'Humpday' director Lynn Shelton

There's a new film sweeping the festivals. It's called Humpday, and it's about two straight guys who have sex. On tape. In order to make a film. According to them, it's not porn; it's art. Andrew (Joshua Leonard) is this bohemian vagabond-type drifter who one day shows up on the doorstep of his old friend Ben (Mark Duplass), who now has a wife named Anna (Alycia Delmore) and has left his wild college days behind him. Before long, Andrew and Ben are spending time together again and Andrew has convinced Ben to... well, I already told you. I had the opportunity to speak with the director, Lynn Shelton; enjoy the conversation.

Do you live in New York?
No, I live in Seattle.

Oh! I know that Alycia Delmore is a Seattle actress.
Yes, exactly.

And that you’ve worked with her before. And you also wanted to work with Mark because you’d worked on the same movie before.
Right. Well, I was really an observer. Mark was the star of it and I was a still-set photographer, so I got to watch him firsthand. But, yeah, we knew we wanted to collaborate—maybe in a way other than me directing him, but we wanted to work together and we had really hit it off. The difference between him and Alycia is that Alycia was brought in later, because it originated with “I’m going to build this movie for and around Mark.”

Since he’s a writer-director also, when you were discussing collaborating did you ever discuss working together as writers?
Well, the first thing—I was quite flattered, because he called me and asked me if I would direct a script he had written that was to star his wife. And that ended up falling through, just for other reasons, but… no, for this particular project, it was always going to be me directing him. And I knew that because of my involvement with the actors—my first film was done in a very traditional way; I had the actors and the script and a picture of the character in my head that I then tried to film, and I found that it was just very difficult on the actors, and I wanted to try something different. So for my second film I started by finding the people I wanted to work with, and it’s a very collaborative thing, in order to get to that naturalism. It was interesting comparing the process of My Effortless Brilliance, my second feature, and this my third feature. In Brilliance I would talk to the actors about their characters, but then I would really go off by myself and write exactly what was going to happen, whereas it all sort of melded together a little more in Humpday. Josh and Mark would chat about their characters, and as we got to know the characters they had some ideas about how they might interact in each scene. And ultimately I had final say and I was the one who was the scribe and figuring it all out, but there were a lot of wonderful times with the three of us when the ideas were just coming fast and furious in this very egoless environment, where the best idea would emerge and we couldn’t even remember whose it was. So it was interesting, and I’m imagining that every project I do will sort of take on a different quality in that way. However the collaboration best works, you know?

It seems like the screenwriting process for you is becoming more collaborative with each film.
Yeah! Yeah, which is great. It feels—I mean, I’m a real control freak.

[laughs]
So it has not come easily or naturally. But I am rewarded every time I open the process up more; I am rewarded with a higher level of naturalism in the acting and writing, and also as the sense of ownership increases with the people I collaborate, as I invite them to be involved more, the quality just goes up. They’re so engaged, and they bring their game in such a way that, I don’t know, it has a different sort of quality from someone who’s just like being a little more dictatorial. I can exert my control in two very important arenas: the first is to make sure that I’m choosing exactly the right people to collaborate with, really. I’m giving so much trust that if I give trust to the wrong person I’m really dead. [laughs] So I really have to be really careful about who I invite, both about crew and cast. But the other place is the edit room, and I can’t tell you how many times I’m on-set… we talk before we shoot, and then we let the cameras go and they’re talking-talking-talking for twenty to thirty minutes, and there’s stuff in there that’s brilliant and there’s stuff in there that’s awful. Or just mediocre. And I won’t stop them. I just let them go, because generally there’s still going to be stuff in there that’s usable. And then maybe I’ll make an adjustment and we’ll do it again. But rarely will I stop them midway or tell them to do something different. I’ll let them give over, so that they feel really emotionally safe and protected and so that they can just fully risk. And they trust, as a director and specifically as an editor, I’m going to carve out all the shit that doesn’t work. It’s nice, because I can be fully collaborative on set and then later I can just go chop-chop-chop-chop! [laughs] And get exactly what I want.

It’s kind of like you’re treating the editing process as your biggest stage of revision.
Absolutely! Well, it’s the writing stage, it really is. It’s the final draft of the script—

You do it backwards!
I do it backwards. I really do. I call it the upside-down model of filmmaking, because I really write it in the editor’s room. It’s really much more akin to editing a documentary than editing a traditional narrative film, and if you have a fly-on-the-wall documentary then there’s some event or something and you’re capturing lots and lots of footage and then you really have to find the story and make it tight in the edit room, and that’s exactly what we’re doing. As much as I have to credit the actors for giving us gold, for giving us all this wonderful material, I have to give just as much credit to Nat Sanders, my editor. That part of the process is just absolutely essential to this particular… and my eyes of an editor—because, again, on set I become more of an editor than anything else, making sure I get all the ingredients I’ll need later.

You’ve said that you originally envisioned Mark as playing Andrew, the more freewheeling character.
Yeah! It’s true. And I also had a different vision as to how the thing would unfold. I thought that maybe this adventurous, bohemian, charismatic roamer would have this MO that he has to try everything once. And he would go to Hump, and he would see the gay porn, and he would be like, “Oh my god! I haven’t ever been with a guy! This is terrible!”

[laughs]
And so for his checklist of things that he—“I have to try every drug once” or whatever—he would be like, “We have to do this!”

Kind of like one of those novelty books about things to do before you get old!
Like the bucket list? His own little weird list, yeah! That was my original idea, and I could see it, and his friend was going to be this conservative… kind of a subordinate. The bohemian would have a svengali-like hold over his little buddy, who would be more scared and more domesticated, maybe, and who would live vicariously through his adventuring buddy. You know, like, “Oh, yeah, oh, sure! I’ll be like you! I’ll…” You know. And then there would be a shift at this point, and—I had this whole idea. But the minute Mark said “I have to play the domesticated guy,” I just knew they would have to be even, because Mark is just so dominant, you know? He’s a very type-A dominating sort of guy. So I immediately also said to him, “If you’re not going to play Andrew, I need help casting who should be your match.” And I love that he suggested Josh, because Joshua and he really match each other well, and as soon as one gets a little ahead of the other guy then the other one parries.

And this was a while ago but Josh did something similar when he did The Blair Witch Project, so there’s that.
Right. Right, exactly, and Mark has worked that way both as a filmmaker and as an actor. He and his brother Jay, whom he works with, start with a screenplay, but they can choose to throw it out—and they tend to throw it out. So it’s slightly different, and Blair Witch was different still: they kept a lot of things hidden from the actors, and I tend to like things to be a little more transparent.

Well, that was also a suspense film. It seems like with your model, if you were doing a more horror-type film, you’d probably do a similar type of thing to get honest reactions.
True enough. True enough, yeah.

Humpday hits select theatres July 10th.