Like Brothers

by Mark Duplass

  So you take stock of your life and try to figure out what went wrong. You’ve made two feature films, one well reviewed and one with Randy Hercules that did quite well financially and critically. And you’ve also run a small TV show for a year and produced a few smaller indie films that did well for everyone (some made money, some broke even, but it all balanced out). You are not rich, but you are making a living and you are proud of your work. And you can’t help but think…“How is it possible, after all these years of hard work and pushing the boulder up the mountain, that the cavalry still isn’t coming? How is it possible that I am still funding and creating my own stuff from the ground up after all this time?”

  And then it hits you: Who gives a shit about the cavalry? You don’t need them. Because now…you are the cavalry. Sorry, have to Tony Robbins this one just a little bit.

  YOU ARE THE CAVALRY.

  Think about it for a second. You are your very own infrastructure. You can self-fund all the micro-budgeted movies and TV shows you want at this point, and you can have full creative control over what you want them to be. And while it is a limit to only make “small” stuff, you can go to bed at night knowing that everything you have made and will make is something that you are proud of, that is reflective of your spirit, and you can show it to your kids one day without explaining why you had to sell out to make it.

  This realization is what “making it” means to us now. Being in independent film and TV is no longer a means to an end to get to Hollywood. It is a way of making things that we believe in and choose to stay with.

  So, dear pupils, we humbly say to you: If you can accept that the cavalry probably isn’t coming but that you can be your own cavalry, this will be your best chance at maintaining long-term success in your career. Perhaps more important (and something we don’t talk enough about in this business), this will give you the best chance at happiness.

  (PART 4)*

  Gridlocked at twelve, we set a couple of hours aside in our office attic (the creative space) to finalize the list. We bandied around a few solutions, mostly just different cowardly justifications that avoided us actually reducing it to the ten films. Because it was clear that neither of us was ever going to budge. We didn’t realize it at the time, but each of us was waiting for the other to be the bigger brother and be the first to knock one of his favorites from the list. The unspoken assumption was that once one of us took that brave first step, the other would quickly follow and we would settle nicely into our final Top 10 list. After all, this was just a fun exercise for the book. There were no real stakes here.

  But that didn’t happen. And, oddly, things got a bit tense. And quiet. And we started changing the subject. When we ran out of the time we had allotted to figure out this portion of the book, one of us quickly suggested that we drop this series of chapters altogether. That it was trivial and somewhat false. Strangely, neither of us actually wanted to drop it. Strangely, we sat in silence, heels dug in like stubborn preteens. Strangely, this stupid exercise was turning out to be a real problem. We left the meeting with twelve movies on our Top 10 list. And no discernible way forward.

  American Movie

  Raising Arizona

  Tootsie

  Rocky

  Hoop Dreams

  The Crying Game

  Dumb and Dumber

  The Cruise

  Henry Fool

  The Horse Boy

  You Can Count On Me

  Close-Up

  * To be continued…

  BEFORE MARK AND I shot a frame of our little feature film The Puffy Chair, we set a few unorthodox filmmaking rules to better our chances of making a feature that didn’t suck this time around. They were, in no particular order:

  Keep it small. Once word got out that we were making a new feature, our reputation in the tiny world of independent film was big enough to attract offers from people wanting to come with us, even willing to chip in for free on the crew. But as exciting as it sounded to have more bodies and more help, we couldn’t forget about the bloated Vince Del Rio set and how it often distracted us from the task at hand: Get good performances and good story. And while it may have been a bit overprotective of us to turn away such generous free labor, we felt strongly that we should stay lean and mean. We were simply not confident in our ability to make a good film if there was too much noise around and too many other jobs to focus on. Story. Acting. We promised to let everything else go for now.

  Another rule was to blow off the schedule if needed. While we had allotted eighteen shoot days, we would not make the same mistake of forcing ourselves to “make our days.” This is what got us into the most trouble on Vince Del Rio…trying to please our crew and producers by being good little Catholic boys who followed the rules. To be clear, this didn’t mean that we could shoot for a hundred days and just be lazy about it, but it did mean we promised that if we got to a point on set where we needed a little bit more time to get things right, we would take that time and get the scene right. Even if it meant punting a scene to the next day so we could rewrite or even reconceive it, we would allow ourselves to fail and regroup. If there is one lesson we have learned from being on set it is that if you are sitting there asking yourself, “Did we get it?” then it most certainly means you did not get it. And while it’s never fun to reschedule or “go over,” in the end everyone will thank you for taking the time to be honest about what’s not working and then get it right. (NOTE: Another benefit of keeping our crew small was that if we went over, it wouldn’t be a huge expense and upheaval of an existing machine’s order.)

