Brothers in art - and weirdness
Mark and Jay Duplass talk to Julie Eley about their new series, which is set in a hotel room.
Film-making brothers Mark and Jay Duplass are thinking inside the box for their new SoHo comedy drama Room 104.
All 12 episodes have been shot inside the confines of what is billed as the sort of cheap $100-a-night hotel room you find near airports all over the US. But if the setting is mundane, the stories aren’t, bearing the Duplass brothers’ trademark weirdness. All 12 episodes have a different story and different characters with genres ranging from comedy, to horror to drama.
For the New Orleans-born duo, whose credits include Togetherness and Jeff Who Lives At Home, the HBO-made show is a chance to expand their circle of collaboration – ‘‘See what happens when we invite younger, different, more-interesting film-makers in to the process,’’ says Mark Duplass.
It’s an idea that has taken more than a decade to come to fruition.
‘‘We’ve had this idea kicking around in our heads for the last 10 years. We were just not popular enough to make an anthology show 10 years ago,’’ he says.
But he admits the project is not without its risks for HBO, especially one using mostly unknown actors and directors, half of whom they decided would be women. On top of that, they opted to hamstring themselves with a few simple rules. All the action must take place in a single room, use the same music and be shot in three days.
‘‘I think Room 104 is a lottery ticket for HBO. It’s cheap. Scratch it off see what happens,’’ says Mark.
‘‘Worst case scenario is they get their dollar back. Best case scenario, s... it blew up. We can’t predict what’s going to blow up or catch on, but maybe one out of every few of them will.’’
It’s a form of budget filmmaking that harks back to the brothers’ first movie, a $10,000 production called The Puffy Chair in which Mark played a struggling musician who travels from New York to Atlanta to claim a vintage recliner he won in an e-Bay auction.
‘‘There is a specific corner of the sandbox for us where we still like making things cheaply. Most people make one cheap one and they’re like ‘f... this give me the money’,’’ says Mark, who has been making movies with Jay since the two were young boys playing with their father’s VHS camera.
In those far-off days Mark saw Jay as his spiritual leader. The perfect older brother who would let him share his bed because he was afraid of the dark.
But today theirs is very much a partnership of equals, but just who has the upper-hand on any given day is a seesaw affair.
‘‘Every project is wildly different,’’ says Mark. ‘‘It’s about rhythms in terms of what we are doing. Who’s got that raw passion that’s pushing it forward and who’s maybe laying back and being a little more centred and using their brains a little bit more.
‘‘We have something that we call president and vice-president mode where basically one of us will be a little bit in charge and the other person is like, ‘OK let me kind of help you and support you here’. Sometimes the president and vice-president changes from day to day. We’ll show up in the morning and Jay will look at my eyes and see the darkness and he’ll be like, ‘Got it, I got you today’.
‘‘The people who know us well and have worked with us consistently through the years, they start to feel it and they know who to talk to on a certain day.’’
But there are no words to describe their shared fascination with human nature and they saw a motel room as the perfect place to showcase that love.
‘‘Everyone stays in hotels,’’ says Jay. ‘‘Marc and I are just observers. We are obsessed with human beings and human behaviour as we travel around. Hotels are definitely the place where our interest was piqued. Big hotels and airports are really the places where you can observe everyone doing things. That was the spark of the interest in the idea. Motels are a chance to reinvent yourself.’’
And a motel room setting was also a chance to revisit a number of ideas which never made it to the big screen.
‘‘The truth of the matter is Room 104 is an excellent chance to resurrect feature films from the graveyard,’’ says Mark. ‘‘You come up with a lot of story ideas that are like, ‘This would make an amazing movie’. And we’ll be talking about it for like 20 minutes and then we’re like, ‘Oh it kind of ends after 30 minutes’. So that little graveyard, we like to go picking in there and we were like, ‘Oh my god, this is a 25-minute one-act play... perfect for the hotel room’.’’
Not surprising then that with so many ideas, the brothers find it hard to pin the series down to a genre.
‘‘You’re going to get a surprise,’’ says Mark. ‘‘It’s a little like bit of Russian roulette as to what story you are going to get every night, but if you like our stuff, you are probably going to do pretty well.
‘‘If we have one thing going for us in Room 104, I would just say you can miss six episodes and just pop back in and know what’s going on.’’
Room 104 debuts on SoHo at 9.30pm tonight.