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.
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Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Mark Duplass is greedy for the little moments
This message comes from Hulu from visionary filmmaker Tyka YTT and author Charles Yu. The Hulu original series Interior Chinatown tells the story of an ordinary waiter swept up in a criminal investigation. All episodes are now streaming on Hulu. 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 Kristinsky 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 Duplace. 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 Duplace plays this guy who is dead set on traveling through time. He's the kind of person who is dismissed and laughed 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 alright 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 Duplace's character and Safety Not Guaranteed. And I think when I watched that movie I needed to be reassured that this baby I was gonna bring into the world would encounter kindness. That is tender heart or his wild imagination would be nurtured not cast off. That vulnerability shows up in all Mark Duplace's 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 producing. 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 Duplace, welcome to Wild Card. 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. I was sharing that. Really I mean it 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 that's what it's all about. It really is a special thank you. I've got a deck of cards in front of me. Each one has a question on it and you're gonna 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. I'm gonna 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 gonna 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 so I don't know why I 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 other country. I'm like I'm just if you say it you can be it. So yeah I'm a jazz singer. I'm a jazz singer. So go 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 and I was like 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. And they were so gracious. They quickly figured out what was going on and they just like started like playing. 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 that is perfect. That is perfect. Alright 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 trips but eight years ago. And it's cold and it's raining and it's hard. And all we're thinking is we got to like get out of the wetness somewhere. But like there's nowhere to 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 like in a moment like this this horrific moment. And all of a sudden it stops raining like quickly. And I opened 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 subtlest wink. And it was so extraordinary that the New Yorker would extend this this small kindness. And I think what 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. Three new cards. Give me number two please. Number two okay yeah one two three you picked two. Okay what was the 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 gonna be good. I really feel it. But at this point I do not identify yet as a filmmaker. I am still a musician who's playing in indie rock bands making 94 to 95 dollars 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 able to be an independent filmmaker giving myself to that. An independent musician be the brother I want to 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 a gift. 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 jest for the first time. 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 was and I closed my eyes. And I said you're gonna make a choice. You're gonna be a filmmaker or you're gonna be a musician. You're gonna 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 gonna 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 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 like when you think about who you are in your core you're like I'm a musician. I have here's what I'll just say is 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 I do you remember the last song that made that that made you have that reaction. Usually it comes from a a particular time in my life that was was connected to one of those songs. But in this case it was it was one of the Taylor Swift songs off of the whatever the black and white album was when she was there's ever more 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 in the gears. I mean Tay Tay she does that to all of us. She gets me. 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 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 busboy at a restaurant I'd saved up about $2,000. I decided I'm gonna record my own record and I'm going to press a thousand CDs and I'm gonna 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 Iran 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 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 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 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 they were a time off and I'll have more my books and I would go hiking and 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'm gonna 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 support for the following message comes from LinkedIn ads as a B2B marketer you know how noisy the digital ad space can be if your message isn't targeted to the right audience it just disappears into the noise by using LinkedIn ads you can reach professionals who are more likely to find your ad relevant target them by job title industry company and more get a $100 credit on 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okay before we get to round two I'm gonna 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 wrote it during the pandemic I was actually hanging inside a little bit I was getting you know I was still scared you know so thought I might just get it by being outside but what I was doing is my daughters were eight and twelve at the time and you know we're 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 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 eight 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 gonna want to watch this except my kids were riveted by it and like my even my eight year old she not only loved the the adventure stuff but she was like dad I don't know if Matt's gonna 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 my parents loved it and I was like how did this become the show that my family wants to watch together and and I something sort of started to click with me that like I think we were all feeling overwhelmed by life in general but I think also where we've come in our 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 what I was like could I make a show like this 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 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 a really hard time being able to enjoy like John Krasinski and Zach Braff because I was like they're taking up my spot it made me mad you know they're only certain why guys who are taking up my spots and and 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 you know I talk a lot about my own journeys with mental health on 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 