Watching a movie is easy. Making one is hard. Just ask Jay Duplass, who with his brother Mark made a name for himself in the mid-2000s and early 2010s with quirky independent films like The Puffy Chair (2005), Baghead (2008), Cyrus (2010), and Jeff, Who Lives at Home (2011).
Duplass later turned his attention to writing, directing, and/or producing TV shows such as Togetherness (2015-2016), Animals (2016-2018), Room 104 (2017-2020), and Somebody Somewhere (2022-2023), among others. He also went from being a casual actor to a serious one when he was cast as Josh Pfefferman on the wildly successful TV series Transparent (2014-2019).
Now, Duplass has just released his first new feature film since 2012, The Baltimorons, screening at this year’s SLO International Film Festival. Duplass will also receive this year’s Spotlight Award.
Writer, director, actor, producer—Duplass has proven himself capable in every role, and during a recent phone call, he explained why directing is the most gratifying.
“People usually ask which is the most fun, and that’s a very different answer,” he said. “Directing is 100 percent the most satisfying. It’s the hardest one to do by far. You’re parent to a whole group of people. You’re the author of a piece of art. It all ultimately rests on your shoulders. It’s honestly the thing I love the most and it is the most satisfying, but it’s definitely not the most fun.”
Duplass thinks his brother’s analogy sums it up nicely: “Mark says, ‘If directing a movie is like being a mother who births and raises a baby through adulthood, being an actor is like being the drunk uncle who shows up on Christmas with Oreos and wins the day.’
“Now that I’ve started acting, I completely agree with that.”
Television vs. film?
Big screen or small, Duplass believes both formats have their place.
“We’re in a great moment in TV right now. That being said, I think it’s very easy for TV to turn into my least favorite word in our industry, which is ‘content.’ I hate that word so much.”
TV is a double-edged sword. The pressure to quickly follow up a great first season can lead to a mediocre second, but television is a “great business model” thanks in part to streaming, which makes the distribution costs astonishingly low.
“It’s so much harder to make one great film than to make three or four episodes of television, even though that might be the same amount of running time,” he explained. “In film, the plane’s got to take off, the plane’s got to do a bunch of tricks in the air, and the plane’s got to land, and you’ve got to believe that ending, you know? It’s a much more challenging piece of art to make from the perspective of the writer/director.”
Despite the degree of difficulty, movies remain his “first true love.”
“That’s what I grew up watching, that’s what made me fall in love with this form. I went to movie theaters as a kid and felt less alone in the world. I love it the most.”
As an actor, two film roles he accepted—in Beatriz at Dinner (2017) opposite Salma Hayek, John Lithgow, Connie Britton, and Chloë Sevigny, and his leading man turn in Outside In (2017) with Edie Falco—probably wouldn’t have happened without his role in Transparent.
“Transparent really opened up those doors to me,” he said. “I think all the major roles that I’ve taken were paved by that experience. Prior to Transparent, my acting was pretty much just me being friends with writers, directors, showrunners, and coming on set and helping … honestly like subbing in when someone would fall out of something. ‘Get Jay, he’s comfortable on set and he’s not going to annoy you,’ you know what I mean?
“Transparent was the first time I took myself seriously as an actor.”
An actor’s director
That experience also changed the way he directs actors.
“I think it’s made me less precious in a weird way. I used to be worried about how I would speak to actors. I grew up in a generation where actors and directors were both terrified of one another. It’s broken down those barriers. I’m much more straightforward with my actors now.
“I’ll say, ‘Look. We’ve got 40 minutes and the sun goes down. I hate to say it, but that’s just what it is, so we’ve got two or three takes. Sorry, but that’s where we’re at.’ Whereas before as a director, you might be like, ‘OK, guys, I have a brand-new great idea! We’re going to do it all in a oner!’ I just don’t feel the need to pull any more tricks. Of course, that requires hiring actors who are reasonable people who are down to make a piece of art by any means necessary.”
Duplass also has a great story about that he calls a “happy accident” during the making of Cyrus with Jonah Hill, John C. Reilly, and Marisa Tomei, which Duplass attributes to giving actors the space to be “in the moment.” Hill adlibbed a line that absolutely killed and fit perfectly.
