperbacks. One of them had an inscription to someone named Peter, so I decided that was Peter's book that she had kept when he moved."
Kutcher and Witherspoon star as Peter and Debbie, two best friends who first connected during a one-night stand 20 years prior. As 20-somethings, Peter dreamed of being a novelist and Debbie an editor, but they've since abandoned those dreams for more practical careers. But when they swap places — Peter taking care of Debbie's son Jack (Wesley Kimmel) in Los Angeles while she stays in his New York bachelor pad — they realize that maybe they let go of some of those aspirations (and each other) too quickly.
While speaking at a press conference, Kutcher revealed that he was a model student. "I'm not a very big fiction reader," he said. "I don't read a lot of fiction. And Aline is like, 'Yeah, but this character's a novelist, so he's going to be very well-read in fiction.' So, I ended up diving in. Aline sent me 10 books prior to the film. She's like, 'You need to read all of these.' And every one of the books had notecards in them about what Peter got from this book, specifically, what he got as a writer from this book."
"[My favorite was] When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi," Kutcher continued. "That book was devastatingly wonderful. High Fidelity was very good. I read all of them. I read all 10 books. I actually fell in love with reading fiction again from this experience. That was fun and refreshing."
JoJo Whilden / Netflix Ashton Kutcher in 'Your Place or Mine'
Adds McKenna to EW: "I didn't know that Ashton would read all of the books I gave him. But as I've gotten to know him better, that's a very Ashton thing to do."
In contrast, Witherspoon, who is known for her literary chops as the founder and head of the influential Hello Sunshine Book Club, didn't do the assignment. "Aline also sent me 25 books and I did not read any of them," she said, with a laugh. "I called her, and I said, 'I have three children. I'm running a company, and I have a full-time other job. I'm not reading these books. But they would look really good on the set.' And they did." (McKenna clarified that they were all vintage books and she did purposefully intend for them to be more set dressing than Witherspoon's background research.)
In advance of the film's release on Netflix on Feb. 10, we sat down with McKenna to talk about making her directorial debut on the picture, why she wanted to tell a love story where the two leads are kept apart, and just how challenging it was to shoot the film's climax on an airport people-mover.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You've said this story is an idea you had kicking around for a long time. Where did it come from?
ALINE BROSH MCKENNA: I went to New York to work on a movie and I needed a place to stay that was relatively inexpensive. My friend Ted Griffin, who's a very successful screenwriter and wrote Ocean's 11 among a bunch of other things, let me stay in his apartment and it was very bachelor-y. It had stickers on the glasses and shrink wrap on the silverware. He had sent me a funny email about cool places to go drinking and meet girls and stuff as if I was also a bachelor. I always thought that was funny. And I thought, "Well, what if Ted had to come to L.A. to take care of my kids if I was being a bachelor?" I always loved the idea. Then it struck me that maybe I could try to do a little magic trick where we're really showing how people connect now via phone, text, FaceTime, all these other things. I wrote it in 2019 before we knew quite how much we were going to have to depend on those things. But when they switch, it's like, "Did they ever really know each other? Were they giving each other an edited view of each other's lives?" They come to realize what things have been excluded, what things they've been told and not told, but they think they're telling each other everything. Of course, no one ever does. It's always a heavily redacted version of that.
Netflix Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher in 'Your Place or Mine'
When you were shopping the script, was it always with the idea that you'd direct?
Yes. Because it's about adults, because it's grown up, because it has scale, it felt really right for it to be the first movie I directed. I'd directed TV obviously [with Crazy Ex-Girlfriend]. Actually being a showrunner was the best training for being a director, even more than being a screenwriter because screenwriters are not integral to the shooting process. But show running is day-to-day, making all the decisions short of directing, and then when you're directing you're doing everything. So it was really great training. The other great thing about having been a showrunner was the years that I spent working so closely with actors and having my creative partner being an actor. I learned a lot about the most productive and fun ways to approach actors.
The literary world is so important to both Debbie and Peter and their journeys. What made you include that?
