Sibling revelry

The Duplass brothers have big plans. Hollywood, beware.

In an increasingly muddled climate for independent film, the Duplass brothers seem almost unsettlingly at ease. Of course, they’ve been having a pretty good run. Three years ago, their first feature, The Puffy Chair, was picked up after a successful showing at Sundance and did surprisingly good business for a micro-budget indie.

And then they got lumped in with the “mumblecore” movement, a messy term used to describe young filmmakers such as Andrew Bujalski, Joe Swanberg and Aaron Katz, who all have superlow budgets, rough aesthetics, improvised dialogue and raw emotion. This year’s Sundance found the Duplass brothers negotiating a deal for Baghead, which many people see as a wry send-up of mumblecore’s navel-gazing tendencies.

“This has been a terrible year for indie movies,” notes Mark Duplass wryly, “except for the fact this has been our dream year; we went to Sundance with a cheap movie and in two days we had a bidding war and sold it to a mini major company [Sony Pictures Classics].”

Their Sundance experience was surreal. “There was excitement in the air,” recalls Mark, “because when we had the first screening, within the half hour we had offers. Then we got to go on the 48 hour…again, the thing you read about, the subterfuge of the selling of the movie at Sundance.”

Jay chimes in: “The late-night condo visitations and the passing of the print in the parking of a grocery store to an executive in his pajamas who is driving the print to L.A. for immediate viewing. It’s like our version of a spy movie. It literally felt like this tiny little spy movie.”

Laughing, Mark imagines that film: “We’re walking down the street and we’re waiting for, like, the late ’70s Caddie to have the headlights flick on and just fucking run us over.”

Right now, the future seems bright, with the brothers planning to take Hollywood screenwriting and rewrite jobs to finance their own smaller films. “We’re now kind of poised to say we might actually have a profitable model here that’s making cheap movies and selling them at Sundance. We’re kind of two for two on that so far. There is nothing out of personal experience that has shown us that we can’t continue to this. Of course talk to us when we make a bad movie and people start moving on us, and we’ll have a whole other set of shit to say.”

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