“First and foremost, it starts with the idea that anything could happen here,” Duplass explained. “That’s a feeling I’m trying to cultivate because I think the audience can tell. They know when something’s fully controlled, and they know when something is loose and real life is happening.”
The actors have their lines, but Duplass encourages what he calls “goal-based improvisation.”
“They know what they’re supposed to accomplish. They can do whatever they need to do in the moment to make that happen. That keeps them on their toes, keeps the other actors on their toes. They’re not locked into a pre-decided outcome or rhythm. It just makes everything come alive so much more on set, and then, every once in a while, you’ll have someone super bold and brilliant, like Jonah, who says, ‘Don’t fuck my mom,’ and that ends up in the trailer.
“I mean Searchlight [Pictures] made T-shirts that said, ‘Don’t fuck my mom.’ It was an improvised line! It’s also the kind of line that if I had written that in the script, it would have appeared as a very arch, broad comedy line that I think a lot of actors would look at and be, ‘I can’t say that,’ but Jonah was able to spring that on everybody. Luckily, we had two cameras going. The look on John [C. Reilly’s] face when Jonah said that was priceless!”
The Baltimorons
Duplass has created that kind of spontaneous magic again with The Baltimorons, a funny, tender Christmas Eve love story about two semi-dysfunctional people—Cliff (Michael Strassner) and Didi (Liz Larsen)—who find each other. Essentially, making the film was Duplass’ “now or never” moment.
“Prior to The Baltimorons, the last original film that I wrote and directed [with his brother Mark] was Jeff, Who Lives at Home, a movie that we shot in 2011. For me, all I ever wanted to do was be the Coen Brothers 2.0 with my brother, and for a while we were doing that, but then my brother got super famous and really into producing.”
Mark took over the day-to-day reins of the brothers’ production company, Duplass Brothers Productions. Jay wanted to make a new film, but he’d always collaborated with Mark.
“After the pandemic and during the [writers’] strike, I turned 50 at that time, and I just had a bit of a midlife crisis. I was like, ‘If I don’t start making movies now, it’s never going to happen.’ It had been 13 or 14 years at that point. I knew that making independent films is extra tough right now, and I’d never done it without my brother. I just knew I needed to go back to my roots and make a tiny little movie with people who desperately wanted and needed to be there.”
The film is a perfect example of what independent filmmaking can accomplish, and what never would have come out of the studio system.
“When you’re making independent films like The Baltimorons, really small-time, handmade, independent filmmaking, it’s interesting because you have a lot more time to be creative, more time to do the thing as opposed to talk about the thing.
“There’s a lot of talking about things in the studio world and justifying the decisions you’re making, rethinking them—and that’s not bad, but what’s actually more useful to an artist trying to make something great is being on set and having more time to figure it out for themselves within the circumstances that are being presented as opposed to a lot of intellectualism that’s floating around the room.”
Even The Baltimorons script grew organically out of “figuring it out.”
“I’d been hanging out with Michael Strassner, the lead of the film, and getting to know him and getting to know his life story, all the things he’s been through, which essentially is the origin story of The Baltimorons.”
Duplass mixed Strassner’s story with things happening in actress Liz Larsen’s life.
“I sort of married those two things together and essentially backed these two people and their lives into the movie and shot it two weeks after the strike ended. Literally pounced on Baltimore right after the strikes ended and right before Christmas, and somehow got this thing shot on the ground in freaking cold COVID-infested weather.”
Their guerilla filmmaking shoot was facilitated thanks to a Baltimore-based location manager Strassner knew with access to great locations around the city.
“So, I sort of Sean Bakered this movie,” Duplass said, nodding to Sean Baker, the Academy Award-winning writer-director of Anora who filmed his movie on the fly in New York City locations such as South Brooklyn, Brighton Beach, and Coney Island.
Both Strassner and Larsen are largely unknowns but terrific in their roles. He plays a scruffy recovering alcoholic, and she’s a brittle divorcee.
“I’ve been calling them the two movie stars you’ve never heard of because they really are just freaking phenomenal. What made me want to cast them is that they were anonymous in that Sean Baker way. I think it lends to the believability. It really feels like you’re watching real life.
“They were so imbued with their own stories that it was very easy to bring it forth in tough circumstances.” Δ
Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Apr 24 – May 4, 2025.