Jay Duplass Talks ‘Manson Family Vacation’, ‘Transparent’, And How Streaming Helps “Really Good Films Find Their Audience”

The Orchard’s offices in New York are a hipster haven. A dingy elevator covered in band stickers takes me to the budding film distributor’s bright orange office that features an ironic AC/DC pinball machine, a folksy Spotify playlist bleeding over roomy cubes, and conference rooms named after tangible media of yesteryear. I am escorted to the “VHS” room (across from “8 Track”) where I wait for Jay Duplass, co-executive producer and star of The Orchard’s new brotherly road-trip dramedy Manson Family Vacation, streaming exclusively on Netflix October 27.

The older half of the dynamic DIY Duplasses, you may recognize Jay from Amazon’s Emmy-winning series Transparent or from the credits of HBO’s Togetherness, which he co-writes and directs with his brother Mark. The Duplass Brothers are known for their prolific madness and their unrelenting mission to get low-budget, intriguing films seen by diverse audiences. Since 2005, the duo has been steadily chipping away at Hollywood’s exclusive, systematic traditionalism and slowly but very surely reviving indie’s middle class with small but buzzworthy flicks like The One I Love, The Overnight, Tangerine, and now the South by Southwest favorite Manson Family Vacation.

Directed by J. Davis, the film chronicles the reuniting of two polar-opposite brothers: Nick (Duplass), the neurotic family man, and Conrad (Linas Phillips), the adopted outcast and cult-obsessed drifter. Still reeling from their father’s death, the two set out to explore the Manson murder sites peppered across the Los Angeles area, now inhabited by average families who aren’t part of, well, the family. What unravels in this modern world of Manson obsessives, however, makes for an uneasy narrative shift that leaves both brothers, as well as the audience, desperately wondering how this could possibly end.

I sat down with Duplass to discuss what went into telling such a unique story, how he’s been enjoying acting more, and why he and his brother prefer to work with streaming giant, Netflix.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XvmjtuvTpI]

Decider: You’ve known J. Davis for a while now, right? Who came to who with the idea for this film?

Jay Duplass: He edited a movie for me and we’ve been friends for a long time, and he was feeling more and more like he wanted to make a film. He had a few ideas he was talking about, and then he started talking about this Charles Manson exploration. He and I have a weird amount of things in common [laughs]. But then this one thing — his sort of fascination with the Manson Family and the Manson murders was NOT something we had in common. I was like disturbed by it, you know? I didn’t really get it. But the thing is, J. sort of embodies both the characters. He is the family guy who’s on the rails with his life and has a job, but his alter ego is this drifter person who would maybe try to find his own family. When he said that, I was like, “This feels like it has a ton of potential energy.” We were having drinks a couple of weeks later and he was like, “I’m going to make this movie, and I want you to play the guy who’s disturbed by all this Manson stuff.” I was like, “I can do that!”

It was very natural to me because that was our dynamic anyway, so it was a fun way to explore it. More than anything, I think people are always asking my brother and me, “What is it about you that makes you want to produce other people?” And it’s much more than an idea. Clearly J. Davis was working some stuff out with this movie. The fact that he grew up without a dad, was kind of weirdly obsessed with Manson, and the fact he is an only child — there’s just a lot of stuff. There’s so much potential energy there, and I felt like it was an exciting opportunity to act. I had not acted at that point, so it was just a new thing in general.

So Manson Family Vacation was shot before Transparent?

Yeah, this was shot before Transparent, but maybe after the pilot. But we decided to do it before Transparent even came out and was a part of my life.

Have you been enjoying acting more?

I have to say that first off, I realize that I am very spoiled. I got to make a movie with my friend about exploring deep things about his life, so that was a long and creative process. And then Transparent is pretty much the dream acting project of anybody. I’m on an amazing show with amazing human beings, and I’m allowed and encouraged to improvise and make the character my own play of complex and wildly insecure, but also wildly charismatic. It’s [shot] on the east side of L.A. where I live; I have young kids, so it provides stability. I mean, it’s nuts. And it got Emmy nominated and we won a Golden Globe. So you know, the bar is high for me as an actor now since my first job is really my dream project. I feel really, really lucky, but also very picky. I’ve been getting offered a lot of stuff , but I’m just generally really busy with everything my brother and I are doing. Also, it’s hard to match what’s happening with Transparent.

How important was it for everyone involved in the film to find that balance between Manson the misunderstood and empathetic patriarch and Manson the monstrous cult leader? Because I really feel like the film achieved that balance.

