One of my favorite movies to play at the Seattle International Film Festival earlier this year was Spin Me Round, a hilarious comedy about what happens when an Olive Garden-esque restaurant called Tuscan Grove sends their most promising managers to a retreat in Italy and most of the women find themselves seduced by the flamboyant CEO. Alison Brie (who also co-wrote with director Jeff Baena) stars with a cast that includes Aubrey Plaza, Molly Shannon, Debby Ryan, Lauren Weedman, Zach Woods, Lil Rel Howry, Ego Nwodim, Fred Armisen, and more. Basically if you made me laugh sometime in the past decade or so, odds are better than not that you’d be in this movie.

Spin Me Round is the latest collaboration between Alison Brie and Jeff Baena, whose other films include The Little Hours and Horse Girl. Often, as with The Little Hours and Spin Me Round, Baena’s spouse Aubrey Plaza also stars. Alison Brie’s character is Amber, a young manager in the Exemplary Manager program at Tuscan Garden who finds there may be in Italy for reasons other than her potential in restaurant management. She’s seduced by the CEO Nick (Alessandro Nivola) with an assist from his mysterious assistant Kat (Plaza). Brie is one of the most reliably funny comedic actresses working today and this is no exception. 

Spin Me Round is the latest collaboration between Alison Brie and Jeff Baena, whose other films include The Little Hours and Horse Girl. Often, as with The Little Hours and Spin Me Round, Baena’s spouse Aubrey Plaza also stars.

Brie and Baena came to Seattle in April with Spin Me Round so it could be screened at SIFF. It was only the second time the movie played after it premiered at SXSW. For reasons still unclear to me, Brie said that she only did one interview with local press while she was promoting this movie: this one. I’ve been holding onto this interview for about four months and am delighted that I can finally share it with readers. Spin Me Round begins its theatrical run at SIFF Cinema Uptown on Friday, August 19.

So can you tell me how this movie came about? It was just so offbeat but I loved it.

Well, the original idea came from Jeff Baena, who I’ve worked with now on four films and this is the second film that we’ve written and produced together. I actually think it was right after we shot The Little Hours in Italy that Jeff just wanted any reason to get back to Italy and he had this idea percolating. He had read an article about a chain restaurant’s exemplary managers program and he thought that that was kind of funny and then I think he just ended up tabling the idea. I kind of waylaid him with Horse Girl and talking about that and we made that movie and after we finished, that was such a wonderful experience and we worked with the Duplass brothers and Mel Eslyn, our producer on Horse Girl. It was just great all around. It was such a good experience that after we finished that, Jeff said, “Let’s write another one together,” so he brought this to me and told me, “I already have a 10 page outline. Do you want to use this as a jumping off point and just expand on this idea I’d already been thinking about?” and I said, “Yeah.”

It was one of those movies where you just don’t know what’s going to happen next, especially the ending. That just threw me through a loop. 

Jeff and I both really like movies that start in one place and then just spin more and more out of control as the story goes along. Horse Girl actually followed a similar trajectory but in a more dramatic fashion than probably all of Jeff’s movies. I think you could follow this kind of arc that he really loves of just taking characters on an adventure that becomes really out there and by the end, you see the characters wondering how they themselves got there. I think what was fun about this one is watching the characters take control of their own destiny throughout the course of a movie and in doing so, they actually are the ones that create the chaos around them.

And how did you get everyone else on board? Everyone that’s ever made me laugh, I feel, over the past 10 years was in that movie.

Well, we just called a lot of friends. Some of the roles were written specifically for actors in the movie. We wrote Molly Shannon’s role for her and Debby Ryan, actually, who had just been in Horse Girl, I think we had her in mind for that role when we were writing it. Jeff has a lot of actors that he works with again and again and this is the case again here. So we have Molly, Aubrey (Plaza), Fred Armisen, who was in Little Hours with us. The way we had written a lot of the characters or I guess the way we work is finding great people to be in the roles and then going back and catering the roles towards the people. So there was a fun thing where we could have cast almost anyone for a lot of different roles and we end up just meeting with people and trying to talk to people that we think are funny or who we know personally are really great and take meetings with them and see if they’re on board.

