Psycho Killer

nik.mercer — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 10:08:08 -0700

The Duplass Brothers first feature film, The Puffy Chair, was an ingenious re-imagining of the prototypical road movie, and a bittersweet examination of family ties and dwindling romance. Fans of that work might be a bit surprised to learn how much the Duplass duo’s sophomore effort, Baghead, has in common with experimental horror like the Blair Witch Project. It’s the story of four fledgling actors—played by Greta Gerwig, Steve Zissis, Elise Muller, and Ross Partridge—who decamp to a cabin in the woods to write a film script. A lack of creative inspiration isn’t their only problem—they soon discover an ominious creep lurking in the woods outside, wearing a bag on his head. Such a facile set-up might turn to muck in less accomplished hands, but this is the Duplass Brothers we’re talking about, and Baghead swiftly becomes a nuanced reflection on moviemaking itself. We asked Mark and Jay to explain how the project came together—they preferred to be quoted collectively—and then went swimming (and baghead-making) with them in Los Angeles.

How did you chance upon the very ‘meta’ structure of Baghead?

Baghead began as a question that was posed when we were doing a lot of driving around Maine while shooting The Puffy Chair. Someone in the car asked, "what's the scariest thing in the world to you?" and someone else answered, "a dude with a bag on his head staring into your window." People laughed, because it didn't seem that scary, more dorky and funny. And then that night I guess everyone got freaked out thinking about it, and the rest of the trip we were laughing and getting freaked out at the same time about this dumb idea. That combo of laughing and getting scared is what got us fired up about making this movie.

How do you both feel about the “mumblecore” tag and the so-called genre as a whole, following the rather extensive deluge of press a few months back?

Well, all press is great, and we love all the mumblecore peeps and their films, and it's an honor to be associated with them and what is potentially a significant film movement. That being said, it's a little strange to us to be considered one of the founders of a movement that we feel like we don't actually fully belong to. Our movies have plot, play with genre, and there's really no "mumbling." We get that the loose and verite style of our movies definitely fits under the mumblecore umbrella, but we feel like a lot of what we do doesn't fit at all. We’re curious to see if the press and fans will call Baghead a mumblecore movie or not.

Did the actors improvise, or was everything scripted? Did everyone actually get fairly drunk during some of those scenes, or are they all just good at playing drunk? Greta especially.

Greta is a bad ass actor, and amazingly wasn't drunk for that scene. All of our actors improvised dialogue a lot, but the structure of our movies is pretty well carved out ahead of time according to script. We do write dialogue, but we're all about our actors re-voicing it their own way.

Let’s talk about The Blair Witch Project. It wouldn’t be that much of a stretch to summarize Baghead as Blair Witch + mumblecore, although that’s a bit reductive. Were you consciously referencing that film’s aesthetic?

We saw Blair Witch the first weekend it opened, before all the reviews and hype got the best of it, and it rocked our world and scared the bejesus out of us. That being said, we didn't aim to reference that film or any film or anything specifically, but just tried to tell the best story we could and to do it our way. During our filmmaking process we did talk about that movie a few times, but honestly, we just shoot fast, and look at it afterwards
and ask ourselves: does this work, does this feel real?

Baghead opens with the main characters at a film festival, watching a short entitled We Are Naked, which seems to be a C-movie parody of the classic “Peter Gabriel boombox” scene in Say Anything, except in black-and-white, with full frontal male nudity. What’s the stupidest thing you guys have ever observed at an indie film festival?

We saw a festival movie once with a dude fully naked who painted himself red from head to toe—after raping his girlfriend—and then walked his penis up to the camera and apologized to his girlfriend in a classic, soap opera-style "tear-drop" shot with her weeping in the background. He was an artist, and...conflicted. And it was... Wow. We've held our tongue up until now.

You seem to be poking fun at the indie film community’s realization that anyone can make a movie. Baghead’s protagonists think they’ll just head to the woods for a weekend and return with a feature film script. We now have the technological means so that anyone can make a movie if they want to, without taking out a million dollars in loans—but does that mean everyone should be making a movie?

We're definitely making fun of all these jokers who make movies with home video cameras—in particular ourselves, because we're as desperate and naïve as they come. It's true anybody can be making a movie today, and if they want to, they should. It'd be great to hear all those unique voices. Hopefully they just won't have to suffer through the ten years of bad moviemaking that we went through in college and in our twenties. We've unfortunately learned the hard way that making a decent movie is really friggin' hard, even if the technology is cheap.