Alison Brie in Spin Me RoundImage: Courtesy of IFC Films
It should come as no surprise that Alison Brie, the actor who played Community’s Annie Edison, Mad Men’s Trudy Campbell, and GLOW’s Ruth Wilder, is just as adept at writing brilliant characters as she is at playing them. Indeed, it was her acting skills that informed the largely improvised page-to-screen process in her feature screenplay debut, Horse Girl, a deep psychological dive of an indie horror that also had the audience asking, “Oh shit, it’s Alison Brie. right?”
Spin Me Round, a wild, dark-faced Eat Pray Love that marks Brie’s later collaboration with writer-director Jeff Baena, retains that inner nuance while recapturing the loose comedy for which she and her co-stars starring Molly Shannon, Fred Armisen and The Aubrey Plaza are the best known. Playing a chain restaurant manager whose all-expenses-paid corporate retreat to Italy goes more than a little awry, especially under the auspices of company founder Nick (played by Alessandro Nivola), Brie toes the line between plausibility and total absurdity. As the writer and star explains to The AV Club, her conception of Nick was inspired by real-life manipulators of the male persuasion.
The AV Club: Asking what a movie is “about” might be oversimplifying it, but Spin Me Round is doing and saying so much and covering so many genres that I have to wonder: What would you say, Alison Brie, about your movie?
Alison Brie: I like to do the same thing, I like to reduce a story to its most basic elements! Spin Me Round is about a woman who goes on a trip. She thinks she’s going to have the trip of a lifetime and fall in love… and things will go off the rails. Things don’t go as expected. That’s all I have to say about it.
AVC: There are a lot of absurd but realistic scenarios in this movie. How much improvisation was there in the writing versus the performance? Horse Girl and your other collaborations with Jeff Baena were more improvised, right?
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AB: Yeah, unlike every other project I’ve done with Jeff, we actually wrote the entire script for this and wrote all the dialogue and all that. But with such a talented cast, there were definitely some riffs on set, especially with Molly Shannon. His character is very funny and talks about going off the rails. She had a lot of different things to play with, so we really let her do her thing, which was really cool.
AVC: Did you write with these actors in mind?
AB: Molly, definitely, and Aubrey, who are part of the “Jeff Baena Players.” Molly, Aubrey and I have been in four out of five of Jeff’s movies, and Fred Armisen is also a repeat offender. The rest of the cast, no, we went deep into the characters and once the cast was secured, we went back in and then adapted the roles more to the actors we had cast.
AVC: So there wasn’t as much reliance on improv during filming?
AB: That’s right. We were, as with many indie films, a little short on time. So it was easier to stay on script most of the time. But there’s a great scene with Zach Woods and Ben Sinclair that’s kind of taken a back seat where there’s certainly been some improvisation going on. It’s always nice to let the material breathe. When you have such a talented cast—and all of these actors are so gifted at improv and comedy and drama—they deliver it from every direction, letting them play a little fast and loose, I think it offers a lot. We recover so much. [Each take was] quite different
Spin Me Round – Official Trailer | HD | IFC Films
AVC: How often do you break character, laughing at all these hilarious co-stars?
AB: Me, never. I have to say that I am one of those people, I hardly ever break. And I think in this project it was especially important for me not to break because my character is the one who is witnessing all this crazy behavior and getting caught up in it. It’s not like she’s the audience; I think the audience has a different perspective on her and can see things a little more clearly than she does. She is a bit naive. But I found, as a co-writer on the project, that doing it directly would keep everything anchored, as we were witnessing all these characters that are there.
AVC: In terms of your own cinematic inspirations, do you have a favorite movie? Or what about a dream collaborator you’d like to work with?
AB: My favorite movie is The American President, directed by Rob Reiner, starring Annette Bening and Michael Douglas. It’s my favorite movie of all time. I mean, I would love to work with Annette Bening. But a collaborator, a director… there are too many to close one. I mean, I could say [Quentin] Tarantino Wouldn’t it be fun, in your lifetime, to work with him? But it seems like a long shot. [Laughs]
AVC: You and Tarantino and Bening!
AB: Yes, me, Tarantino and Annette Bening! It’s like Tarantino’s dream cast. It seems like a no-brainer. [Laughs]