Three years ago, I saw a film at SXSW Film Festival called HUMPDAY that made me laugh so hard I almost had to tune the film out just to keep from laughing and heaving my guts onto the floor of the theater. I had certainly seen films that had been pigeonholed into the category of "Mumblecore," but HUMPDAY didn't quite fit comfortably as a member of that ilk, despite featuring one of the movement's kings, writer-director-actor Mark Duplass. The movie was so funny because it captured the essence of male one-upsmanship, and the foolish behavior that results, all in an improvised setting. What was even more wonderful was that the tale of male stupidity came courtesy of a woman--writer-director Lynn Shelton.
Jump ahead to last year's Toronto Film Festival (and later at this year's Sundance Festival), where Shelton unveiled her latest work, YOUR SISTER'S SISTER, starring Duplass, Emily Blunt, and Rosemarie DeWitt in a story that aims for affairs of the heart and sisterly bonds/rivalries. And the insight into human behavior, unrequited love, and forgiveness is all still there.
Seattle-based writer-director-actress Shelton gained a great deal of recognition with her previous film, MY EFFORTLESS BRILLIANCE, and her first feature, WE GO WAY BACK, won the Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance in 2006. And in the weirdest twist of fate, HUMPDAY is being remade in a French production starring Yvan Attal, François Cluzet, Laetitia Casta, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Joey Starr, and Asia Argento. She also has her next film, TOUCH FEELY (also starring DeWitt) shot already, and will likely make her next one with one of the biggest comedy stars working today. Read on, and please enjoy Lynn Shelton…
Capone: One question I did not ask at last night's Q&A was “Is three a magic number for you?” Your last three films have all had three main characters.
LS: Yeah, I think it all started at my seventh birthday party, when only two of the 12 people I invited came, and my mom was like “Oh no, three.” It’s just this terrible number, because there always ends up being these pairings, you know? You always end up pairing off and somebody gets left out at some point or another, which makes for really interesting drama, because there can be different combinations of pairings. The other thing that you can explore is these masks that we have, that we put on with different people. Not to go back to a totally different film, but Mark's character in HUMPDAY, Ben, is a totally different person with Andrew than he is with his wife, and when the three of them are all in the same room it’s like “Worlds colliding! Who am I? Who am I?” So there’s that kind of thing going on, too. We get to explore different aspects of ourselves with different people, so it’s endlessly fascinating. I think it’s a great formula.
Capone And yet you are deciding to branch from it slightly with the film you just finished.
LS: True.
Capone: But now is the one you are doing with Paul Rudd and Rebecca Hall, is that back to three?
LS: In a sense, but there are more characters as well. It’s interesting, the core is really three people. [laughs] I’ve tayed away in general from romantic comedies, because you know who the two are and what’s going to end up happening, and sometimes that’s fine. Along the way, it’s the journey that is unexpected and how they get to where they end up. But the ones that really interest me are BROADCAST NEWS, THE PHILADELPHIA STORY, movies that involve three people, and you really don’t know what’s going to happen, who's going to end up with who, or if anyone is going to end up with anybody. So that’s where things get much more interesting to me than the basic scenario. So at any rate if you have an ensemble cast, you have even more opportunities for pairings and juxtapositions of people and relationships, so it just makes it that much more complicated, and LAGGIES [with Rudd and Hall] is a little bit like that. There’s really one central character, but then she comes into juxtaposition with a lot of different people.
Capone: There’s a whole section of YOUR SISTER'S SISTER that we really can’t talk about without ruining the two main surprises.
LS: The bulk of the film, exactly. [laughs]
Capone: But it is kind of interesting how you, and I think you do this deliberately, that you hold and important piece of information about [DeWitt's character] Hannah.
LS: That’s an important reveal to me, yeah.
Capone: It's a great reveal, because most people are going to go into this movie probably knowing the basic “He sleeps with his best friend's sister” premise. That adds a whole different element to it. Why did you decide to do that?
LS: Because it would be a reveal, and then the fact that they have sex would be a surprise. So again, it would be great if we didn’t have to talk about this.
[Both Laugh]
LS: I don’t know how to talk about it without talking about it.
Capone: This is the lesser of the two reveals I think, or of the two that I’m talking about.
LS: Well, there are a few reveals, but yeah I mean when they first are having a conversation, it’s a very different tambour, two people who are on the market. It’s going to be a seduction scene basically. But if it’s two folks who are both in a bad place, and they have this best friend/sister person in common [redacted], it creates a whole different vibe and then a much more interesting scenario.
Capone: To me it seemed like the reason it was so important about that combination was that it wIris would never even think that that would happen.
LS: Exactly! Yeah, yeah. Absolutely, right. I thought it was an extremely important thing for the plot.
Capone: It is, and as somebody who I was there with last night said to me, that was the biggest shocker of them all, and you get it right at the beginning. Tell me about the continuing importance of Mark Duplass in your world.
LS: Did you see the Kasdan movie [DARLING COMPANION]?
Capone: Yes, but that’s not even one of the ones I’m talking about. I have seen that and that’s a horrible movie, but he’s in this Alex Kurtzman film too with Chris Pine and Elizabeth Banks.