Tone was just something we were working on all day every day. Not, like, safeguarding the tone, but we were very aware we were making a relationship movie, a drama, a comedy, a road movie, a thriller, and a mystery — just a crazy amount of stuff we were synthesizing in this one movie. It was a little tricky, but ultimately what set us free and allowed us to just make art was when Linas, J., and I realized the whole thing was being embodied between the two brothers.

We started getting really specific about how siblings talk to each other. You know, siblings know so much about each other that they don’t talk to each other directly. They do weird things. They speak in roundabout ways. They come in the back door, they’re passive aggressive, and there are triple meanings on top of things [they say]. Once we started improvising that stuff — Linas and I both have brothers and we love our brothers, but it’s very complex — we started bringing a lot of that stuff in and it was really interesting to us. Then we noticed the crew members also being like, “What the fuck is going on?!” — in a good way. That’s when we really felt like we were starting to bring the complexity, because it seems like it’s really a mystery at first. The mystery of how all this Manson stuff happened and the mystery of “What is the modern-day world of Manson?” and “Oh shit, that’s still a thing?” We started to move that into our characters and exploring those same themes within two brothers.

So that was the rehearsal process then? That improvisation?

We didn’t rehearse at all. We just went in with the script on Day One and were like, “OK, so what are these two characters trying to achieve in this scene?” And we would completely improvise how to achieve that in the best way possible. During that process we would discover things, and the next day we would show up and we would rewrite or rehash what more could we do so that the scenes would have many layers to them.

I know you played the straight and narrow, kind of neurotic brother in this film, but do you find you identify with both characters?

Yeah, I totally identify with both sides. I mean, you definitely settle into the one thing you’re trying to do and accomplish, but I think we played a lot with the swinging polarity of these two brothers. You know, when [Conrad] first shows up, he’s basically a drifter and he looks like crap and everything he owns is in his backpack and he’s a dark dude. Then later in the movie, I think my character is darker in some way because [Conrad] has this optimism and this hope and my character is weirdly in a darker place.

Manson Family Vacation is the one of many Netflix exclusive Duplass Brothers releases, but you’ve been working with them since they were The Red Envelope?

Yeah, The Puffy Chair was one of their first original releases, and we were dealing directly with Ted Sarandos back then and have maintained that friendship. I think we all have very similar sort of rule-breaking, tradition-breaking, DIY methodology. “Like, why is it done that way? Because that way seems cumbersome and annoying. Can’t we just do it this way?” And most people say no. But we’ve noticed that when we’re dealing with Netflix, they’re like, “We’ve thought the same thing for five years, let’s do that.”

At this point do you wait for your films to be released on a streaming service or VOD platform and then take off? Or do you still kind of enjoy the theatrical chase?

It all just depends on the movie. We’re wildly flexible about that stuff. Whatever serves the movie the best and whatever is ultimately going to get it out to the most amount of people and find its audience. For instance, Manson Family Vacation did not have a theatrical release. Tonally, it’s a very complicated movie and doesn’t really have any famous people in it — or not enough famous people in it to warrant a theatrical release. And what we’ve learned in the past is that if you push a theatrical [release] that doesn’t warrant it, you’re going to lose a lot of money in and it’s going to give you less legs on VOD and all the other platforms it has to go to. So we try and put all our resources in that.

The other thing is, we’re relentless about making the best movies we can possibly make, and we have a strange confidence that when you make a really good film it will find its audience and it will be appreciated over time. I mean, Jeff, Who Lives at Home, which didn’t have an explosive theatrical situation — I still get tweeted at like five times a day by people saying things like, “I just saw Jeff, Who Lives at Home. What the fuck? Why didn’t I hear about this movie before now? It’s my favorite movie.” It found its life in DVD, so I’m kind of OK with it. A lot of people think great movies get lost. Yeah, sometimes great movies don’t have an explosive theatrical [release], but they don’t get lost. Like, if Office Space had had a bigger theatrical, maybe it wouldn’t have had that same word-of-mouth. And also Idiocracy. Idiocracy had no theatrical and everybody was up in arms like, “This movie didn’t come out in a movie theater, but you have to see it, it’s insane!” It was like this frenzy about how this incredible movie snuck past theatrical and people were yelling at people, forcing them to watch it. It had it’s own sort of magical experience in that way. So I try not to get too hung up in what it has to be.

Manson Family Vacation is available exclusively on Netflix streaming October 27. You can catch Jay Duplass in the credits of just about everything you watch on the small screen.

 

Like what you see? Follow Decider on Facebook and Twitter to join the conversation, and sign up for our email newsletters to be the first to know about streaming movies and TV news!