they're an 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 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 overwhelm what I do is I do something I call the scan I look up the ceiling 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 the marriage kids work life my jealousy my envy my this and usually if there's like one or two things wrong that 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 because fix let's say let's address address address acknowledge right fixing okay three new cards one two three number one again number one oh are you good at knowing when something should end hmm 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 clean or anything because Jay was older smarter and he could always did that for me so I have these weird gaps because I was in such close lockstep with someone for so long yeah one of those things is the finishing of art I am not good at it what do you mean get specific okay um you and you and I are hanging out and we're like let's make a movie together we come up with a concept there's no but 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 gonna shoot it in this house we're gonna make it $50,000 there's no way to lose money I take that concept I go and write a pretty good be be to be minus first draft very quickly so I and I I have this power I can just galvanize things and get them to the 85% completion mark extremely well and then like a relay race you 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 you know 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 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 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 questions about ending things yeah yeah yeah yeah things end things end I my feeling about that is when you have these long-term relationships like I have with my brother my wife my children the the ending like all great M. Night Shyamalan movies as something 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 a hard this message comes from IBM your business deploys AI pilots everywhere but are they going anywhere or are they stuck in silos exhausting resources unable to scale maybe you don't need hundreds of AI pilots you need a holistic strategy IBM has 65,000 consultants with a gen AI experience who can help you design integrate and optimize AI solutions so you're not just deploying AI you're scaling it across your business learn more at IBM dot com slash consulting IBM let's create this message comes from ADP ADP knows any new technology any old competitor any trendy thing even a trendy thing that everyone knows isn't a great idea but management just wants us to give it a try for a bit can change the world of work so whether it's a last-minute policy change or adding a new company holiday ADP designs forward thinking solutions to help businesses take on the next anything ADP always designing for people support for this podcast and the following message comes from autograph collection hotels with over 300 independent hotels around the world each exactly like nothing else autograph collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands find the unforgettable at autograph collection dot com last round one two three I want number one please do you think there is more to reality than we can see or touch mmm wow well this is gonna be a great segue into our show out there I mean really you really making these so many plugs we're doing we're nailing it we're nailed it um cards take us for the card stake us my friend yes um the short answer is yes for me there is 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 the but my best description for it is this this this the interchange that I have of my children has created this this energy this force this 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 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 and and they they just feel so real and present to me I don't know if that's exactly what you were asking but but it's this no I get it I like that 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 the energy that that is manifested between two people the relationship itself yes becomes a third component yes or the 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 that's that that's 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 miss with a Ouija board still don't mess with things so like you know what just in case just don't invite it I know 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 room 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 hmm 47 past what I assume is the halfway mark of my life extremely close with my parents my father 79 and we talk a lot about things he's 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 and 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 I 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 I got my music outside of myself 30 times you know like I'm 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 they're 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 premier screening for Penelope you know and we came home we're a little tired as 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 pull the 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 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 realized 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 47 so I really want to get as much of this as I can so I'm I'm attached to not dying anytime soon in that regard 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 Medire, Louisiana off Lake Pontchartrain and we're in like the first seven to eight minutes of raising Arizona and I watch Nick Cage yes and I watch the camera race towards the ladder leading up to the room that all the big the kids are in and the camera goes up the ladder and 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 aren't these movies aren't just like hyped 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 between my brother and my 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 and 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 and vidiots 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 shape shifting you know the shape shifting 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 free by signing up for wildcard plus at plus dot npr.org slash wildcard. This episode was produced by Lee Hale and Ramel Wood and edited by Dave Blanchard who was mastered by Robert Rodriguez. Wildcard's executive producer is Beth Donovan. Our theme music is by Ron Dean Arablui. 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. Support for this podcast and the following message come from LinkedIn Sales Solution. Are you struggling to close deals? Cold outreach is wasting the time of both the buyer and seller at every stage. Your organization can overcome these challenges with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. The first deep sales platform. Right now you can try LinkedIn Sales Navigator and get a 60 day free trial at linkedin.com/wild. That's linkedin.com/wild for a 60 day free trial. Let LinkedIn Sales Navigator help you sell like a superstar today. This message comes from Instagram. Recently Instagram introduced teen accounts with built-in protections. 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