Jay and Mark Duplass
Tags: signs, comedy, writer, director, Jay Duplass, Mark Duplass, Jay and Mark Duplass, Jeff, Who Lives At Home, M Night Shyamalan
When you hear Jason Segal and Ed Helms star in Jeff, Who Lives At Home, you might think of some wacky screwball comedy. It is a comedy but not like you’d expect. Segal plays Jeff, and he has yet to move out, but he is a philosophical loser. He has embraced the movie Signs for its message that everything happens for a reason, and he looks for signs to guide him through life. Indeed the events of the movie lead him to a spectacular conclusion.
Jeff is the fourth film written and directed by Jay and Mark Duplass. The indie filmmakers let their actors improvise, and they frequently mix tones. Their Puffy Chair and Cyrus also had family drama like Jeff, and Baghead was a horror movie. Besides Jeff’s spiritual awakening, the film also deals with the breakup of his brother (Helms)’ marriage.
Mark Duplass may have a face you recognize too. He appears in many movies and on TV’s The League. He is also a retired musician. When he heard a reporter from Suicide Girls was interviewing him it reminded him of his rock n’ roll days. He and Jay pretty much alternated answering questions, allowing a fair split of soundbites between them. They rarely interjected and certainly never interrupted each other.
Mark Duplass: I once had one of the songs from my old band on a Suicide Girls DVD. They were like, “Yeah, Suicide Girls wants to license your song.” We were like, “Do it! Free! Totally fine!”
SuicideGirls: Are they your type of girls?
MD:
Not at all, nope, but they’re just cool.
SG:
Are you guys still M. Night Shyamalan defenders through his oeuvre after Signs?
MD:
We are neither defenders, offenders or anything. We are obsessed with the fact that Jeff would be obsessed with M. Night because that to us was the perfect, for lack of a better word, the perfect exposition element for Jeff. You think about how you want to set up a character efficiently, quickly and comedically, right? So we were like okay, how about a guy who is obsessed with the movie Signs and also is living his life according to the principals of the movie Signs.
Jeff Duplass: Yeah, he’s going one step beyond fan, one step beyond defender. He’s actually an implementer of the principals.
MD:
What’s great about that is it kind of set the tone for what we wanted for this movie which is all right, that’s going to be really funny. It’s also kind of sad but also what’s great about it is it says that Jeff is no cynic. He is a believer and that’s rare in this day and age.
SG:
I still am a defender and I’ll go to bat for The Happening and Last Airbender. I’m still with him.
MD:
I have not seen those films.
SG:
Was it important that Signs is a big enough film that a lot of the audience would know it?
JD:
Yeah, that is an important part of it but also he talks in great detail about Signs and what in Signs is very important to him. He sort of appropriates details of it that weigh heavily in the film later on. Like Mark said, it really does come from the perspective of the character and his obsession with it.
SG:
A lot of art in the last few years is expressing this belief in the connective tissue of the universe. Are you part of that movement?
MD:
I honestly haven’t noticed that at all, or haven’t specifically noticed that. It’s interesting because we wrote the script about five years ago. It was one of the first scripts we wrote after we made The Puffy Chair and it kind of sat around until we felt like we were ready to make it and also that we could get the money to make it, because it is kind of the biggest film we’ve made yet. So I don't feel like we’re a part of any movement of people talking about the connectivity of signs or anything. It was really just a product of we liked that this character would do it and it provided that level of comedy/drama combo that we like.
SG:
Is comedy a good way to create more connections between people?
JD:
I think comedy’s just a great way to live in every way. Any time you can have an interaction with somebody and somebody can make a joke, it just makes everybody’s day better. That’s why everybody loves Jason Segal and Ed Helms, because they have such a great sense of humor. Mark and I, this film in particular, speaking of Jason and Ed it’s a very dramatic turn from what they normally do. There’s a ton of comedy in this movie and I don't think anybody’s going to be disappointed with the laugh quotient but Mark and I primarily are interested in honest characters and earnest characters too, people who are struggling with life and try to get their stuff done, try to figure out their place in the world. We find tragic elements to that as well as comedic elements to that. Most importantly heartfelt and hopeful elements. That’s the kind of tone that we’re obsessed with and we find challenging to execute well and that’s sort of what’s exciting about it for us.
SG:
Is the title in some ways a misdirect because it sounds very wacky but it turns out be a spiritual story too.
MD:
Yeah, we loved the title because it embodied what we think this movie feels like which is it’s goofy but it’s earnest. We like that idea that we are inviting people to come see a movie that’s very funny and that does feel kind of light up front. We don’t take ourselves too seriously but there is an existential component to this film and we like exploring that with not too heavy of a hand.
SG:
Do you feel you’ve been instrumental in the naturalistic film movement?
JD:
I don't know. Mark and I, our whole process is in every step of what we do is really about removing intellectualism from what we do.
MD:
Shut the brain off.
JD:
Our brains are just in the way all the time. We went to film school and we actually tried to be the Coen brothers and make movies like that. We tried to make movies from intellectual principals and they didn’t work. They just sucked. It wasn’t until we started just making movies from our heart about just the crap we were going through and how just embarrassing it is and how tragic it is and how hilarious it really is, that people started responding to our movies. That was honestly our big breakthrough. In terms of literally every step of the way, Mark and I really try and keep it very small and instinctual. We just ask each other the question of what do you want to see next. We try to trust the fact that our instincts and our own sense of personal timing and our own desires what we want to see, you’re asking us about whether or not we think about the interconnectivity of the universe and that stuff. It’s in the back there somewhere but we let it come out in our art. It’s not something that we’re consciously discussing.
