New rom-com Your Place or Mine is one to tug on your heartstrings and tickle your funnybones! Before you catch it on Netflix, Virgin TV 999, hear from its stars – Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher…
You’ve made your share of rom-coms before; what was different about this one?
Ashton: It was very very much about the hair; a very particular hairstyle that [writer/director Aline Brosh McKenna] felt the character had to have. And she used the word ‘grown-up’ a lot – like, ‘I want you to have grown up hair.’ I’m like, this is my hair – it is old! It’s 45 years old, the same as me! But it’s the style, and kind of the put-together essence of the character.
The film features a whole lot of split-screen – so while you’re acting together, you’re not actually together. How do you prepare for that?
Reese: Probably a month before we started shooting, I had sort of a little panic attack because we didn’t know each other. We’d met fully one time, at a party. I was like, ‘I don’t know this guy, and we’re supposed to be best friends for 20 years!’ So we started sending each other videos every day.
Ashton: Every day, we would send back-and-forth videos; ‘How’s your day going? What’s going on with you? What are you afraid of?’ If you were having pancakes, would you have syrup?’ I met your dad, spent some time on your porch… By the time we started shooting, we were sort of used to communicating this way.
A seamless transition to the set, then?
Ashton: The tricky part about shooting it is that when we’re in a scene together and we’re both there, we’re very improv-y with one another – but the way that this was done, one side was done before the other person even began to shoot their side. We were acting against a video of the other person, and their choices that were already made; there was none of that thing of affecting the way a person reacts to the thing you just said.
Literature plays a big role in the plot – which meant a lot of homework beforehand, we hear?!
Ashton: I’m not a very big fiction reader, so Aline sent me 10 books prior to the film. Every one of the books had note cards in them, about what [my character] got from this book. I read all of them. I actually fell in love with reading fiction again from the experience.
Reese: Aline also sent me…25 books? And I did not read any of them, haha! I called her and said, ‘I have three children, I’m running a company, I’m not reading these books – but they would look really good on the set.’ And they did!
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