by Mark Duplass
MARK: (smiling bigger) Exactly.
JAY: Love it.
MARK: Love it.
I grabbed the camera bag and Mark went into our roommate Will’s closet. Will was a computer programmer and had some “grown-up” clothes (as we still call them, because we are children) for work. Mark grabbed a pair of black slacks and a green button-down. He came back into the kitchen to find me ready to go, with a few fun, readily available prop options I had grabbed. Some gas station sunglasses, a set of house keys, a cellphone, a bottle of wine, and, randomly, a small box of mints. Without saying anything more Mark positioned himself at the threshold of the kitchen….
MARK: You rolling?
JAY: Yep.
MARK: Okay. I’m just gonna…just gonna come in and…see what happens?
As usual, Mark was good at leading the charge but got cold feet toward the end. And somehow whenever Mark got cold feet I was able to step in and push us that last few feet over the cliff. This is also part of our rhythm to this day.
JAY: Let’s just have fun with it. No pressure.
MARK: Right.
JAY: Good luck. Love you.
MARK: Love you.
(Heading out, stopping…)
MARK: Wait. I need a character name.
(This is Mark stalling because he is now fully scared. I think for a second and then reach for Mark’s collar, reading the label.)
JAY: Your shirt says “John Ashford” on it.
(Pause.)
MARK: It’s perfect.
And with that, Mark went outside and came right back in. What happened next was one uninterrupted twenty-minute take of Mark trying and failing to get the answering machine greeting right. I moved around with the camera instinctually, zooming in and out as needed to get the right frame on the fly. I threw story and dialogue ideas at Mark along the way. Mark took them and ran with them. Taking sips of wine when it got difficult. Putting on the sunglasses when he got ashamed of his tenth failed attempt. Even sucking on a few of those random mints I gave him, as if he were trying to seduce the answering machine with his fresh minty breath. And then, a false emotional breakdown that suddenly became quite real for Mark due to all the stress we had been through with Vince Del Rio and the impending death of our lifelong artistic dream.
After the breakdown, while still filming, I leaned into the shot and whispered to Mark, “Now get up, and get the message right, but have it be as weird as possible.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was creating the dramatic structure of the film on the fly. As if all those hours spent watching HBO for the past fifteen years were paying off. I didn’t even think about it. My internal movie barometer just knew what needed to happen. So Mark gathered himself and did it right then and there, without cutting.
After we had finished filming, we just sat and stared at each other for a long while. We knew some kind of breakthrough had occurred. But we couldn’t quite pinpoint it. We quickly called over our close friends and collaborators and showed them the take. We watched them watch it, and their faces said everything we were feeling. It was electric, raw, inspired, unpredictable. Somehow the energy of us not knowing where the story was headed could be felt in the footage. It was exciting for everyone. But it was also the crappiest-looking and -sounding footage we had ever shot. There was even a dead pixel in the center of the frame.
Over the next week, we tried to edit the footage down into something more cohesive, but we struggled getting the form right. Eventually we asked our friend David Zellner to take a look and see if he had any ideas. David had already had some success as a filmmaker, and we looked up to him and his brother, Nathan, as sources of inspiration. David loved the take and offered to edit it for us to see if he could crack something shorter and more like an actual film as opposed to just an inspired piece of footage.
Within a few days he handed us a ten-minute version, using jump cuts, that captured the spirit of what we shot but also gave it a more narrative pulse. Jay Deuby, our editing business partner, then weighed in. We all collaborated, and eventually we landed on a seven-minute final cut that we thought might be watchable as an actual short film. It needed a title, so we named it after the most prevalent piece of dialogue in a film about recording John’s outgoing answering machine greeting: This Is John.
