Wild Card with Rachel Martin - Mark Duplass is greedy for the little moments

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

Mark Duplass is known for his roles in The Morning Show and The League, as well as for writing, directing and producing indie hits with his brother Jay, including The Puffy Chair and Jeff, Who Lives at Home. Lately, the brothers have taken separate creative paths, and Mark is learning how to fly solo. Mark talks to Rachel about that process and about crying to Taylor Swift.To listen sponsor-free, access bonus episodes and support the show, sign up for Wild Card+ at plus.npr.org/wildcard See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

How do you manage envy? Oh, my gosh. I had a lot of it early on. Like, I had a really hard time being able to enjoy, like, John Krasinski and Zach Braff because I was like, they're taking up my spot. I'm Rachel Martin, and this is Wild Card, the show where cards control the conversation. Each week, my guest chooses questions at random from a deck of cards. Pick a card one through three.

Questions about the memories, insights. and beliefs that have shaped them. My guest this week is filmmaker Mark Duplas. I have made more art and reached more people than I possibly could have anticipated. In the summer of 2012, I was overdue with my first child, and so I went to the movies to get my mind off the fact that, you know, everything was about to totally change. The movie was called Safety Not Guaranteed, and Mark Duplas plays this guy who is dead set on traveling through time.

He's the kind of person who is dismissed and laughing. at and he is so vulnerable, like his heart's just walking around in the world exposed, and at any second it could be crushed into a million pieces, but it's not. The script treats him with so much dignity, and he's all right in the end. The credits rolled when the movie finished. People filed out, and I sat there and sobbed. Really sobbed. Having a baby is a bizarre thing.

Maybe you've heard people say this. It's like your heart is walking around outside your body. It's so vulnerable, just like Mark Duplas' character and safety not guaranteed. And I think when I watched that movie, I needed to be reassured that this baby I was going to bring into the world would encounter kindness. That his tender heart or his wild imagination would be nurtured, not cast off. That vulnerability shows up in all Mark Duplas' creative projects. He and his brother Jay have produced dozens of shows and movies together. Mark goes back and forth between acting and writing and produced.

He's gotten two Emmy nominations for his role as Chip Black on The Morning Show. He's got two new projects out right now. One is a docu series that he and his brother executive produced called Out There, Crimes of the Paranormal. It's on Hulu. The other is a show he produced and co-wrote called Penelope. It's about a teenage girl who runs away from home to try and survive in the woods by herself. Mark Duplas. Welcome to Wildcard.

Hi, that was so wonderful. Thank you. Oh, thank you for sitting through all of it. Oh, it was so, I love that story. It's very meaningful. Seriously. Thank you for sharing that. Really? I mean, I've seen a lot of movies in my time. And that one, in that moment, it meant a lot. So, thanks. I've had some of my peak life experiences in the movie theater. And to think that I was a part of one of yours at that vulnerable time in your life is what it's all about. It really is special. Thank you. I've got a deck of cards in front of me. Each one has a question on it.

and you're going to choose which ones I ask, okay? Great. I will hold up three cards at a time, and you will pick one at random to answer. You've got two tools at your disposal. You get one skip. If you use your skip, I will swap in another question from the deck. And the second one, you get one flip. You can ask me to answer one of the questions before you do.

Okay, cool. So that's what you got. I'm ready. Round one. Here we go. First three cards. Pick one, two, or three. I'll take the first one.

One. What's an ordinary place that feels extraordinary to you because of what happened there? Hmm. I'm going to flip it to you first because I want to hear it. Flip out of the gate. Yeah, I'm going out of the gate. Flip out of the gate. Yep.

Okay, well, I'm going to say, okay, this is random. All right, I'm ready. This is really random, but it's the first thing that came into my head. That's what you want. right? Oh my God. I faked my way onto a jazz stage in Japan. I did. I wasn't expecting this. I don't know why it came into my head. I convinced a friend. I was teaching English there after college. And this woman I knew, this French lady, she was super into jazz. She was like, I'm going to a jazz club. Do you want to come? I was like, I do want to come. And also, I think I might be a jazz singer.

