The Verge: Mark Duplass & Joshua Leonard

For audiences who've already slept off The Hangover, might we suggest Humpday? The indie comedy has a premise that sounds like it could have fueled a high-concept Adam Sandler movie -- two straight guys let their friendly one-upmanship escalate to the point where they find themselves locked into a dare to have sex with each other on film -- but it's deftly explored without any of the usual gay panic jokes that stud other summer non-romcoms.

Credit the film's two leading men, Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard, for navigating the heavily improvised film over that hump. Duplass is no stranger to no-budget indies -- as a director, he and his brother have helmed mumblecore classics like The Puffy Chair -- and Leonard's acting career was launched by one of the biggest improv sensations ever, The Blair Witch Project. Movieline took both guys out for ice cream to talk about how this little comedy could put them under a big summer spotlight.

Humpday was a pretty big Sundance smash this year, but you guys are no stranger to those. How did the reception around Humpday compare to what you'd been through with your other films?

DUPLASS: To me, it was pretty similar to the way that The Puffy Chair came out for us. It was a very little movie and there weren't a lot of expectations about the film going in, so it was able to be a surprise hit, which is just the best place you can be: [The critics are] either going to give you a good review if they liked it, or if they didn't like it, they won't say anything because you're just a little movie. No one's gonna go out of their way to bash a $20,000 movie.

LEONARD: Well, one guy at the Hollywood Reporter, he did.

He gave you a bad review?

LEONARD: He eviscerated us.

DUPLASS: That's just 'cause I wouldn't have sex with him in the bathroom, though [Leonard laughs]. But for me, Humpday was the first project I've gone in with at Sundance where I was just an actor and didn't direct it or anything.

So were you less nervous going this time?

DUPLASS: Oh, it wasn't even close.

LEONARD: It was so much fun going there, under that context.

DUPLASS: And I think we knew enough to know it was gonna kill. It is the Sundance movie --

like, it's the prototypical Sundance movie. We'd been there enough to see what kinds of movies worked. I think [director Lynn Shelton] was really nervous, the producers were nervous, but the movie was positioned really well to do well.

LEONARD: Also, just to add a few things: When you do a movie this small, any step beyond it getting cut and your friends seeing it and liking it is a win already. So the fact that we were in Sundance was so great, and I've at least learned to table my expectations and appreciate things as they happen. With an independent film, even at this point, we don't know if anyone's gonna see it or whether it's gonna make any money.

Josh, is it more nerve-wracking for you to do a heavily improvised film as opposed to one that's tightly scripted?

LEONARD: No, it's so much more fucking fun. You know, I played the numbers game and made a living as an actor for a decade, but I don't think I'm a great journeyman actor. I think I'm just proficient enough and good enough to win enough roles to pay my bills. The fact is, something like [Humpday] where I get to bring my writer brain and my specificity? This is what I'm actually good at. It's way more in my comfort zone and way more exciting than in traditional movies where I'm really trying to stretch beyond myself. I can be really honest about things that are in and slightly outside of my spectrum of understanding, but I'm not Sean Penn.

So how much improv did you do in Humpday? Were the scenes pretty much planned out beforehand?

DUPLASS: I think we knew pretty well what we were gonna be doing here. Josh has already done an all-improv film with The Blair Witch Project, and I did a similar improv film with my friend Joe Swanberg called Hannah Takes the Stairs. When my brother and I are directing movies, we're improvising, although we do use a script. But I think [Humpday] was pretty well set up in terms of, like, these are our goals in these scenes and we're going to hit these emotional points.

LEONARD: Maybe eighty percent of the time we used some variation on what we had already hypothesized was gonna be the arc of the scene. And then there was the other twenty percent of the time where you get on set and things turn out different.

