Jay Duplass

“We are going to start with Slacker. I showed up in Austin, Texas, in 1991 when this movie was in the midnight theater, and it is the first time that I realized that a normal person could make a movie, because I grew up in New Orleans and I just wanted to be a musician because that’s all I knew you could do as an artist. So I saw this movie, and it cost $20,000. And then I was walking around and we went into a coffee shop and a friend of mine was like, “That’s Rick Linklater.” And he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. And although I could not muster $20,000 at the time, it was an imaginable amount of money, and I was like, “Oh, a normal person can make a movie.””

“Now we’re going to go to a Coen brothers movie, No Country for Old Men. It blew my mind in a million ways. But what I want to say really, because I’m kind of just doing, like, a personal thing here, when I saw Raising Arizona in 1987, it’s the first time that I thought to myself, “Oh, people make movies. And I think I know a little bit about these people, even though I can’t see them.” And then I saw… read a newspaper article about them, and it happened to be two brothers. One brother looked like myself a little bit and the other brother looked like my brother Mark a little bit. And I was like, “Oh, maybe this could be possible.” That was really the first step in the journey. So I wanted to be the Coen brothers. I went to film school at the University of Texas at Austin. I tried to make Coen brothers-type films. I failed at doing that. The Coen brothers are really, really good at being the Coen brothers, so don’t try to be them. I failed at that.”

“And then I started making movies about myself and my friends and the desperate stuff that we did, and that was heavily influenced by John Cassavetes. Husbands is one of his lesser-known movies and less celebrated movies. It happens to be my favorite. There’s a very simple operating principle with Husbands, which is: a group of guys, one of them dies, and those guys go nuts. They go on an adventure, and they are looking for something, and you don’t know what they’re looking for. And it’s a weirdly well-built driver of a movie. And they improvised the whole damn thing, and it’s great.”

“We’re just going to go across the pond to Secrets & Lies. I don’t do impressions, but I will do one briefly when she says, “Sweetheart!” “Sweetheart!” That’s what’s been said a lot in this film. And that phrase comes to mind a lot when I’m trying to wrangle my children. “Sweetheart! Sweetheart, what’s wrong, sweetheart?””

“Let us go beyond across the pond to Iran. Close-Up. This is the story of a man in Iran who impersonated a filmmaker called Makhmalbaf, probably the second most notable Iranian filmmaker at the time, got arrested for it, and then the first and most notable filmmaker in Iran heard of this story. His name is Abbas Kiarostami, and he went and made a movie of this guy’s trial and hired this guy to play himself in the reenactment of the impersonation of Makhmalbaf that got him on his way towards jail. It is a movie that works as a fictional narrative. It is a movie that works as a documentary. It is a movie that works as a social service. I am not just saying that because I want to seem cool, that I like foreign films. This movie, there’s no other movie like this movie. It transcends what a movie is. I’m going to end there.”