LS: Oh? What’s it called?
Capone: PEOPLE LIKE US.
LS: He’s in PEOPLE LIKE US?
Capone: Yeah. He’s Banks' downstairs neighbor.
LS: I have to see it. I had no idea.
Capone: He’s so quiet in it too. It’s a totally different kind of thing, plus I’ve seen Mark and Jay’s new movie, well the new old movie.
LS: Oh, DO-DECA-PENTATHLON, which he was supposed to be in. Did you know that?
Capone: I did not even know that, no.
LS: Yeah, he was supposed to be ne'er-do-well, poker-playing brother. He dropped out of his own movie about three days before before shooting. It was like two months before we shot HUMPDAY, and he just realized he couldn’t do it. It was just too much for him. He had a new baby and it was too much at once. Mark Kelly was the ringer. I thought he killed; I really like him in that one.
Capone: Yeah. That movie is hilarious. Actually, my brother lives in Seattle, and he said he saw you in line for that movie at the Seattle Film Festival.
LS: [Laughs] Awesome.
Capone: I shouldn’t bring that up; it seems stalkerish.
LS: That’s so funny.
Capone: So back to my original question, explain the importance of Mark in your film career.
LS: I made my first feature in a very traditional way and I'd been on the post side of things. I had been an editor, but I had never gone to film school and I never really worked on a set before. I had visited, but never really worked on one. So this non-profit film studio gives me the opportunity and invites me to write and direct my first feature. I was basically commissioned to make my first feature, which is insane. I don’t know how long it would have taken me to figure out how to do it on my own, and I didn’t even know what a gaffer was. I’m going around introducing myself to everybody, “Hi, what’s your name? What do you do? What’s that?”
I felt like that’s when I really came into my own as an artist, when I was forced to collaborate with all of these people, because I’m such a control freak, and I had been making experimental films and documentaries for 12 years by myself doing everything on my own, because I didn’t want to give up control and I was terrified of collaboration, but here I was forced to, and it was so amazing. It was so beautiful and so clearly important for me. But I found it really frustrating to the traditional paradigm of making a movie, at least if you don’t have an endless budget and endless time. I felt like 90 percent of the time we spent of our 16-day shoot was on lighting.
I had a lot of theater actors and fresh-out-of-theater-school actors, none of whom were used to working under those circumstances and in front of cameras and with smoke machines and 30 people standing around staring at them. It just seemed like everything on the set was designed to obstruct the central work of what should have been the production, which was the acting. But there was one tiny little improvised scene, and everything just became electrified. I just believed everything out of their mouths, and it was like “What if a whole movie felt like that?”
I just started to fantasize about an experiment where you would get rid of all of the crew, except for a couple camera guys and the sound guy, and we would all be like flies on the wall, and I’d set up a documentary-style situation and I would develop the characters with the actors and the people that I chose to work with first instead of like writing a role and trying to fit a person into that role by auditioning them. I just wanted to try an experiment. And right at that time I was fantasizing about all of this, I met Joe Swanberg at the Maryland Film Festival. He was there with LOL, his second film, I was there with WE GO WAY BACK, and I met him at exactly the right time. He was just about to work with Mark, who he was obsessed with, on HANNAH TAKES THE STAIRS. They were just about to go in production, and so he sort of talked to me about Mark.
That was 2006, so it was a year later that Mark came to Seattle to work on TRUE ADOLESCENTS, and I volunteered to be a set photographer, so that I could meet him and hopefully bond with him and I totally did. We both knew of each other and we saw each other down this pathway, and he just like held out his arms and I held out mine and we just had a big bear hug, and from the very beginning we just really hit it off artistically. I saw PUFFY CHAIR after I saw Joe’s work and I remember giving him rough cuts of MY EFFORTLESS BRILLIANCE, and he gave me great notes on that. It was like as soon as we met, we just hit the ground running. I mean he we went back to L.A. after we met, and within a month I called him and pitched him HUMPDAY. Bt we just knew we wanted to work together from the get go. There was just such a kinship in our sensibility and in the kind of work we wanted to make and how we like to work with actors.
Capone: It was fun seeing Joe at the screening last night. I’ve seen him a lot in the last year. He was at a screening of THE INNKEEPERS when Ti West came to town, and then I ran into him down in Austin for V/H/S.
LS: He used to work for the Chicago Film Festival.
Capone: Definitely. You took 12 days to shoot this, and I wanted to know if you think that made you ideal to director some of the TV shows you've done in the last couple of years like "Mad Men" and "New Girl," because you can work fast?
LS: TV is really fast it turns out, so it’s really helpful. On "New Girl," it was a five-day shoot, and I made my first three days. We made them without going over time, and the crew was ecstatic. They were jumping up and down and running up to me and shaking my hand, and I was like “What’s going on?” They were like “Because nobody has ever done this before,” and I was like “Oh, well okay.” I don’t know, it was just crazy, like “Well what do other people do?” “Well we go really long,” and I was like “That’s great.”