Like I was, I like singing and I was sort of an aspiring kind of singer person. And she's like, really? Because you know you can reinvent yourself when you move to the middle country. I'm like, I'm just, if you say it, you can be it. So I'm like, yeah, I'm a jazz singer. I'm a jazz singer. So we go to this club and they invite me, you know, the American jazz singer to come on stage. Like, they're legit.

They're like a jazz trio. They know what they're doing. And I come on stage and the guy opens his jazz standards book to me and starts pointing at songs. And he's like, do you know this one? You know this one? And I was like, no, I don't know that one. And I don't know that one either. And so it was so awkward.

And then finally I turned around and I was like, do you guys know proud Mary? It is one of the great jazz standards of all time. The great jazz standards of all time. And they were so gracious. They quickly figured out what was going on. And they just like started like playing notes. Amazing. And I like saying proud Mary in front of a bunch of random strangers in a Japanese bar.

And why is that relevant? Because it was extraordinary. Like the grace those people showed me in that moment was really, it was so generous. And I've thought a lot about that over the years. I mean, who was I? I was like trying to project some vision that I had of myself. And it could have been met with like ridicule, you know? And I just, I feel so grateful that people were gentle with that.

That is perfect. That is perfect. All right. So for me, this was the first thing that came into my head. We're around the corner of, I think, 43rd or 44th Street in like 7th Avenue in Manhattan. I'm there with my wife and my children. We're trying to have a nice family bonding trip, but eight years ago. And it's cold and it's raining and it's hard.

And all we're thinking is we've got to like get out of the wetness somewhere, but there's nowhere to go. Like maybe we'll try and find a movie theater or somewhere. And I've got my then four-year-old on my shoulders. And she's just getting soaked. And then I literally close my eyes and I just think, where is there a way to find joy in a moment like this, this horrific moment?

And all of a sudden it stops raining, like quickly. And I open my eyes and I'm like, did we just have some sort of divine intervention? And I look up and there's an umbrella over my head. And I look to my left and there is the most grumpy looking later middle-aged white New York businessman who has no care for anyone in the world other than his own agenda. And he is becoming drenched because he has taken the umbrella from his head and put it over me and my daughter. And he just turns and looks at me and gives me the subtle. wink.

Oh, my God. That's so good. And it was so extraordinary that the New Yorker would extend this small kindness. And I think why I thought of that is when you were talking about the dignity and kindness with which we try to approach our characters and the things that we make. It is, it's so special to me. Cards. Give me number two, please. Number two. Okay. Yeah, one, two, three, you pick two. Okay. Okay. What was a moment in your life when you could have chosen a different path? Okay. I am 27 years old. I am on a bus from Bangor, Maine to New York City by myself. I have just finished shooting the Puffy Chair, our first feature film. And I know it's going to be good. I really feel it. But at this point, I do not identify yet as a filmmaker. I am. am still a musician who's playing in indie rock bands making $94 to $95 a night to split amongst three people. I'm headed to New York because I'm supposed to go on a seven-week tour to Europe with my band,

Volcano, I'm still excited. And I'm thinking to myself, this is not sustainable. I'm not going to be an independent filmmaker giving myself to that, an independent musician, be the brother I want be to my brother, the son to my parents, the incoming husband I'm about to be to my girlfriend, now wife, Katie. And something's got to give. And I had stayed at my sister-in-law's house who has this nice selection of books. And I was like, oh, maybe I'll read Infinite Jess for the first time. Maybe I read this. And for some reason, I pick out the bridges of Madison County. This is my choice. And I'm a little tired. I'm a little sick. I just wrapped this movie. and I pull out Bridges of Madison County

and I sob through the entire book and there's this quote that says this type of certainty comes but once in a lifetime and it really like hit me and resonated with me and I closed my eyes and I said you're going to make a choice

you're going to be a filmmaker or you're going to be a musician you're going to make a choice right here and on that bus I decided even though music is my number one passion and it's what I identify with most I actually don't think I am good enough to be the artist I want to be as a musician, and I think this is going to destroy me.