MD:
Judd Apatow, who’s a friend of ours and we test each other’s movies on each other, he was making TV shows before our stuff came out. He’s doing certainly a lot of naturalism. In one sense we’re all “in it” together but in the other sense, to Jay’s point, we are kind of almost like two rogue dudes in a cave. We live on the east side of Los Angeles a little bit away from the industry. We come over here to take our meetings and do our press and stuff like that but we’re just kind of making shit the way we did when we were five and eight years old. We just pick up a camera. I mean, you would laugh if you saw the budget documents and how we prepare our movies. It looks like arts and crafts in kindergarten.
SG:
That doesn’t surprise me because even as a writer, I find you just do it. As soon as they ask you to make a report about it…
MD:
The format, the this, just like fuck off, man. We’ve gotta get this thing done. That’s crazy. People are always saying, “How do you get your budgets down from the unions and the fringes?” I’m just like: gas, food, camera. That’s it, go. Go, go, go. We’ve almost turned into these unwitting Roger Corman forces in the micro budget world where we’re lending out our cameras and giving people money that we make on writing jobs to go make their shit.
JD:
And telling them to stop using budget documents. We tell them don’t do that. Just figure out what you absolutely need, go buy it and then go shoot the thing. If you make a budget, then you’re making a budget. But if you’re making a movie, then you’re making a movie. It’s literally that stupid. That’s how we think. We have a philosophy called “Make movies, not meetings.” Because if you make meetings, what you usually get out of that is more meetings. If you make movies, what you usually get out of that is more movies. It sounds so ridiculous to say it and it’s 100% true.
MD:
It sounds like we’re selling Amway here. We get it. But we believe it too so we can’t stop ourselves from saying it.
JD:
We bought in so you’ve got to bar with us.
SG:
Well, the practice speaks for itself. A lot of people talk about the movies they want to make and there are all these reasons why they haven’t done it yet, and then some people just make them.
MD:
That’s right. There’s a word in Los Angeles called packaging. You’re packaging the film right now which all of a sudden makes it feel like a commodity and not a piece of art and this thing that is pending and waiting to be made. I guess our impatience has worked for us.
SG:
I had fun interning in development though, seeing all those scripts not get made but everyone was getting paid and making a living.
JD:
Not only did they not get made but people fought over them and lost friendships over them.
MD:
Now it’s just like a little piece of air somewhere. It doesn’t even matte.r
JD:
It doesn’t even exist. That’s wild.
SG:
With the finale of the movie, the cars and stunts, could you do an action movie?
MD:
We’ve thought about it a lot. It’s weird, you’d be surprised the scripts that come across our desk, big movies that come to us. We have thought like “What would it be like if we actually did this movie in space with our sensitive relationship approach to it?” It intrigues us. We tend to be modest and we tend to be a little bit more conservative about the budgets of the movies that we pursue because quite frankly, the movie that’s made the most money for us so far was Cyrus and that was only $10 million. But every movie that we’ve made has turned a profit because we make them at the right price. So I would be scared to go out and make a $100 million movie. What if either A, we couldn’t make it good or B, the studio didn’t allow us to make it the way we wanted to. That’s a pretty soul crushing experience that can also crush your reputation too.
JD:
Yeah, it’s a two or three year process to make a movie. You’ve got to love it and you’ve got to feel like you can rely on your instincts to find a way.
SG:
Or there’s gritty grindhouse style action movies you could do on your scale.
MD:
Absolutely, absolutely and we’ve discussed all that. We’ve discussed honestly shrinking our budgets down a lot too. We love making movies like The Puffy Chair for $15,000.
JD:
It just comes down to what are we going to do next and how are we going to do it?
MD:
Yeah, every movie has its right size. You just look at the DNA of the movie and go, “Okay, this is what this should be.”
SG:
Near the end of the movie, Jason Segal really throws up a lot. Do you share my pet peeve when actors throw up just a mouthful in movies?
JD:
He is amazing. There is some throwing up in the film.
MD:
What you see is what you get and the actors do their own stunts.
JD:
We had pumps, we had machines, they didn’t look real and Jason just said, “Guys, I don't know if you’re aware of this, but I’m extremely large. I’m a very large man and I can contain within me a lot of liquid.” We were like, “This never looks real, it never looks good,” because it doesn’t. Throw up never looks real. He let that rip and Mark and I, everyone on set, literally their jaws dropped. Seriously.
MD:
No sound effects in there either. All Segal. It was like the Dogme throw up scene. We did not separate sound from film. It was perfect.
SG:
Mark, were you more interested in being an actor on the side also?
MD:
I’m very interested in acting. Our writing/directing career has been first and foremost and it always will be. It’s the most creatively satisfying but it is fun Jay and I have our own little affairs. He’s starting to make short documentaries on his own and I go and act in other movies and I think that it’s good for us to do other things now and then to keep the relationship healthy.
Jeff, Who Lives At Home is now playing.
Jeff, Who Lives At Home is now playing.
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