Again, that external validation is really nice, because I just don’t have any context. I’m not on other people’s sets and I don’t see how other people work, and so to know that my skills translate and that directing is directing is directing, and the combination of having made a bunch of films without a ton of time to play with. HUMPDAY was made in 10 days--over the course of 11 days, I think with one day off in the middle. If I needed anymore time than 11 days, then I couldn’t have done it, because those two actors were both incredibly busy between making movies and being in them, and it was the same with YOUR SISTER’S SISTER. I couldn’t have asked for more time from anybody, but I didn’t need any more time either. It was exactly the right amount of time.
I really credit my editing background, because I know I don’t need one perfect take, I can combine my takes, and as long as I have a couple of variations that are going to work of each part of a scene or even really one. I need one portion of a scene that works. I was recently editing one of the scenes in [her recently shot next film] TOUCHY FEELY and I was so frustrated, because most of the parts of this one scene were “Not right, not right, not right,” and then there was one take where there was exactly what I needed and I realized, “Oh right, I don’t need 10 of them, I need one. I just need one, so it can end up on the screen.” So sometimes that’s what it is. Usually, you’re cobbling together lots of different parts of different takes, and so I wonder is that’s what it is, if people are trying to find that one perfect take.
I know that I don’t need to flog the master shot forever, because I’m not going to play the whole thing out in the master; I’m going to use it for the beginning or the end or whatever and I don’t need to get a perfect take of the master. Just that sensibility of like “What do you actually need in the edit room to put together a scene?” is key. And then there’s a little voice in my head that tells me I know when I’ve got it and “You can move on,” and now I can really trust that voice. It’s served me well over the years.
Capone: When you’re working on a show like "Madmen" that is so about the written word, how did that work with your improv style? Were you about to adapt pretty easily when you had to stick to the script?
LS: That experience is one of the reasons that TOUCHY FEELY exists in the form that it existed in, because I came to the actors in a much later stage of the process, and it was much more written. It’s more written than any other movie I’ve made since my first feature, and some of the scenes they really diverged and some of them they really just only slightly diverged, and a lot of them are straight up. I’d say 70 percent of it is as written.
The reason was that on "Madmen," it was like I never realized how stressful my kind of moviemaking was until I was on the set of "Madmen," and it was like “You mean we don’t have to write the words on the set? What? This is amazing. They're here already and they're really good, and the actors know who their characters are, so we can just find the scene?” It was so liberating. It was spectacular, Steve; it was really great. I had just never had the luxury of working with a really great script and so I found it fantastic. It’s very different. It was word perfect.
Capone: I’m sure.
LS: And so the actors would go off and you'd have to steer them back. The script supervisor and I were gently trying to remind them, and sometimes it was really frustrating for them, but for the most part everybody is on board, because it is a brilliant, brilliant script.
And I’m just going to say this: I used to do poetry. When I was eight, I started writing all of these poems for some reason, and in college I had this class with this poet, Nelson Bentley, and I'd always done free verse my whole life, and in college he was like, “Nobody should be allowed to do free verse unless they’ve concurred structure and forms,” and I was bucked against it. But I really relished that experience and I’ve kept that with me my whole life, that obstruction often is incredibly liberating and actually really helpful, and that's what "Madmen" was like for me.
It was like “Okay, you’re given a cast, you’re given a crew, you’re given a script,” and in TV in general, but especially with that show, because it was so specific. I mean Matt [Weiner, the show's creator] has the thing in his head exactly, so I’m trying to channel him on set. It’s the same job as directing my own movies, but it’s harder, because I’m trying to be somebody else and imagine what he would want. And I just found it one of the most edifying and invigorating and inspiring experiences of my artistic career. It was just incredible and confidence inspiring, because I feel like I could walk onto the set of a studio movie and shoot it.
Capone: The last thing I wanted to talk to you about was, and not to assign a single meaning to the movie, but when the film opens, Jack is in mourning still, and his life has not gotten back on track since his brother died. By the end of the film ,what I realized is that when all is revealed, the thing that he says to Iris is, “I do not want to be the person that comes between you and your sister, because you will never understand how important that bond is.” That’s what the film really comes down to. It’s not about who's sleeping with who or who's in love with who.
LS: It’s like the underground river running beneath the whole movie. And it’s what brings him back. I mean, he really is dead. At the end, he says, “I want to come back. I’m tired of being dead and I want to come back to life,” and that scene of him in the diner with the little kids is a combination the best improv in the whole movie. I always think of every time, those kids just being kids, there it is. “There is real life. There’s the real fucking thing,” you know? They don’t even know the camera is on them, and they steal the movie in this weird way, just in that tiny little moment. But it’s a combination of “Here are two bothers,” so he can think back to his brother and he can also see this is as the regeneration. “I could be a part of that.” So it’s sort of the double header. Well I’m really glad you saw that, because I know it gets lost sometimes.
Capone: When do you think TOUCHY FEELY is going to surface?
LS: I'm aiming for a festival in 2013.
Capone: Okay, so not this year.
LS: Yeah, it will take me a while.
Capone: Okay, well best of luck with this one.
LS: Thank you. And thanks for having me. It was really a delight and nice to see you again.