DUPLASS: You know, I never say this because it always sounds shitty and egotistical, but I do think a big part of that is the kind of actors that Josh and I are. It's less about "I'm just gonna inhabit this character and my only job is to react," and more that we know how to be engines that drive the story. We keep some little part of our brain going as a writer and as a filmmaker saying, like, "OK, I'm being my character, but I also know that I have to get off this phone within forty-five seconds and go here and there, so what are the right ways to transition into that and make it feel smooth?" I don't think movies like this are possible without people who can do that kind of thing, and I think we both do it well. [To Leonard] I've never said that before!

LEONARD: Well, I've never said this before, but I think it's also fun when you're working with a friend because there's a chess game going on when you're improvising, and there's an element of keeping something in your back pocket that you're going to surprise the other actor with. It's as much fun to throw them something and watch them have to react to it as it is to have a great moment that you have planned for yourself; like, you throw a bomb into the mix and let them deal with the explosion.

There are a lot of little curveballs in this film -- just when I thought I had the concept or one of your characters or even a monologue pegged, things would go in a surprising direction. To what extent did you have those things in your back pocket?

LEONARD: I think we each had some of them. You know, as Mark Duplass has been known to say in the past, "If you're gonna make another movie about middle-class white people, you better make sure you go deep." We had the opportunity to explore in a way you don't get to do on big films with a bigger budget--

DUPLASS: I can attest to that.

LEONARD: And also, because it was a bunch of filmmakers working together, there was some acknowledgment in all of our minds about putting ourselves in the shoes of the audience, like, "OK, what's the audience going to be anticipating and expecting at, like, 'Moment 42' of this film, and let's preempt that question a minute before they ask it." That, for me, is what's fun as a viewer.

I noticed that, actually. There were a few times when someone would actually say what I'd just begun thinking or anticipating.

LEONARD: See, [the porn tape bet] is such a dumb idea that I think as actors, you have to acknowledge that it's a dumb idea, otherwise you're asking the audience to suspend their disbelief entirely. We were trying to be really careful that we did not make a farce.

You don't think there are any farcical elements in Humpday?

LEONARD: No. I mean, I think the idea that they come up with is pretty farcical, but if we did our jobs correctly...like, we thought, "Well, what if that [bet] was true? How could that happen?" and charted an emotional trajectory where that actually does make sense. We took a farcical idea and turned it into something very viable and human.

Mark, I know that when Lynn originally approached you for the film, she offered you--

DUPLASS: --a million dollars? [Leonard laughs]

No, she offered you Andrew, the part that Josh would eventually play. Andrew's a good, showy role: the uninhibited partier who essentially taunts his domesticated friend Ben out of his shell. So what made you want to play Ben instead?

DUPLASS: You know, it happened so quickly: I was in an airport on the phone with her, and she said she was thinking of me for the character of Andrew. Part of it was, like, I'm sick of playing the "charming adventurer" guy -- I do it all the time. When you're improvising, I think it's nice if you play a character that's at least somewhat close to home or has shades of you that you can lean on if you're really going deep. For me, [playing] a newly married guy in a nice house was exactly where I was at.

Honestly, I never even thought about this before -- and I'm not just saying this because you're here -- but I thought of Josh immediately for Andrew. The thing I've always said is when you're making a movie, just skip to the best thing and put your ego aside. I felt immediately like Josh could do that role of Andrew better than I could -- I think Andrew's laden with traps. That "adventuring guy" role and how you play it is the biggest acting trap since playing stoned, basically. I didn't feel totally confident that I could do it, and something about the turn in Ben allowed me to be more subtle than I was in my last film.

How different would things have been if you'd switched roles?

LEONARD: It's funny -- for about five minutes after we found out we got into Cannes, we were talking about doing another movie that we would shoot in the south of France where we'd kind of switch roles: I would play the straight guy and he would be the crazy guy. Then I was talking to a mutual friend of ours about the idea, and she was like, "Sounds really great...I'm fairly certain that Mark could do the wild guy role, but I'm not so sure you could play the straight guy."

DUPLASS: Remember how [John C.] Reilly and [Philip Seymour] Hoffman did True West on Broadway and they would flip roles every night? We're takin' Humpday to Broadway! [Both laugh] ♦