The Duplass Brothers on Cyrus, Jeff Who Lives at Home, and Why They Don't Read Scripts

You're joking, but then again, the director of the next Spider-Man movie last directed a small film for Fox Searchlight. Do you guys get offered big movies?

JAY DUPLASS: Oh yeah, we got offered $40 or $50 million comedies right after The Puffy Chair.

MARK DUPLASS: They were the bad ones that no one wanted to make. [Laughs]

JAY DUPLASS: They weren't all bad. There were some good ones!

So why didn't you take them?

JAY DUPLASS: Because we weren't the best people to make those movies, and it wasn't necessarily what we thought we did well.

MARK DUPLASS: And honestly? If you make one bad movie, you're done. We weren't confident we could make a good movie out of those movies, so we figured, "Let's be smart, let's be safe, let's be us."

JAY DUPLASS: If we're going to fail, we're going to fail on our own terms with a movie we really believe in.

Do you feel like you would ever direct someone else's script?

JAY DUPLASS: It's highly unlikely.

MARK DUPLASS: Feels like a remote possibility.

I love that you're not even like, "Never say never!"

MARK DUPLASS: I mean, here's the logistical reason why: we don't read scripts. How are we going to direct someone else's movie if we don't read scripts? The reason we don't read scripts is that we're really busy, we make a lot of movies, and we both have daughters. Reading scripts is a giant time commitment, and if you read scripts on a daily or weekly basis, it's going to occupy at least ten hours of your time. For us, that's an enormous time commitment.

JAY DUPLASS: By the time it takes us to read twenty, we can write one.

MARK DUPLASS: Much less find the 500 to 1,000 that it would take to find a script that would be right for us. The second thing is that we constantly trash our scripts on set, or we rewrite in the morning and constantly work on it.

JAY DUPLASS: That would be highly disrespectful to someone else's script.

Mark, you also have a series commitment to FX's The League. How much does that affect your schedule?

MARK DUPLASS: So far, it's good. I was hesitant to go onto this series because our filmmaking career comes first and always will, but they were very generous with the amount of time required of me. Jay makes documentary projects on the side and I have my acting projects, and we've found that it's healthy to have our little solo projects, if you will.

When are you going into production on the new season?

MARK DUPLASS: Monday.

And when did you finish filming Jeff Who Lives at Home?

MARK DUPLASS: Two weeks ago.

So when do you do find time to do post-production for it?

MARK DUPLASS: It's going on right now.

JAY DUPLASS: Our editor is kind of like the unofficial third Duplass brother.

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