Jay Duplass is back in theaters this weekend with “The Baltimorons,” which had its world premiere at SXSW back in March to rave reviews. It’s a return to form of sorts for Duplass: a small-budget indie like the mumblecore movies he made his name on with his brother, Mark. But why the return to independent film after fifteen years?
Duplass spoke about how shifts in the film industry landscape brought him back to his filmmaking roots when he and “Baltimorons” star Michael Strassner visited “The Rich Roll Podcast” for a new episode. “We’ve done it on a less extreme scale because our fourth and fifth movies were Hollywood movies,” explained the director. “They were Fox Searchlight and Paramount movies. They were seven and a half and $10 million, respectively. And at that point in time, we realized, man, we actually enjoy making the little ones better. And they make us just as much money because we own them. So we kind of receded from that Hollywood pathway. That idea is like, you go to Sundance with a couple of films, and then you start working with Searchlight, and then you start working with, you move up to Focus.”
The Duplass Brothers did get a slew of enticing offers to make bigger budget movies over the years, though. “My brother and I definitely got offered some really big crazy stuff that we turned down,” Jay continued. “We were courted by Marvel. We were courted by the “Fockers” franchise. We were offered “The Dictator” to direct. There were a lot of people who were very interested in us. Not only because we did good dramatic comedy, but we were known as like really good guys who could work with challenging people if need be.”
And while Duplass recognized he and Mark had the skills to manage all of the personalities on a big-budget shoot, it came at a cost to the kind of filmmaking he wanted to continue doing. “It’s a very underrated skill, and nobody thinks about it,” he said about the personality management that happens on set. “But you get in Hollywood and you start hearing about it real fast, and you know, and you feel it, like a lot of these big comedies, for instance, are not about making the best movie. You have a franchise, and your job is not, of course they want it to make it as funny and as heartfelt as it can be, but your job is actually moving a movie from A to Z over the course of three years without anybody murdering anybody else. You know what I mean?”
“That was really tough for Mark and me because big studios didn’t really want to make exactly what we wanted to make at a higher budget,” Jay continued. “They wanted to suck us up into their world and use our skills to essentially get their franchises made, you know, without murder. And ultimately, we turned away from that because we just…wanted to make original art, and we had suffered so much and come so far, you know? We were like, let’s, let’s, let’s go back to our little pond that we swim in.”
“The Baltimorons” opens nationwide tomorrow on September 12. It’s in NYC theaters now.
Christopher Marc is lead writer at The Playlist and the primary engine behind our daily news coverage. Chris is based in Canada and tracks everything from Marvel and Star Wars developments to arthouse acquisitions and festival buzz with equal enthusiasm and an instinct for the story readers actually want to read.
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