It's in the Bag: Baghead's Jay & Mark Duplass

Baghead, which opens in limited release today, is just the right amount of twisted. The latest film, written and directed by The Duplass Brothers (The Puffy Chair), is a romantic comedy that kind of gets hijacked by a horror movie.

Baghead is about a group of struggling actors (played by Greta Gerwig, Elise Mueller, Ross Partridge, and Steve Zissis) who, after attending the Los Angeles Underground Film Festival, are “inspired” to go to the woods for the weekend to make a film that would turn them all into stars. The usual problems—romantic entanglements, unrequited love, jealousy—take a backseat when a maniac “Baghead” starts terrorizing them.

When audiences see this movie, “people are alternately either laughing or screaming,” Mark says. “Or sometimes they yelp and then they laugh at themselves, because ‘It’s just a bag. Why am I screaming?’”

“That has been our favorite part of watching this movie,” Jay adds, “that laughter-screaming combo thing. Trying to figure what the hell people are reacting to and watching them go through it is like really a joy.”

Jay and Mark Duplass didn’t set out to make a “let’s-make-a-movie” movie.

“It just happened to be what we knew about,” Mark says. “The last couple years of our life we spent a lot of time on the festival circuit, so we were around these people.”

Being authorities on the subjects of their movies is essential.

“[Baghead is] about people who are desperately trying to achieve their goals,” Mark says. “That’s kind of us. We actually tried to shy away from the film within a film element in the editing process, and really just focused on the characters.

“We’re making fun of ourselves as much as anybody else in this movie. We like to have [actors] who comfortable enough in their skin to poke a little fun.”

Although they have had offers, the brothers have stayed away from the studio systems … at least thus far.

“This is a process of discovery,” Jay says. “And it’s not a process of machination.

“We go out to an environment with our friends and our collaborators, and we are discovering what this film is going to be. And we want to protect that process.

“In particular with this film, it’s about desperate, unknown actors. And one of the key ingredients that a studio was going to want was to put famous people in the movie. And it wouldn’t have made sense. The second side of it was that the studios inherently wanted to move it more toward a horror film because it would be much more marketable, and we totally get that. But at the same time we were more interested in making a relationship movie that was funny, that also was scary; in trying to get that tone right; and [in making] something that was unpredictable.”

The brothers’ filmmaking process is very much collaborative from the get-go.

“Pretty much what we do is we structure the movie out together, and we come up with the spine of the film, so it really has a solid arc,” explains Mark. “We believe if you’re going to make a shaggy, loose, improvised movie, you’d better have a smoking plot to get yourselves towards the climax; a combination of the slow and the fast.

“Then I take one of these Dictaphones and I speak out the whole script … really quickly… so you get natural dialogue,” he continues, “but it’s usually a mess. And we transcribe that and then Jay quality controls it, helps fix it up.

“Likewise on the back-end of the process, when the editing is going on, Jay and Jay Deuby, our editor, are plowing through the footage. Then I’ll stay a little bit more objective in that process and do [quality control] there.”

Jay and Mark Duplass live by the “two heads are better than one” philosophy throughout their work process.

“There will often be an unspoken thing that happens between us,” Mark says, “whether it’s an interview or we’re directing or we’re writing or editing, where it will become really obvious to us within the first half hour of showing up, that one of us is more on than the other one.”

Without even saying anything, the brothers will know who is in charge that day and who will be the trusty sidekick!

The Duplass brothers’ film set is a positive and creative environment.

“We’re not very auteur-oriented people,” Jay says. “We’re not like, ‘this is my vision, and we’re going to shove it down your throat.’

“We’re really just looking to our actors and looking to each other to find something that’s inspiring on-set.”

For more information, go to http://www.sonyclassics.com/baghead/