MARK AND JAY DUPLASS

Jay and Mark Duplass's studio debut, Cyrus (in theaters today), furthers the brand of immediate and sometimes uncaged hyperrealism the brothers demonstrated in indie features like The Puffy Chair and Baghead. For the first time, the brothers have made a movie featuring faces familiar to audiences outside the New York-based mumblecore scene (stars include John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill, Marisa Tomei, and Catherine Keener); however the pair has maintained their signature style of zooms, raw tension, and sudden mayhem. Though the Duplassian approach to filmmaking is heavy on improvisation, it manages to avoid the stooging antics of comedy. Candid and clumsy portrayals of relationships, moments of vulnerability, anger, and affection are private instead of parodied. In Cyrus, the story of a mother, her son, and her boyfriend, the discomfort of new relationships—their ugly truths and paranoia–and the anxiety of nearness result in both laughter and recognition.

I spoke to Mark and Jay about the dueling (in both plot and emotion) nature of their film, and how they transitioned from low-budget documentary style–one person on boom, one person on camera–to studio crews.

DURGA CHEW-BOSE: How was the transition into your first studio film? I read that at one of your first meetings, there were 12 people in the meeting room and that was already double the crew on your previous movies. For Cyrus you had close to 80 people working on the film, right? Did that make the process less intimate?

MARK DUPLASS: You know it was weird; what we did was that we made sure every set was a closed set. On normal movie sets they cut and then everyone rushes in and touches up the makeup, fixes the hair, fixes the props. That happened on our first day and we were like, "Whoa! We got to fix this." We had a first assistant director, this woman named Cas Donovan who's really become a sister to us, who had worked in the big movie world and really appreciated our little movies, and knew exactly how to keep us in that little, sweet and intimate pocket. So when we were shooting the scenes, it was Jay on camera, another cameraman, a boom operator, and that was it. I would be back at the monitors. At the end of the day it was a big Fox Searchlight movie but we were all in a house on the East Side of LA shooting close-ups of people and it was like, "Wow, this is one of our movies."

JAY DUPLASS: Just with better food.

M. DUPLASS: Yeah, and we didn't have to hang the lights ourselves, so that was cool.

CHEW-BOSE: You've said that, in your earlier years, you made a lot of films you thought you should be making, and now you've found your niche so to speak: relationship films. Does that come the most immediately to you?

J. DUPLASS: It's what Mark and I have always been obsessed with. When we were kids and everyone was obsessed with Star Wars, we were watching Kramer vs. Kramer. We were watching these weird ass relationship movies. You know these really heavy-hitting dramas. I don't know what it is, but just in our private conversation, that's what we talk about. We'll see someone in public and they're not really aware of what they're doing, but there's something really intensely emotional going on and usually hilarious at the same time...

M. DUPLASS: It might just be the way that they're dealing with their cell phone but we're just very in tune with those little things and I don't know why we are.

J. DUPLASS: It's what we love. And once we started putting those kinds of things on film, people started responding. It's like a channel opened when we started writing like that. It came straight through us and went to the audience.