I need to give this thing up and go to this other place where I'm better suited to have a happy lifestyle and find a way to be my true creative self in a form, which isn't what I initially identified. And it weirdly felt inauthentic in some way. Inauthentic. Yes, inauthentic because, you know, musicians are my passion. It's what I am. But it was the best choice I ever made, and I truly believe I am alive and on my feet because of it. Do you still? Do you still identify it?

Like, when you think about who you are in your core, you're like, I'm a musician. Here's what I'll just say. It's like every 12 to 18 months, some song will come on, and I'll just start uncontrollably sobbing. And it's a grieving process for the person that I thought I was going to be. And it's totally okay, because I have a wonderful life, and I love what I do. But it's a loss. Just out of curiosity, what was the last? Do you remember the last song that made you have that reaction?

Usually it comes from a particular time in my life that was connected to one of those songs. But in this case, it was one of the Taylor Swift songs off of the, God, whatever the black and white album was. There's Evermore in folklore. It was off the folklore album. And it was about the beautiful and terrific heartbreak of first love. And my daughter's 16. And she's, you know, has a serious boyfriend. And they're going through it.

And I was just thinking about her listening to Taylor Swift while doing my elliptical machine workout and dropping tears in the gears. I mean, Tatee, she does that to all of us. She gets me. She gets me, too. Okay. Number three, please. Number three. Okay, these are three new cards. One, two, three. We're going with three. Oh, well. What period of your life do you often daydream about?

There was a time when I was 20 years old. I took a semester off of college. I was at the University of Texas. And this was 1997. And I decided, because I was very inspired by independent artists, whether they were in the music scene or the film. scene. And I used to work as a bus boy at a restaurant. I'd saved up about $2,000. I decided I'm going to record and I'm going to press a thousand CDs and I'm going to book my own tour and live out of my van. And everybody thought it was crazy. Like, what are you doing? But I just, I really felt compelled to do this. And so I booked a four and a half month tour. You know, a lot of it were just like open mic nights or whatever I could get and a lot of unpaid gigs. But that time, no cell phone, traveling by a Rand McNally map, getting lost a bunch, showing up, not having anywhere to sleep, offering a free CD to anyone who would put me up. And the vulnerability of exposing myself in that way, like following some stranger back to their trailer park to sleep with them.

But it always going well for me, giving myself into the energy and the belief that if I just jump off of this cliff with. a little bit of naivete and earnestness, you know, there was earnest goes to camp and earnest goes to jail. This was earnest goes on tour. This is what it was, you know, and that the world will catch me and it will take care of me. And it did. And I would, in particular, I would go two to three days sometimes without speaking to someone if there were time off. And I'll have more of my books and I would go hiking and I never, I didn't have a phone in order to escape. So I sat with myself in a way that no 20-year-old, I think today, is offered the luxury. I want to call it a luxury to be able to do.

And some of that was the inspiration, honestly, behind making my show Penelope was, you know, I want to put somebody out in the woods, which is very similar to some of the time that I had to just sit and be and just be quiet. Okay, before we get to round two, I'm going to talk about this new project you're working on. It's called Penelope. It's on Netflix. And you were just talking about that chapter of your life when you were this young person, living off the grid and the world took care of you. Yeah.

And that's what's happening to this young girl who's at the center of the show that you have written. The main character, Penelope, has run away from home and she's in the woods basically trying to figure out how to survive. I understand you wrote it in the pandemic, right? Were you hanging out outside a lot at that time? Yeah, I wrote it during the pandemic. I was actually hanging inside a little bit.

I was still scared. I still thought I might just get it by being outside. But what I was doing is my daughters were 8 and 12 at the time. And, you know, we were watching a lot of old movies. And anyone who has a family or lives with a group of people knows how difficult it is to find a piece of content that you can all agree upon to watch. Every Friday night in my life. And it brings you to this lowest common denominator of programming that no one really enjoys, you know. So I happen to be watching this little reality show called Alone.

where they send people off into the Canadian wilderness with 10 items, and you watch them slowly make a shelter for 12 minutes, learn how to build a fire for 8 minutes, sit with themselves, be with themselves, confront things that they've never been able to confront before because of the magnitude of the quiet and the time they spend there. And I was like, well, this is fascinating. It's my perfect show. No one's going to want to watch this,

except my kids were riveted by it. Interesting. And even my 8-year-old, she not only loved the adventure stuff, but she was like, Dad, I don't know if Matt's going to make it. He's got unresolved issues with his mom that he's really working through out there. And I was just like, what has happened? And my parents loved it. And I was like, how did this become the show that my family wants to watch together?