I felt like it was important for them to have had that vestige of the 20-something purest aspirations. What you choose to do when you first enter the world is probably the purest form of your aspiration. And then sometimes it gets funneled into something else. In terms of rediscovering each other, the ember is also this dream of what they were going to be when they first met when they were in their 20s. We also have cameos of real authors and editors who are standing outside the Brownstone Club. We have Amanda Brainerd who wrote Age of Consent. Morgan Entrekin, who's a very famous editor and now is at Grove Atlantic. Patricia Marx, who writes for the New Yorker, Min Jin Lee, who wrote Pachinko, Jackie Woodson who's incredible and has written tons of stuff. Emma Straub, who is also a friend of Reese.
Erin Simkin / Netflix
The soundtrack is heavy with the music of the Cars, and you've said you chose that because of guy's tendency to choose a band that is just their band. But why the Cars?
The Cars really suit that intellectual but slightly emotionally remote person that Peter is. The Cars are not head-bashing music. It's party music for smart people. And the songs are so incredibly well written and they're bops. We could have used 20 Cars songs. It was hard to limit the list to ten songs.
We rarely see rom-coms about people in their 40s and up. Was that always important to you in writing this?
What's funny and cool in the context of this movie is they're both gorgeous. The movie is not pretending that either one of them is an ugly duckling. By the way, they could both play anything. But the idea is not that they're shy or woebegone or need a makeover. The makeover is on the inside. It's really two people coming of age at the same time later in their life. It's never too late to come of age. And it's never too late to learn how to lift the obstacles that are keeping you from being happy. I think what makes people old is accepting certain limitations that they don't need to accept.
The climax takes place on this airport people mover. How hard was it to shoot that without one of them falling over?
That was always a pretty important part of the movie conceptually for me. We spent a very long time looking at airports and convention centers, anywhere else we could do it. But what we needed in terms of space and the ability to light and control the space ourselves, it ended up being easier, which is hard to believe, to build our own airport. We got some movement help from Katherine Burns, who did all the choreography for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. At the end of the show, we did a musical number on a turntable. So, Katherine and I had worked with a moving walkway with actors before, and I wanted to make sure that we weren't going to injure either one of them. Kat and the assistant director came up with the idea of an old couple in front of Reese slowing her down. We didn't have a lot of runway between the walkway and the end of the stage. It's a pretty big space, but it's all floored in and it's six feet off the ground.
Erin Simkin / Netflix Reese Witherspoon and Wesley Kimmel in 'Your Place or Mine'
The visual implications of that concept of these two people moving in opposite directions and then having to come together is so ripe in that sequence. Where did you get that idea?
It's really easy to let those opportunities go by in life, to let the brass ring go by, whatever it is. Whether it's a friendship or a romantic partnership or a work opportunity or anything. And I wanted them to almost miss each other. In my own life, my husband and I, it felt like we continued to bump into each other. But you have to take that opportunity when circumstance puts you in the right spot. I'm not a believer in fate or destiny or any of those things. But I'm a believer in, if you are in a situation where you can seize the moment, you should seize the moment. And this is a moment where if they had gone past each other, I don't know if they even still would've been friends.
I feel like you write in two really specific modes: you have The Devil Wears Prada or Crazy Ex-Girlfriend where there's this really sharp, satirical tone to it. And then you have something very earnest like this, or 27 Dresses or Morning Glory. What made you want to return to that earnest space? Do you like writing in one more than the other?
The intention was always to make it funny. Because as our producer, Michael Costigan, likes to say, when you're making a rom-com, you want your rom-coms to be rommy and commy. So it was definitely placing an emphasis on it being funny, but it's not necessarily satirical. The thing it has on its mind is more emotional obstacles and what does it take to be a fully realized person? The stakes are human as opposed to being a deconstruction of a genre or a satire, which is a little bit what Prada is. But I think all of the movies, including Prada and Crazy Ex, always come down to the human emotion and what is underneath that. I think of them more as dramas with jokes. What I'm always trying to do is try and capture the human experience, but with humor. Somebody said to me, "You write coming-of-age pieces for grownups." That really resonated with me. That idea that it's people going through something and sometimes that brings you to a zoo. And sometimes that brings you to realizing you shouldn't be a people pleaser, which is 27 Dresses. In this case, it was after they've come of age, they're ready to be with each other.
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