EXCLUSIVE: Reese Witherspoon & Aline Brosh McKenna Talk Bringing to Life Netflix’s Your Place or Mine

Netflix’s new romcom, Your Place or Mine was directed and written by Aline Brosh McKenna. We got the chance to hear from Mckenna and one of her leads, Reese Witherspoon as they celebrated the release of their new movie.

This story is a personal one for you Aline, what made you want to be the one who directed this story?

Brosh McKenna: “I was very taken with the story. It was based on personal experience. And I wanted to do a romantic comedy for people who have been through something in their lives, and have accumulated some life experience. And so, as I was working on that, it just felt very personal to me through the whole process. It was an idea I’d had for a long time. And then, when it finally came to fruition, it felt very personal. I like to work with unknowns. I’m really looking to discover people, as you can see with this cast. I was lucky enough to find these folks.”

Reese, you and your costar, Ashton Kutcher, have very little physical scenes together, how did you two go about creating the chemistry needed in a rom-com?

Witherspoon: “Well, we decided probably a month before we started shooting. I had sort of a little panic attack because we didn’t know each other. But we fully had met one time at a party. So about a month before, 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. It was really, actually kind of fun. And then our kids would get in the videos and our dogs.

Aline, in addition to writing, directing, and producing the film, you also co-wrote the song “Embers,” which appears in the film multiple times. Can you talk about how that song came to be?

Brosh McKenna: “We used The Cars as sort of Peter’s music, the band The Cars that I had grown up on, but also I noticed that men tend to pick a band or an artist that they love and then really stick to that. And for her [Debbie], we had a bunch of female singer/songwriter-type artists for her, but we wanted a song that was hers. And so, I was lucky enough that Sid [Siddhartha Khosla, who did the composing, and Alan [DeMoss], who works with him, invited me in to write a song with them. It was really fun, and we spent hours on the phone. I told them stories about why I had written the movie and sort of some of the experiences that had led me to write it, and what my inspirations were. And we talked a lot. Then we came up with this idea of embers, that it’s a relationship that is not in flames at the moment. Flames. But it’s still there, and it just needs to be stoked. And so, it was really fun.”

How did you find the vocalists for the song?

Brosh McKenna: “I was on TikTok, and I found this young group of artists from the Berklee School of Music. And they sing acappella a lot. So, we did the arrangement with them. It came out to be a really, pretty cool song that sort of represents Debbie’s hope for re-igniting. But I wanted to say, Reese has three men who are interested in her in this movie. And one day, Reese was like, ‘Why do they all like me? They all really like me. [laugh] “They really like Debbie.’

Witherspoon: “‘Cause it’s a movie.”

Brosh McKenna: “It was important. I wanted to show, you know, when you’re falling in love, and you’re not 21, that maybe she has more of a romantic history, and there’s other people in her life. Sometimes romantic comedies, the female lead is incredibly chaste, sort of chaste to a point which seems unrealistic. And so that was fun to give her a number of different love interests to play off of.”

Your Place or Mine is now streaming on Netflix.

*This interview has been edited for length and clarity

Photo credit: Eric Charbonneau for Netflix