Interview: Directors Mark Duplass, Jay Duplass on ‘Cyrus’

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CHICAGO – HollywoodChicago.com recently interviewed brothers Mark and Jay Duplass, the filmmaking duo behind acclaimed micro-budget indies such as “The Puffy Chair and “Baghead.” Their new comedy, “Cyrus,” centers on a darkly funny love triangle between a lovable loser, John (John C. Reilly), his girlfriend Molly (Marisa Tomei) and her frighteningly possessive son, Cyrus (Jonah Hill).

Question: Is it your hope to do bigger Hollywood fare as well as smaller independent features, or perhaps blur the line and create studio films with an indie mentality?

Director Mark Duplass: We definitely still love making little movies, and by no means do we plan on abandoning that now that we’re lucky to make some bigger ones. In terms of blurring the two, there’s a certain group of actors that really like what Jay and I are doing. They really like the run ’n gun mentality of improvising and [having] creative control, so we’re kicking around the idea of a middle class format where some larger name actors bring some profile to the movie, but we still [make] it independently.

Director Jay Duplass: We wouldn’t necessarily tailor the content for studio versus indie. It’s just really a matter of whether it can be produced small, and whether some famous people might want to come to our house and shoot a movie over the course of two weeks.

Question: The film’s humor is primarily born out of character, rather than broad comedy. How did the vibe onset facilitate this approach?

Jay Duplass: When most people think of improv, they think about it in terms of an Adam McKay movie with Will Ferrell or [an] Apatow [movie]. Mark and I are doing something a little bit different, where we’re actually improvising every single take, but it’s all within the confines of the script. It’s not like we’re just riffing to get a joke. We tell our actors, ‘We don’t want you to be making jokes. We just want you to inhabit this character.”

Co-directors Jay Duplass and Mark Duplass on the set of their new comedy ‘Cyrus,’ which opened in local theaters on June 23rd.
Image credit: Fox Searchlight Pictures

Question: What particular improvisations from the actors had a significant influence on the film, in terms of plot or tone?

Mark Duplass: I think the key word there is tone. That’s where the improvisation comes in. We work from a traditional script and the story and the plotting never changes. We don’t want to be that out to sea. We like shaggy, loose-feeling performances inside of a tightly structured narrative. That being said, the interpersonal nuances are pretty variable depending on how the improv [goes].

I think a good example of that would be the first dinner scene with Cyrus and Molly and John. Jonah, without telling anyone, threw out that line, “Seriously, don’t f—k my mom.” That was not scripted and it was a shock to everyone. Likewise, when John came back with, “We did have sex,” it was sort of like John reacting to Jonah in that moment and in that energy. We never would’ve directed John to be that bold at the dinner scene had Cyrus not thrown that out, but that sort of gave him the permission to do it and it worked.

Question: How did you come up with the character’s name of Cyrus? Was Miley a conscious influence?

Jay Duplass: It was just a coincidence. We have two-year-old daughters, but we fortunately aren’t entering the world where we have to take our kids to Miley Cyrus concerts yet. [laughs] But basically, the motivation behind the name Cyrus was that it’s a name that we’ve always thought was magnanimous and biblical. We didn’t want [his character] to be like a momma’s boy in that traditional sense where he’s just lingering on her every word and waiting for approval and stuck in that way. Similarly, we wanted his music [that he writes] to be kind of powerful and intimidating. For us, this was all about trying to create a 21-year-old kid that could stand up to the intelligence, humor and emotional evolution of the character that John C. Reilly was creating. It was all about making this kid as strong of a force as we could, while hopefully being funny.

Question: How were you able to make the uncomfortable relationship between the three main characters amusing?

Mark Duplass: For us, there really is no difference between the comedy and the drama and where they’re rooted. In our movies, sometimes the very same moment will be experienced by someone as comedy and someone as drama and by someone as a little bit in between. What Jay and I are trying to do is find very truthful moments onset that ring true to us, based on core human emotions; for John, a 40-year-old guy who’s trying to find love before it [gets] away from him, for Cyrus, a 21-year-old kid who’s desperately trying to hang on to his mom, and for Molly, a woman who’s caught in between the affections of two guys and trying to please them both.

The truth is, when you sit in a theater and watch this movie, there’s no empirical way that the audience receives it and interprets it. Sometimes there will be a moment where two people are sitting next to each other in a movie theater. One of them is laughing and one of them is having a very dramatic moment, and they’ll look at each other as if they’re both insane.

Question: Have you been happy with the critical response to the film?

Jay Duplass: Yeah, we’re really happy. This is our first studio movie, so we were worried. [laughs] We had always been well-reviewed in the past, but we always just chalked it up to the fact that it’s a $15,000 movie. If you don’t like [“The Puffy Chair”], who’s going to take the time to take a crap on [it]? So we were a little nervous about this movie. The press tour is an exhausting thing to do, but when nine out of ten people walk into the room smiling and thanking us for making a movie that is somehow helping to alleviate what they consider to be probably the lamest movie summer of their career to date, it makes the whole experience kind of special.

Jonah Hill, Marisa Tomei and John C. Reilly star in The Duplass Brothers’ comedy Cyrus.
Image credit: Fox Searchlight Pictures

Question: Do you see any similarities between yourselves and other famous brother teams in Hollywood, such as the Coens and the Weitz Brothers?

Mark Duplass: Well, we spent a lot of time worshipping the Coen Brothers and we still spend some time worshipping them. They probably couldn’t be more different as filmmakers than we are. We’ve actually worked with the Weitz brothers a little bit, we developed a TV show with them for a little while, and they were super great guys. It’s very nice to be able to talk to people who understand the benefits and difficulties of working side-by-side with your brother.

