Making "Somebody I Used to Know" had to have been such a memorable experience for you, not only to film it with your husband, Dave Franco, but also to be able to create this world and these characters together. What inspired you two to write this story? It was written during lockdown, right?
Yes, it was, but we actually had hatched the idea just before lockdown. We were home for the holidays in Davey's hometown in Northern California and taking a walk around his old neighborhood. [We were] exploring that idea of going back home, what it brings up for people, the nostalgia elements there and what happens when you run into people that you used to know, how you're affected emotionally, how you end up taking stock of your life now versus who you were then, seeing where other people landed, and things like that. That was the initial impetus.
Then, during lockdown, we were watching so many romantic comedies. There's a lot of dark stuff going on in the world, and we wanted to watch things that were uplifting and optimistic. That really fueled this, where we wanted to make something like that. We were like, "Let's put something positive out into the world."
Were there any scenes that you two wrote or discussed that didn't end up making it in the final cut?
Oh, gosh — so many. Our original draft had this whole set-piece scene where the characters are playing the paper game [cootie catcher] ... I mostly remember it because we had a ton of rom-com references. We have a lot of references in the film as is, but in that scene, we were firing them off one by one. That didn't make the cut.
The scene that kills me the most is a great scene with Danny Pudi and me that came at the end of the movie that we shot. We even sent a version of the film to some friends for some early screenings of it. It was a fan-favorite scene, but it didn't serve the story. It was sort of interrupting. It was giving the audience too much closure before the characters have closure, and we had to get rid of it. That's the biggest heartbreaker of the movie. If people still made DVDs, I'm like, "Got to put it in the special features."
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