Alison Brie's dream collaborator? Quentin Tarantino, of course
The writer and star of the new film Spin Me Round has an ideal co-star in mind, too
It should come as no surprise that Alison Brie, the actor who played Annie Edison of Community, Trudy Campbell of Mad Men, and Ruth Wilder of GLOW, is as adept at penning such brilliant characters as she is at performing them. In fact, it was her acting skills that informed the largely improvised page-to-screen process in her feature screenplay debut, Horse Girl—a psychological deep dive of a horror indie that also had audiences asking, “Oh, damn, is Alison Brie okay?”
Spin Me Round, a wild, dark-sided Eat Pray Love that marks Brie’s follow-up collaboration with writer-director Jeff Baena, retains that inner nuance while reclaiming the loose comedy for which she and co-stars Molly Shannon, Fred Armisen, and Aubrey Plaza are best known. Playing a restaurant chain manager whose all-expenses-paid corporate retreat to Italy goes more than a little awry—particularly under the auspices of company founder Nick (played by Alessandro Nivola)—Brie toes the line between plausibility and outright absurdity. As the writer-star tells The A.V. Club, her conception of Nick was inspired by real-life manipulators of the male persuasion.
The A.V. Club: Asking what a film is “about” can oversimplify it, but Spin Me Round is doing and saying so much and covering so many genres that I have to ask: What would you, Alison Brie, say your movie is about?
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 go off the rails. Things do not go as expected. That’s all I have to say about it.
AVC: There are so many absurd-yet-realistic scenarios in this film. How much improvisation was there in the writing versus the acting? Horse Girl and your other collaborations with Jeff Baena were more improvised, yes?
AB: Yeah, unlike all the other projects that I’ve done with Jeff, we actually did write the full script for this and wrote all the dialogue and everything like that. But with a cast this talented, there was certainly some riffing on set, especially with Molly Shannon. Her character is so fun—and talk about going off the rails. She had a lot of different stuff to play with, so we really let her do her thing, which was really great.
AVC: Did you write with these actors in mind?