Now the film was done. But the problem was we had no idea what to do with it. Everyone who saw it really responded to it, but its extremely poor production value limited our avenues of exploitation. We thought about maybe just putting it on YouTube. Then we thought that maybe we should shelve it and try to make something similar but with better production value. Ultimately we decided to just pick one film festival and submit it to “see what happens.” We chose (because we were idiots) Sundance. The most prominent and most difficult festival to gain entry to. We submitted it and quickly forgot about it.
In the meantime, we went back and revisited Vince Del Rio, and suddenly its failure and all the reasons for it were made abundantly clear to us. Yes, it was beautifully shot. Yes, the production value was amazing. But because we had unfortunately focused all of our energy on making a “professional” film, we had forgotten to focus on the most important elements…the performances and the story. And by accidentally stripping away all of those professional elements in our little answering machine movie (a full crew, proper set etiquette, trying to make the day on time and on budget) and instead focusing only on getting Mark’s performance and the story right, we had stumbled onto something interesting. Perhaps even more important was the discovery of what kinds of topics we should be making films about. There’s a saying that no one under the age of thirty makes a good film that’s not autobiographical. And while that’s not necessarily true, it proved to be helpful advice in our case. Why had we written a movie about a South Texas runner we knew nothing about, when our own personal foibles and way of seeing the world were what we happened to be in a unique position to offer? It took us a while to truly embrace the idea that the dramas of our relatively privileged middle-class life were film-worthy, but this moment was the beginning of that discovery.
A few months later, Mark was flying home to New Orleans for Thanksgiving. My parents and I were waiting at the airport to pick him up. When Mark got off the plane, we greeted him with a homemade white poster-board sign that said “Filmmaker Registration.” Mark just gave me a blank look.
JAY: Um…I just got a call. We got into Sundance.
(Pause. Mark looks around for clues as to why I would say something like this. But he just sees more smiles from our parents.)
MARK: This is not funny.
JAY: Mark…We. Are. In.
The four of us screamed and cried and jumped up and down in the Southwest terminal of the NOLA airport. And then we kept doing it.
WE’VE ALL SEEN it many times. It’s the fourth quarter. The visiting team is driving down the field with under two minutes to go. They are down by one point. They go for it on fourth down for a second time on this drive. The chains come out. They barely get the first down. But the clock is still ticking. So the hurry-up offense kicks in, the coach saving that final time-out for when the team needs it most. They try a few passes. They don’t work out. Then on third down they run the ball up the middle, landing on the opponent’s thirty-four-yard line. Coach calls the final time-out with two seconds left to stop the clock. This final time-out with that much time left on the clock can only mean one thing…field goal.
Sure enough, the broadcast cuts to the sidelines and shows a rather smallish dude (at least by NFL standards) kicking a ball into a small net. Practicing before he is called onto the field to make or break the day with one last kick. And if you’re anything like us, all you can think is “Dear God, I’m so glad I’m not him right now.”
Because it’s really unfair when you think about it. For sixty minutes, everyone else on the team
has worked their asses off trying to claim victory. And now the team’s destiny all comes down to this one guy who’s been sitting on the sidelines for most of the game. This one guy who is infinitely smaller than everyone else on the team. This one guy who either makes the field goal or misses the field goal. Who wins or loses the game for the entire team. The pressure that he feels must be astronomical.
Growing up, we would watch these games on Sundays with our dad. All of us feeling so nervous for that poor kicker. And as we watched him prance out on the field, we were inevitably shocked at how calm he looked. How was that possible? It was a fun thing to talk about. You’d be surprised how often games play out like this. But one day our dad said something profound that we’ll never forget….
“At some point in your life you’re going to be faced with this kind of situation. And almost every time you’re going to be thinking, PLEASE DON’T GIVE ME THE BALL. I DON’T WANT THE BALL. IT’S TOO MUCH PRESSURE. And that’s fine. It’s how most people feel and it’s how I’ve felt in most situations. But at some point, you’re going to find yourself thinking, AS CRAZY AS THIS SOUNDS, I THINK I WANT THE BALL. I KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH IT. I’M UNIQUELY QUALIFIED TO HANDLE THIS SITUATION. SO…GIVE ME THE BALL. And when you find yourself feeling that way, you’ll know you’re in the right spot.”