  Lastly, we decided to shoot the film in its natural scene order. When making a film, it is much more practical to shoot the scenes out of chronological sequence. For instance, if three scenes in the movie take place in one restaurant, you go there and shoot all three scenes in a row. Cheaper, more efficient, smarter all around. For Puffy, we decided to shoot the film in the exact order that the scenes took place in the film. This often meant asking actors to hang around production longer than they needed to, or even doubling back on locations. But because we used our “available materials” school of filmmaking, this wasn’t a big ask of the locations, which were mostly given to us for free. The big benefit to this approach was being able to track the organic relationship dynamics as they progressed in real time. While we do work from a traditional script, we often improvise the dialogue on set so that we can make things feel more natural. By shooting in chronological order, if something interesting came up in the improv, we could incorporate that surprise into the subsequent scenes (which is impossible to do when you are shooting out of sequence). We could now look at a fight scene we shot the previous night and say things like, “He was more defensive than we thought he would be, so he should be aware of that in this apology scene and be a bit more contrite than we initially imagined.” It was a perfect way to dial in the nuances of the interpersonal dynamics that make or break small films like the one we were making. And this is an approach we still use whenever possible.

  With these basic tenets in place, we shot the first two days in Mark’s apartment in New York City, and they went off without a hitch. Feeling confident and inspired, the six of us hopped into the van and started our drive up to Maine. Along the way, we shot a simple scene in which Emily (played by Katie) has to go to the bathroom, but Josh (played by Mark) won’t stop driving because he wants to make good time on the road. It was a classic road movie conflict, and we played it in a fun, subtle way that alluded to some of the darkness that existed beneath the surface of Josh and Emily’s seemingly fun relationship. In short, we felt we nailed it. We were so excited to see what we came up with that we pulled out the tapes that night and gathered in one of our shared Motel 6 rooms to preview the magic.

  The footage, however, was completely unusable. The camera had developed a bug in transit, and the whole d
ay’s shooting was a bust. Not only was it disheartening to lose what we thought was a great scene, we couldn’t shoot the next day because our camera was broken. After a few hours on the phone trying to get it fixed, we realized that we would have to break out the credit cards and buy a brand-new camera, shelling out hundreds extra to have it overnighted so we would only lose one day of shooting. Our hope was to get the broken camera fixed after the shoot and then eBay it to defray the cost of the new camera, which we felt confident we could rent out again over the next year to pay off. Not a huge deal, but a blow to the momentum for sure.

  Still, that strange down day off the interstate in Bangor, Maine, was a tough one. We were all feeling a sense of doom. That our movie might be somehow cursed. That the underdog momentum we had been building since our first Sundance short in 2003 might be hitting a wall.

  And the next day was a little bit worse, when we got the new camera and reshot the “pee scene,” as we called it. Because this time around, the scene was uninspired, false, and forced. And we all felt it. Katie and Mark tried their hardest to get back that fun spark of the first time around, but it was gone. We hammered away at it for twelve hours and eventually flopped into the van and made our way to Milbridge for the rest of the shoot.

  When we got to Milbridge, we settled into a groove. Mark, Katie, and Rhett found their characters’ voices and drilled into them. I was operating the camera, directing, and running sound right into the camera, so I was exhausted at the end of every day. But we were getting good footage, and it felt like it was working.

  The hardest part of the shoot for Mark and me was learning how to collaborate closely with others. This was the beginning of a long journey that we still struggle with today. We tend to communicate in gestures, grunts, odd references. And this was all fine when we were making a $3 short in our kitchen with just the two of us, but we now needed to include Rhett and Katie in this dialogue, and we were admittedly not very good at it. Add into this mix the fact that Katie and Mark were dating at the time (and all the meta stuff going on in the scenes and their relationship), and the soup started to become somewhat insane.

  As often happens on set, allegiances started to build. Mark and Katie, as a couple and as the main actors in the film, had built a sometimes impenetrable bond as scene partners that I often found hard to crack. This was a shock to me, since it had always been Mark and me against the world. Likewise, Katie often felt left out of the bizarre inner communication circle of Mark and me as directors of the film. To make matters even worse, she and I often commiserated and joined forces against Mark’s fast-paced type-A bedside manner. It was like a complex game of Survivor, where alliances were made and broken on an hourly basis. And while there were never any big fights about it, it was definitely a confusing time for all of us and a big learning curve for Mark and me as brothers in terms of letting other people into the twinlike fold we had built over the past twenty-five years.

  The good news was that despite these challenges and conflicts (or perhaps because of them), we stayed on our toes and gave everything we had to the movie. We improvised when it wasn’t right, we took walks and rewrote when scenes felt stilted, and Katie even pulled out an improvised rewrite for the end of the film that in our opinion makes the movie what it is today. And after our twenty-one production days (yep, we went three days over schedule, and it was worth it), we all came out alive and felt we had something special in the can. We said goodbye to Milbridge and to Katie’s parents (who had become parents to all of us during the shoot) and headed back to Brooklyn to edit the film.