And something sort of started to click with me that, like, I think we're all feeling overwhelmed by life in general. But I think also where we've come in our viewing is a lot like I described like what happened to jazz in the 40s and the 50s where it, got so loud and so crazy with John Coltrane and Bird. It was so beautiful, but there was nowhere else to go, right? And so somebody needed to come in and reset it. And Miles Davis released Kind of Blue in 1959, and it's slow. And he honks his horn like nine times throughout the whole album. And it reset everything. And I was like, oh, like the Norwegian slow TV movement where they just watch people stacking wood. I was like, could I make a show like this? And And Netflix really loved it and fell for it.

And, you know, this is good for the culture and it might be good for business. We might be ahead of the curve here. Maybe people are tired. Maybe they want to watch something soothing and calming at night. I know I do. We're moving to round two. All right. One, two, or three.

I'll take number one, please. How do you manage envy? Oh, my gosh. That's such a good question. So the more, this sounds pretty maybe, maybe. more reductive than it should. But the more successful I get, the less I have to face envy in my career. I had a lot of it early on.

Like, I had a really hard time being able to enjoy, like, John Krasinski and Zach Braff because I was like, they're taking up my spots. It made me mad, you know. They're only certain numbers spots for white guys who are tall in Longwood. spots. And so it's actually not really a big problem for me at this point. But it does rear its head every now and then. And I talk a lot about my own journeys with mental health on social media and whatnot. So I have to go really to the source, which is what's happening inside of me. So it's less about, well, I'm feeling envious about this person because their independent film really knocked it out of the park and mine didn't this year and I'm feeling bad about myself.

So I really just have to go inward. And for me, there's a couple of just really simple solutions, which is, did you get your eight hours of sleep? Did you get at least 20 to 30 minutes of rigorous exercise to get your endorphins going? Have you done your meditation? Are you eating good foods? And as long as I get those basic things in, I stay relatively centered. So it's part of envy is just part of the cornucopia of emotions and mental health stuff you're managing.

Yes. The way I describe my life is like if I wake up feeling something, whether it's jealous, envy, sadness, overwhelmed, what I do is I do something I call the scan. I look up the ceiling and I throw all the elements of my life up on the ceiling, just like you fanned out those cards for me. right and I'm like okay um the marriage kids work life my my jealousy my envy my this but that and usually if there's like one or two things wrong it means there's something wrong with those things and I'll pick those things out and I'll solve them but for me usually what it is is they all look wrong to me and I'm and I realize it's not that overnight everything went wrong it's something going on inside of me that I need to retool so that I can then look at them with a clearer eyes

I think that's helpful for a lot of people to hear. It's like you don't need to fix it all at the same time. You know what I mean? No. You can just fix one thing, address one team. And maybe not even fix is the right word. Uh-huh. Because fix, I don't know.

Let's say address. Address. Adress. A dress. A dress. Yes. Fixing. I don't know.

Okay, three new cards. One, two, three. Number one again. Number one. Oh. Are you good at knowing when, something should end. Wow. Okay. Here is, here's what I'll say to that. My journey as an artist and a creative person for most of my life has been lockstep with my brother. And what that has meant is that

I have only had to learn how to do a certain amount of things well because I had a partner who could do those other things. For instance, I still cannot open a box and put anything together, vacuum cleaner, anything, because Jay was older, smarter, and he always did that for me. So I have these weird gaps because I was in such close lockstep with someone for so long. One of those things is the finishing of art. I am not good at it. What do you mean? Get specific. Okay. Um, you have a You and I are hanging out and we're like, let's make a movie together. And we come up with a concept. There's no, I really feel strong.