Of course, we are paraphrasing and making our dad sound a lot cooler and more prophetic than he really was, but that was the message and it has always stuck with us. We’ve felt that pressure onstage as musicians, as runners in high school, even as fathers, husbands, and brothers. And it has usually scared the shit out of us. But when it comes time to film a small, off-kilter story about people and how they relate to one another, we are always ready to step up and take the ball. We want the ball because we truly feel that we are qualified to carry it. And we are also very thankful that, should we happen to drop the ball, none of our peers are three-hundred-and-fifty-pound linemen who can beat the ever-loving shit out of us.
I STILL DON’T know why I did it. I was upset about something Jay did to me. But I can’t remember what it was. Probably something small. But I had clearly decided to retaliate. With something big. So I waited patiently. For inspiration to come. Sitting quietly on the floor of the laundry room with revenge on my mind. I was seven. Jay was eleven.
Then I heard the upstairs shower turn on. And happened to notice a screwdriver with a translucent yellow handle next to the junk drawer. The same one Jay and I had bought our dad, together, for Father’s Day. But as I stared at the screwdriver now, evil came to me. Which is kind of odd because I clearly loved this person. A lot. My sweet big brother. He taught me to read when I was only four years old. He included me in playtime with his friends when he didn’t have to. But that screwdriver in my hand felt great. And something in me knew that I had to do something terrible with it.
So I marched up the seventeen shag-carpeted steps and down the hallway into our shared bathroom. I knew before I did what I did that, although Jay was a foot taller than me, he was standing in the sunken green tub and we would be eye to eye when the shit went down. I took a breath. I raised the screwdriver over my head. I gnarled my teeth. I loosened my throat in preparation for a guttural scream. And I reached for the shower curtain.
But then I stopped. I could see the immediate future. His terror. His potential retaliation against my retaliation. And I knew I couldn’t follow through with it. I loved the guy. This was wrong. So I decided to just make a fun joke out of it. I lowered the screwdriver and casually opened the curtain with a faint “ha ha” and a loose, offhanded swipe of the screwdriver. I smiled, knowing he’d appreciate the smart humor. This would bridge our gap. This would solve whatever conflict we had at the moment. Less retaliation and more…reaching out.
What happened next is still a bit of a blur. But I do remember Jay’s fragile, thin, hairless body slamming into the back of the shower, his face whiter than the subway tiles and his scream at a pitch level that, even though only half of its decibels were audible to the human ear, sent a lightning bolt up my spine and exploded my brain into stardust. I also remember seeing his emotions traveling quickly across his eyes. Fear, anger, and then (just before I turned and ran) hurt.
But I didn’t stay for anything more. I took the seventeen stairs four or five at a time, past my terrified mother, out the front door, down the block, and all the way to the Lake Pontchartrain levee. And I hid myself in “the woods” (really just a ten-foot area of foliage between the levee and the lake, but it felt like an entire forest at age seven).
I’m not sure how long I stayed out there. If I had to guess I would say it was about twenty minutes. But a lot changed within me during that time. I was processing what had just happened. I was coming to the age of reason in my life. I was feeling something big that I couldn’t put my finger on then but I now know was the innate desire for a young man to kill his God so he could be free. I remember feeling that I should not have done what I did to my awesome big brother but that I somehow needed to do it, and that I needed to stand by my actions and not apologize. Again, I couldn’t understand this at the time, but I was just beginning my struggle with how to simultaneously be with and worship my God and still be an individual who could grow and breathe in this world on his own two feet.
And I remember deciding that when I got back home, I was not going to apologize. I was going to walk in and take my punishment like a man. Surely my parents would side with Jay. He had been harmed, and I was the clear offender. But something in me said, “Do not apologize for this. This is what you had to do.”
