One Acts, the Other Doesn't

By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 2, 2006; Page WE52

Here's something funny.

During a half-hour conference call with the filmmaking Duplass brothers -- Jay directs, Mark writes and acts -- the word "dude" comes up only twice in conversation. This is funny because in their film "The Puffy Chair" (see review on Page 44), a Gen-X-centric comedy about obsessions romantic and otherwise, it feels like the word appears somewhere on the order of 500 times. And this is over the course of an 85-minute film. Do the math.

"We had to do an editing pass on that film to cut 'dudes' out of it," says Jay, 33, who jokingly refers to himself as the "brains" of the outfit, while calling Mark, 29, "the pretty face." "Seriously, it was so bad."

"It was epidemic," chimes in Mark, who moved with his brother to Los Angeles recently, after living in New York "on and off" for the past few years. He attributes some of it to the simple fact that they both loved the idea that the central couple (played by Kathryn Aselton and Mark) would use the word as a term of endearment for each other, while chalking the rest of it up to their, er, loose approach to written dialogue. "Once you start 'duding' on a set," he says, "it's really hard to stop. When people are improvising, and they happen to be under the age of 30, you're going to get some 'dudes.' "

The naturalistic acting and hand-held camerawork of "The Puffy Chair" -- what Mark calls "classic Hollywood storytelling in a low-fi vehicle" -- can be found in "This Is John," and the handful of other well-received short films they made in the years before this, their first real feature. Or first good feature, notes Jay, adding that they made a lot of duds before this one, which was nominated for the John Cassavetes Award at this year's Independent Spirit Awards. "We've always tried to do what John Cassavetes did," Mark says, "but we thought it would be better, or just better for us, if they were funny."

It's a shtick perfected over an almost 25-year working partnership. Their earliest equipment was "one of those enormous video cameras that feeds directly into the VCR," says Mark, who cheerfully recalls being forced by his 9-year-old sibling to not just lug around the player, but to "do whatever he told me to do."

Nowadays, he jokes, "it's pretty much the same."

As far as "Chair" is concerned, a theme that especially resonated with the brothers was the increasing futility of its hero's (Mark) efforts to deliver a purple recliner to his father. "We're grass-is-greener people," jokes Mark about their dyspeptic worldview. As emerging filmmakers trying not just to make a decent film, but to live down the shame of all the bad, unseen ones they made over the past 10 years, the brothers say the story's quixotic nature was something they could relate to.

"The one thing that Mark and I could personally bring to this movie," says Jay, "is driving forward so hard, and just banging your head against a wall to try and make something happen. Just to try and be successful on some level."

"On a basic level," says Mark, "it's defined by trying to be independent filmmakers and trying to make a feature film for $15,000. You've got to have a little bit of the overachiever in you, but unfortunately it also involves lots of late nights breaking down and crying with your girlfriend, and some occasional medication to keep you on the right track."

Now that Hollywood has started to take note of the brothers, they're getting some mainstream job offers -- and a little bit more cash too -- but they're convinced that they'll never entirely give up the misery-loves-company dynamic they've grown up with.

"We can't envision our future," says Mark, "but the way we're envisioning it is that we'll make an independent move and then complain to each other about how we need more money to be comfortable and we need more stars in it so people will go see it. Then we'll make a big movie and we'll complain about how the studio is coming down on us. And then we'll make a little movie. And we'll just bounce back and forth, complaining in between."