There's almost no one better than me who will team build and begin this process better. I will look around and say, this person should be our DP. We're going to shoot it in this house. We're going to make it for $50,000. There's no way to lose money. I take that concept. I go and write a pretty good B to B minus first draft very quickly. So, and I have this power where I can just galvanize things.

and get them to the 85% completion mark extremely well. And then, like a relay race, you're watching me with the baton trying to pass it off, and my legs just start giving out on me. And I need a closer. And Jay has always been my closer, and he is excellent at it. But about five years ago, Jay really requested some creative space from being lockstep, making creativity together. So while we still produce together as a company, you know, I lost my closer and my partner.

So now I'm doing two things. I seek other partners who can fit that for me because I truly believe you don't have to do everything to be a good artist. You just got to do a couple of things really well and fit into the puzzle. But I'm also challenging myself to grow as an artist and see if I can also learn how to close. And I may just discover, eh, it's not what you do well. That's okay. Leave it. But it's not in my natural DNA.

Were you okay with that ending, though? The question's about ending things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Things end. Things end.

My feeling about that is when you have these long-term relationships like I have with my brother, my wife, my children, the ending, like all great M. Night Shyamalan movies has something. thing that rebirths itself in some way. What has emerged from my brothers and my ending of our lockstep creative partnership has been unexpectedly quite incredible, where we're now on the sidelines of each other's artistic pieces, cheering each other on with zero competition, no fighting for breathing space. It's quite beautiful, but it was very hard. Last round. One, two, three.

I want number one, please. Do you think there is more to reality than we can see or touch? Wow. Well, this is going to be a great segue into our show out there. I mean, really, we're making these. We're getting so many plugs. We're doing. We're nailing it.

We're nailing it. The cards, take us for the cards. mistake us, my friend. Yes. The short answer is yes. For me, there's something that happened to me when I had children that changed me forever as a human being. And what I think it is is that, I guess my best description for it is this, this, the interchanged. that I have with my children has created this, this energy, this force, this being, which is my relationship with my children. And it's similar to how it is with my wife and my parents and my brother, the people I'm very close with, but more so with my children. And it lives in the

room with us. So like my house is not just four people. My house is the four of us. And then it's also another being, which is the relationship with my wife, their relationship with my children. And I'm constantly aware of them and of what I want those relationships to be, try not to hang on too hard to them, falling short of what I want them to be, allowing them to shift and change. And they just feel so real and present to me. I don't know if that's exactly what you were asking, but it's this. No, I get it. It's this thing that I'm in deep relation with that has no corporeal or spiritual empirical essence. But it's one of the most important things in my life.

Yeah. My mom used to talk about that in her, she was an artist, and she would make these sculptures, and it would be these representations of her, my dad, and then this other thing. And I was really young, so I didn't really understand what she was talking about, but it's the same thing that you're discussing. It's the energy that is manifested between two people. The relationship itself becomes a third component. Yes.

Worthy of our attention and nurturing. And it is part of our reality. So yeah, it's more than we can touch and feel. It's this other thing. Yeah. Presence. Yeah, and it's big and it's thick. I'm a lapsed Catholic and I don't have any of those beliefs,

anymore. I don't know if I ever really had them. Although I still don't mess with a Ouija board. I still don't mess with things. I'm still like, you know what, just in case. Just don't invite it. I know. What's the point of that? Why would we do that? You know? Why would we do that? So it's not really in that realm for me, but yeah, it's more in the relationship realm. Okay. Mark, last three questions. One, two, or three? I will have number three, please.

Number three. This is heavy. How have your feelings about death changed over time? I'm 47. I'm past what I assume is the halfway mark of my life. I'm extremely close with my parents. My father's 79. And we talk a lot about things.

Some of his friends are starting to pass away and talk about mortality. I used to be deathly afraid of death because of my ambition. I have so much to do, right? I have so many records to make. I have so many movies to make. That part is at peace. As much as I am a driven person, I have made more art and reached more people than I possibly could have anticipated. If I die tomorrow and I look at myself as an artist, I'm like, I got my music outside of myself 30 times.