So I marched back from the levee. I put my hand on the front door, steeling myself for the moment. And when I walked in, Jay was sitting on the couch, still undressed, hair wet, a towel wrapped around him like a boating accident survivor. My parents flanked him, arms around him, consoling him. He wasn’t crying anymore, but his face had the ground-beef vibe of post-traumatic tears to it. And he just looked at me. And so did my parents. They were either unsure what to say or somehow knew that the bond between me and Jay was beyond them, that they had no right to interfere in what was about to happen. That it was our moment and had very little if anything to do with them.
And as I looked at Jay, something interesting happened. The desire I had to stand my ground and let him know that, while the incident may have been unfortunate, I was my own man and was capable of killing my God whenever I wanted …that desire was equally met by my desire to be next to him. More than that. To be with him in that moment. To be conjoined. A single unit. To come back to church and worship my God again so we could be that special duo that we’d always been. The Boys. And I was paralyzed with indecision as to how to be and what to say. And the funny thing is that he wasn’t mad at me. He was just waiting to see what I would do. Patiently.
I think about that moment often. And whenever Jay does something that pisses me off or offends me, I think about how patient and loving he was to me then. How he let me do that to him without retaliation, somehow sensing that I needed to figure out where I stood with him. It plays like an eternal IOU in our relationship. And I try my best to let whatever is bothering me slide. Sometimes it works.
WE FLEW TO Sundance in 2003 with a thousand postcards, a thousand business cards, and a thousand DVD copies of our crappy-looking $3 short film, This Is John, to hand out for free to any industry person we met. We were vastly overprepared for the world to receive us and lavish upon us praise, opportunity, and fortune. As you might imagine, things did not go down quite like this.
What did happen was that we were made aware of all the very cool parties at Sundance to which the short-film makers were not invited. So we spent a good portion of our early days there feeling bad about being snubbed, becoming obsessed with what was actually going on inside of those parties, and then concocting schemes by which to gain entrance into said parties. The lamest of which, I believe, was Mark realizing that David Arquette had a fi
lm at the festival, that I looked somewhat like David, and that we could try to gain entrance to the parties by pretending I was David Arquette. This seemed like our best option, until we realized that neither of us had the balls to try this tactic and risk the grand embarrassment of being rejected in wide view of everyone on Main Street. Not to mention WHAT IF DAVID ARQUETTE WAS ALREADY AT THE FUCKING PARTY?
So instead we went back to our “just out of town” (way out of town) ski lodge and watched a bunch of eighties movies on VHS. If memory serves, SpaceCamp held up pretty well.
However, once our little short film started to screen, something very interesting happened. Despite being the ugliest and worst-sounding film in the festival’s history, we became a bit of a cult hit. There was a lore to our little movie…a “Look what these guys did with only $3” kinda thing. And industry people started to seek us out. Being underdogs seemed to serve us, and this was a status we would soon learn to embrace.
By the end of the festival, a fair amount of industry folks knew who we were, and we were asked to fly to Los Angeles to meet with a top-tier agent at William Morris (one of the big four agencies at the time). He signed us on the spot and we realized we had made it!
But not really. Because that agent simply asked us to “write a feature script you want to make and I’ll help you package it.” We didn’t know what that meant, so we asked around and it turned out that “packaging” sounded really cool. It means that the agent takes your script and seeks out famous actors who are also represented by that agency to “attach” to your movie, then goes out and gets financing to make the movie. Simple. Easy.
But not really. Because the more we talked to peers who were a few steps ahead of us in this whole independent film game, the more we realized that packaging is a lot like the Waiting Place in Oh, the Places You’ll Go! Filmmakers often sit there for years, feeling so close to getting their movie made but never quite getting there. Or perhaps even worse, getting so desperate after a few years of waiting that they take whatever cast and financier they can get and end up making a bastardized version of their passion project.