Actor. Director. Know-it-all pirate. These are just some of the titles held by Mark Duplass, tonight’s guest and topic of conversation on THE MORTIFIED SESSIONS. One of the founding members of the mumblecore movement, you may recognize Duplass from such films as THE PUFFY CHAIR, CYRUS and JEFF, WHO LIVES AT HOME.
Lisa and I are in the middle of shooting our micro-budget feature titled SMALL, BEAUTIFULLY MOVING PARTS, and we are thinking hard about methodology, tools, and how this approach might simply … change things. Here’s a beauty:
Charles Swanson, our cinematographer … he’s in charge of beauty. The beast? Well, that’s the mountain of a challenge he has in front of him to achieve that beauty with ONE tool, make that two (see camera and Chimera light above) and, er, no crew. Sometimes he just looks at us, like … “really?”
Molly (Marisa Tomei) meets John (John C. Reilly) when she stumbles upon him peeing in the backyard at a party. She’s more amused than shocked, adding that she herself was about to squat in the bushes for a pee, and so their charmingly awkward, middle-aged romance begins. Neither Molly nor John have been in a relationship since their respective divorces; John’s was 7 years ago with ex-wife Jamie (Catherine Keener) and Molly hasn’t seen anyone since her first husband split when she gave birth to their son, Cyrus, who’s now 21 and living at home.