Jay and I have always found that for whatever reason, when we try to make movies that were inspired by or referential to other filmmakers, they just turn out derivative and bad. We started making movies based on our own private conversations about the people that we encounter in the world, whether [we’re] on a plane looking at the strange couple next to us and taking delight in the strange way they behave, or just sitting in a bus terminal or a park bench and looking at people. That is where our movies come from.

Question: Did you research single motherhood in order to make Molly a realistic character?

Jay Duplass: We didn’t really research, but like Mark was saying earlier, we’re just hyper-obsessed with the details of how people manage their lives and maintain their happiness or try to get by. But I think one of the weird things we found out recently is that the Molly/Cyrus relationship is actually subconsciously based on Mark’s and my relationship. We’re three years apart, but we’re basically twins.

When you grow up that way, it’s very hard for people to penetrate your relationship, not only friends, but especially girlfriends once we got into our teens and twenties. It was very, very hard for any girl to break through and feel like she had any place because Mark and I are so close. In our late twenties, we were starting to get worried about if we were ever going to get married. We’re family guys, and our parents are still married. We didn’t know if we would ever [settle down] because every girlfriend seemed like half of the relationship that we had with each other. I don’t know where the single mom stuff came from, other than us thinking of what that would be like being in her situation. Her life is tough and she has to keep things moving. When you are a single mom and you’re trying to do something that’s very tough to do, your momentum is such a big part of it.

Question: Were you involved in the film’s marketing campaign that includes T-shirts displaying the line, “Seriously, don’t f—k my mom”?

Mark Duplass: Fox Searchlight is essentially the marketing gurus for independent films, so we really let those guys go with their gut and what they wanted to put out into the world. I think that marketing campaign hints at the levity that’s in this film, while still staying true to the core of what that relationship is.

Jay Duplass: We thought we would get a lot of single moms and guys who are single, maybe dating a woman who has kids saying, “Oh god I’ve been through this,” and we’ve definitely had that. But we’ve had an inordinate amount of kids in their early twenties all the way to their mid-thirties who came up to us and said, “I was Cyrus and I didn’t even realize it until just now.” We’ve had some pretty amazing moments in the movie theater where the audience opens up in a therapeutic state, and [says], “I did that to my mom for seven years, and I just realized what I did.” It’s actually happened so many times that it’s kind of scary. We didn’t imagine [audience feedback] coming from the Cyrus perspective.

Jonah Hill stars in The Duplass Brothers’ comedy Cyrus.
Image credit: Fox Searchlight Pictures

Question: Did you have Jonah and John in mind for their respective roles?

Mark Duplass: We definitely had John in mind. Our goal was to write a love story with an unconventional lead, and the fact that the character’s name is John isn’t a coincidence. From day one, we kept imagining John Reilly doing this stuff, and every time we did, it just got funnier but also more emotionally deep and awkward. We hung out with John and realized just how amazing he is, and how smart and funny and emotionally deep he is. It started getting scary for a while because we were like, ‘How are we going to get a kid who’s 21, or can play 21, that could go head to head with John and truly seem like a worthy opponent?’ We’re not doing “Step Brothers” comedy, as much as we love that stuff. This is really a battle of wits, and we needed a kid that was that sharp, that funny, that dark and Jonah was that person.

Question: Was there a reason why this film was set in LA rather than another region of the country?

Mark Duplass: Jay and I have been living in LA for the last few years. When we started thinking about this [film], our minds immediately started clicking into where we live. We imagined that Molly got pregnant around 1989 or so, and she decided, “I’m going to have this baby and I’m going to raise this baby by myself.” At the time, Highland Park was like no man’s land. She was probably able to get a cool craftsman house [there] for under $100,000, and have a cheap mortgage, and make the money she needed from doing massage therapy here and there. But she wanted to spend the bulk of her time with her son, raising him, teaching him, home-schooling him, and that felt really, really right for the east side of LA.

Question: How did you go about balancing the palpable danger and neurosis of Cyrus with his more comedic nuances?

Jay Duplass: When we started hanging out with Jonah, it became really clear that he sees the world in the way that we do and that he is also obsessed with human beings and human behavior. When we would talk about people or characters, there was always this underlying love for that person, and enjoyment, not only of the funny things about them but their faults and their difficulties. I think there’s an unspoken understanding between all of us that we don’t judge these characters, and that leaves the foundation for how to build a really complex character like Cyrus.

He is probably the most extreme character we’ve ever created, but at the heart of it, this is a kid who is terrified of losing his mom. It’s really the only significant relationship in his life and when John comes into the picture, no matter how smart he is and no matter how socially evolved he behaves, he’s just not emotionally capable of dealing with it. So for us, that’s the core of it.

Question: Were there any moments where you wanted to reign in your actors or push them further, in terms of the film’s improvisation?

Mark Duplass: Jay and I, we tend to go with the actors’ instincts first, and those normally land within the ballpark. There’s always some nuancing that we want to do, so after the first take we’re usually giving some adjustments. Those are great or small depending on how successful the scene was, but this was not a case of us having to hammer our actors over and over, getting them into the right spot. It’s a case of guiding and nuancing into that spot. The way I’ve seen it usually work is we waffle around a little bit until the lightening strikes, and we get that take that we think is wonderful. At that point, Jay and I really swoop in and exercise control to finish out that take and get all the necessary pieces that we need to make the scene work as a whole.

By MATT FAGERHOLM Staff Writer HollywoodChicago.com [email protected]