I was also delighted to see Lauren Weedman because she used to be on a sketch comedy show called “Almost Live” here in Seattle…

She’s a local.

I love Lauren. She is so funny and the only tragedy is that there’s so much good stuff on the cutting room floor that she was improvising while we were shooting this movie but there’s only so much time.

I must ask, did you have a job in a restaurant like Tuscan Grove before? 

I worked in a restaurant but it was slightly more upscale than Tuscan Grove. I worked at a Greek restaurant in Pasadena right after college. I was a hostess, not a waitress, but restaurant culture is a very specific thing. It’s very familial and then we’re taking that to the next level of putting them in this exemplary manager’s program. I hadn’t been to anything like that before, but I’ve worked in food service. I worked at a frozen yogurt place before that so I enjoy the comradery of that industry.

I have also worked in the food service industry but the restaurant I worked for is far less upscale than Tuscan Grove, but we were sent out to Minnesota for our annual meeting once and I just assumed that every person in upper management acted just as they did in Spin Me Round but they definitely didn’t want us low level restaurant workers to know what was going on.

I think anybody, when they’re away from home, they want to maybe get into something a little naughty.

I know you just got into Seattle for the screenings at SIFF. What was it like to screen your movie for this local audience? 

It was great. It was actually my first time getting to see the movie with an audience because the film premiered at South by Southwest but I was shooting in Columbia and I couldn’t leave. So it was really fun to sit through with the audience and hear people laughing, which is always nice and we all sort of felt like the audience was just really tuned in and seemed to be a really cool artistic audience. The questions afterwards were really thoughtful and it was so nice.

I really wanted to get the chance to talk to you and your publicist and SIFF and a bunch of people worked really hard to get me a screener and I’m really grateful for all of the work that went into making it happen, but I also kind of wish I went to the first screening so I could laugh with other people in a full theater. 

It was so fun. It was also fun because I just haven’t even been in a movie theater to see a movie, period, in a couple years so it was a great experience all round. It’s always fun to watch a comedy with an audience and get to laugh together.

Is there anything you want people to take away from Spin Me Round or anything we didn’t talk about that you want people to know?

At the end of the day, it’s meant to be a fun, enjoyable ride and so I think I would just want people to enjoy it and to laugh and have fun. Certainly, there’s commentary being made about Americans abroad, the American fantasy of what traveling abroad is, and also commentary about men who maybe use their businesses as a front to manipulate naive women and things like that but ultimately, it’s a movie about expectation and unfulfilled expectation and also about finding yourself and finding your voice. So I hope people get all of that but are just entertained and have fun.

I don’t want to take up too much more of your time but can you tell me if there’s anything else you’re allowed to talk about that you’re working on that’s coming up?

Sure. I am on the show “Roar” that actually just came out. All episodes are on Apple TV+ right now and it’s an anthology series that stars eight different women. There’s eight episodes written by women, directed by women. It’s created by Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch who created “GLOW” so that was a fun reunion to work on that again with them and it’s produced by Nicole Kidman who stars in one of the episodes and it’s a really fun, darkly comic, surreal, feminist, powerhouse show.

So I can guarantee it’s very unique. So I feel like people should check that one out because it’s totally different than anything I’ve done before or seen before so that’s really cool. My husband and I co-wrote and produced a film that we shot at the end of last year and he directed it and I starred in it. It’s called Somebody I Used to Know and hopefully that’ll be coming out later this year. I just finished shooting a movie in Colombia called Freelance, which was an action comedy with John Cena so that was really fun but I don’t know when that’ll come out. We just shot it.

Before I let you go, I must ask how you’re enjoying your time in Seattle?

I’m enjoying it but it’s very quick. We flew in yesterday and we’re leaving tonight so it’s a real tease because I’ve never been to Seattle before. This is actually my first time. I’ve been to Washington. Actually my husband and I just finished shooting a movie that we shot most of in Portland and then we finished it in Leavenworth, Washington.

It’s so beautiful. I love the Pacific Northwest so I’m always wanting to come up here, but I certainly am itching to get back already. With my 24 hours here, this trip is so sad and I would love to take a trip back here and just a food based trip, you know?

Spin Me Round opens at SIFF Cinema Uptown on Friday, August 19. It is also available on the usual VOD platforms as well as on AMC+.