You know, like, I'm really, really good. I have become more afraid of death since I've had children, not because they need me and I need to be there for them. My kids are cooked. My kids are 12 and 16, and they're there. They're formed, you know. I just want to be there for it. And I don't want to be there for the weddings and the graduations. I don't care about any of that stuff.

I want to be there for, you know, the other night we had a little premiere screening for Penelope, you know, And we came home, we're a little tired, and it was a little late as on a school night. And there was about 15 minutes in the kitchen, you know. The dogs were there to greet us. Some people were a little hungry. We pulled a snack out, tasted a stale cookie, made a joke about it. Somebody farted, and we all ran away from it. And that perfect family life, it's those little moments.

I'm very greedy when I come to that. I want more and more and more and more. I can't have enough of that. And I think because I suffer from something that is, I guess it's called incessant creativity, my brain is often distracted by it. And I realize that I have not been as spiritually present as I might have liked to have been or intellectually or whatever you want to call it. My body's always there with the kids. You know, I never work out of town. I stay here.

But I'm aware of that now, and I'm aware of that at 47. So I really want to get as much of this as I can. So I'm attached to not dying anytime soon in that regard. Yeah. We're at the end of the show. We always end it the same way, which is a trip in our memory time machine. So in this memory time machine, which I just realized, safety not guaranteed. There's a nice little circle there.

In this memory time machine, you get to go back to one memory, one moment in your past that you would not change anything about. It's just a place you would like to linger a little longer. Which moment do you choose? I am 10, brothers 14. Parents are about my age now. We're in the general cinema in the Lakeside Shopping Center in Metairie, Louisiana, off Lake Pontchartrain. And we're in like the first.

first seven to eight minutes of raising Arizona. And I watch... Great movie, Nick Cage. Yes. And I watch the camera race towards the ladder leading up to the room that all the kids are in. And the camera goes up the ladder in an impossible way and through the room. And in my mind, I think for the first time, wait, somebody made this movie. I can see the machinations behind this.

And for the next 20 minutes, I'm almost distracted from watching the movie because my whole universe has exploded. And it means that I might be able to make something like this one day. These movies aren't just like piped in made by a machine or a factory, a human being and their vision. So I'm thinking of all these things I might be able to do. and I'm in the safest spot possible in between my brother and my parents. And I'm thinking that Jay would be a great partner to make all these things with. And maybe one day we'll be in a movie theater and we'd watch one of my movies together with Jay. And it was probably the single most limitless possibility moment of my entire life.

And the addendum to that story is that last year, we have a movie theater in vidiates that I'm just in love with and they do retro screenings and they showed Raising Arizona. And I went with my wife and my parents to see it. And I was holding my dad's hand. And when the end of the movie came around, I didn't say anything to him and he didn't say anything to me. But we felt that time machine you're talking about. We traveled back to that time. We traveled forward to it.

He's looking at me. I was his age when we first saw that together, and we just held hands and just sobbed through the whole end of the movie. And that was also a great moment. Mark Duplas, he's the producer of Out There on Hulu, and he produced and co-wrote Penelope on Netflix. Mark, thank you so much. Thank you.

This was so fun. If you want to hear more from Mark Duplas, we've got a bonus episode where he talks about being pulled between his indie upstart self and his professional producer self. I call it shapeshifting. You know, the shapeshifting I've been able to do in this life has been very beneficial to me in a lot of ways. You know, and it's helped me navigate some of those complex rooms and get me where I need to go. But there's a cost.

You'll also hear Gail Garcia Bernal talk about growing up in the middle of a political revolution. And I'll share what I personally took away from both those conversations. You can listen to that bonus episode and every one of our episodes sponsor for you. by signing up for Wildcard Plus at plus.npr.org slash wildcard. This episode was produced by Lee Hale and Rommel Wood and edited by Dave Lentert. It was mastered by Robert Rodriguez. Wildcard's executive producer is Beth Donovan. Our theme music is by Ron Dean Arablewe.

You can reach out to us at Wildcard at npr.org. We love it when you do. We'll shuffle the deck and be back with more next week. See you then.