BIG EASY BROMANCE
N’awlins siblings with indie cred give mainstream movie making a shot
IN 2005, Mark and Jay Duplass made their first hit movie for less than the cost of a Starbucks coffee. The short, called “This Is John,” got them into Sundance and helped establish them as one of the forerunners of “mumblecore” — an indie subgenre renowned for low budgets, meandering scripts and maddeningly introspective characters.
Now, the writer-director brothers are moving closer to the mainstream with Friday’s “Jeff, Who Lives at Home,” a black comedy starring Ed Helms, Susan Sarandon and Jason Segel.
Segel plays Jeff, a 30-year-old stoner who lives in his mom’s basement and is obsessed with the idea that fate controls our lives. His straight-laced brother Pat (Helms) is having marital problems, and Jeff reluctantly helps him spy on his wife (Judy Greer), whom Pat believes is having an affair.
The idea that names like Segel and Sarandon are even in a Duplass movie is pretty improbable, considering where the guys were a few years ago.
The siblings grew up in Louisiana and have been interested in film since they began making forgettable shorts around the house with their parents’ camcorder.
“We grew up in New Orleans, in a middle-class, hard-studying, hard-working environment,” Jay says. “We believed in the kind of life where you just work your ass off and you get it done, but we were also obsessed with the arts and film. But it seemed very outside to us, very magical. We never dreamed we would be in the positions that we are in now.”
They toiled through their 20s, making admittedly awful movies that nobody wanted, until they hit a wall in 2002. They decided to give up and get jobs as accountants or something. But before they did, Jay suggested they not leave their shared apartment that day until they’d made one more movie. There was no script. Jay worked the camera while Mark improvised a character having a breakdown while trying to record an answering machine message.
That film was “This Is John,” which was made for the price of a $3 videotape. At Sundance, the brothers scored representation and went on to produce two well-received features. The first, 2005’s “The Puffy Chair,” was made for about $15,000 with a cast and crew totaling seven people. It starred Mark as a man driving across the country to deliver a La-z-boy to his father. “Baghead,” a horror-comedy, followed in 2008.
They finally made a movie with recognizable stars with “Cyrus,” released in 2010. It made $7.5 million domestically, a fortune for one of their movies, and featured John C. Reilly as a middle-aged loser who clashes with the grown son (Jonah Hill) of the woman he’s dat- ing (Marisa Tomei).
Higher profile or not, the brothers still make movies the way they always have. And it’s definitely not a process used by most studio flicks: They write a script, but don’t rehearse. They don’t block scenes, either. Much of their material is improvised.
The unorthodox process allows for more naturalistic filmmaking. Some 20 to 30 percent of “Jeff” is comprised of material shot on the first take. “It’s the most fun way to go to work on a set; not knowing what you’re going to say,” Helms says.
The Duplass brothers also don’t stop in the middle of filming to get close-ups or change setups.
“That’s the worst thing I’ve experienced as an actor,” Mark says. “It’s all going great and like, ‘OK, we’re going to break for an hour and a half, and turn around for lighting the other side.’ And you’re just like, ‘Oh, my God.’ So we try to just keep that momentum going.”
While Jay, 39, and Mark, 35, no longer live at home, they do live near each other in Los Angeles and say they have no plans to truly go Hollywood. They’ve been offered more mainstream projects before and have refused. In other words, these brothers plan to be more Coen, less Wachowski.