  The first thing we noticed in editing was that, as we expected, the “pee scene” was just not inspired. In fact, the whole first fifteen minutes of the movie seemed to be suffering a little bit. Once Josh and Emily got on the road, the movie really took off, but something was just off in that early footage. We tried to diagnose it and treat it a bunch of different ways, and then began to ask that wonderfully naïve question of ourselves: “Maybe we’re being too hard on it and it’s fine?”

  Relying on our proven process for audience feedback, we gathered a group of filmmakers and smart friends to watch a rough cut of the movie. And, of course, the first act of the film was just not landing. This was a huge blow because we once again found ourselves in the familiar position of having a quality issue and not knowing how to fix it (Vince Del Rio all over again). But this time we felt that the overall quality of the movie was worth sticking with and trying to fix. So we hunkered down. Mark did what he usually does, which is avoid reshooting at all costs. He is very resistant to it and wanted to make the fix somehow in editorial. I, for whatever reason, am much more willing to reopen production, and I began pushing hard for not only reshoots but rewrites as well. Essentially my idea was to completely reconceive the first fifteen minutes. I dragged Mark into it, and once I did it was obvious to us both that this was the right way to go.

  Then something great happened. We were forced to truly ask, “What is wrong with this couple?” and “What is their journey?” By having already shot the film, we realized we now had a chance to reverse engineer our beginning to perfectly fit the film…which was already shot. It was a small concept but proved to be a huge breakthrough.

  One night shortly after this realization, while we were brainstorming in Mark’s apartment, Lethal Weapon came on TV and gave us an idea. They start the movie with a generic action scene to get the story going before all the boring setup and exposition. We looked at each other and said nothing. We started improvising a “right out of the gate” fight scene between Josh and Emily that was indicative of their issues. Our version of that nonspecific action scene from Lethal Weapon. We came up with a scene that featured Josh and Emily being passive-aggressive, using their trademark baby talk to deal with each other. Josh was trying to get some distance from Emily, to go on this road trip alone. But he was afraid to ask. This made her fearful that he was pulling away and caused her to glom on to him more tenaciously. We improvised this concept a bit as the two of us happened to be eating chicken, so we just decided to write the chicken dinner right into the scene for Josh and Emily. We were so excited we were dancing around the room like idiots. But we stayed in it and hunkered down to finish the rest of the rewrite. We knew we needed another scene to bring them back together, to show the good side of their relationship before they took off on the trip. We thought about it awhile and started talking about Lloyd Dobler, from the movie Say Anything…, and how awesome he was. How he could make mistakes, but he was such a loving dude you couldn’t help but forgive him. We lamented that we hadn’t thought of the iconic Peter Gabriel ghetto blaster scene ourselves. And then it hit us…Josh is the kind of guy who would love Lloyd. He is of a generation that just wants to be Lloyd. Let’s have Josh reenact the ghetto blaster scene for Emily and win her back.

  Careful not to lose the momentum, we set up the reshoots right away. We knew enough then to know that whenever you can shoot a scene that you are still in love with due to its freshness, it has that much better of a chance to be great. So we shot the new scenes within the week and then picked up some extra road footage to help sell the travel element of the movie (we hadn’t done a good job of this in production). Within two days, Jay Deuby had edited the scenes in, and just like that the movie emerged.

  We held a test screening in the basement of Two Boots Pizza on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and invited forty filmmakers and friends. We sat in back as usual and watched them watch the movie. Within ten minutes we knew the film was working. When it was over everyone told us how much they related to Josh and Emily and their journey. How it felt like we had put a microphone in their apartment and recorded the last fight they’d had with their significant other.

  We rode the subway home that night. There was a lot of smiling and grabbing of each other’s knees. And high-fiving. And a shitload of crying. We had finally cracked a feature film that worked. And we had done it on our ow
n, in our way. It was a massive breakthrough.

  From: jay duplass

  To: mark duplass

  Subject: xmas eve

  dupes. that was an awesome night. I feel like everyone was at their best. mom and dad. the kids were just jamming together and loving it all. it just worked. thx for hosting that and ushering it into being.

  From: mark duplass

  To: jay duplass

  Subject: RE: xmas eve

  I felt it too. I thought about it a lot after u guys left and was trying to crack the code to why it worked so well. I guess sometimes things just have an energy and u get lucky or whatever. but I wish we could bottle it or map it out in some way to help re-create it cuz it was so rad and beautiful. particularly with me and u and jen and katie. did u notice that?

  From: jay duplass

  To: mark duplass

  Subject: RE: xmas eve

  yeah. that was the biggest part for me. i’ve always convinced myself that i had unrealistic expectations of how close u and me and our wives would all be. like we would all live in a commune and share all the same ideals and raise our kids together kinda thing. obviously it’s more complex than that and my brain can totally accept it, but in my heart I still feel badly that it doesn’t just click in perfectly like I hoped it would.