Starring in Your Place or Mine seems to have brought Ashton Kutcher and Reese Witherspoon back to their school days as the film's director Aline Brosh McKenna gave the pair some homework before filming. The writer-director has given the two stars books to read to help them prepare for their roles.
McKenna recently sat down for an interview with Entertainment Weekly, and she revealed that Ashton Kutcher and Reese Witherspoon needed to read tons of books that would reflect the point of view of the film's characters. She said, "I gave Ashton books that I thought Peter would have and would have read and have a point of view on."
She continued, "With Reese, I gave her a bunch of books that I felt like Debbie had collected over the years — some first editions, some beat-up paperbacks. One of them had an inscription to someone named Peter, so I decided that was Peter's book that she had kept when he moved."
Ashton Kutcher and Reese Witherspoon Had Totally Different Reactions to the Director's Assignments
Ashton Kutcher is a self-confessed model student and further revealed that he was never into reading fiction books, so he took this opportunity to try reading them. He said, "I'm not a very big fiction reader, I don't read a lot of fiction. And Aline is like, 'Yeah, but this character's a novelist, so he's going to be very well-read in fiction.' So, I ended up diving in. Aline sent me 10 books prior to the film. She's like, 'You need to read all of these.' And every one of the books had notecards in them about what Peter got from this book, specifically, what he got as a writer from this book."
The actor liked the director's assignment and ultimately found his favorite book. He said, "[My favorite was] When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi.... That book was devastatingly wonderful. High Fidelity was very good. I read all of them. I read all 10 books. I actually fell in love with reading fiction again from this experience. That was fun and refreshing."
While Kutcher took the assignment as an opportunity, Reese Witherspoon didn't like the idea. The actress reacted differently to the assignment and said, "Aline also sent me 25 books and I did not read any of them. I called her, and I said, 'I have three children. I'm running a company, and I have a full-time other job. I'm not reading these books. But they would look really good on the set.' And they did."