It’s dark. It’s late. It’s quiet. You’re in a cabin deep in the woods, ten miles from any major road, trying to sleep in spite of the silence. All you hear is the sound of your own breathing, growing shorter and faster. You have that feeling, that every moment you keep your eyes closed someone draws closer. You to calm down, remind yourself you’re alone. You take a look, and find a silhouette in the window.

It’s a man with a bag on his head.

Whether or not this image is frightening is questionable. Whether or not it’s a good idea for a thriller is up for debate. For filmmakers Mark and Jay Duplass, the question “is a man with a bag on his head scary?’ started as an inside joke, an ongoing survey on a movie set. Some said yes, some said no, some wanted to know what kind of bag they were talking. The string of responses got the Duplass’ thinking, but that’s just half the story.

They were touring the festival circuit with their first feature “The Puffy Chair” in 2005 when they realized they wanted to make another movie. Waiting in lines at parties and sitting through countless screenings they had repeated run-ins with an industrious group of actors: self-promoting, largely unknown, and savvy-impaired. They were a species of their own, with Sundance as their annual mating ground. Mark and Jay felt for them, but they also knew squirming comedic gold when they saw it.

They drew up a story about four struggling actors desperate to jumpstart their careers. Frustrated by the lack of choice roles (and access to the people who cast them) they decide to take a weekend and write a movie starring themselves. The getaway of choice? A cabin in the woods.

MARK:
We didn’t want to make a movie about filmmakers, we didn’t want to make a meta-film. It just happened to be what we knew about, but we actually try to shy away from the film-within-a-film element as much as possible.

The idea caught the eye of the studios, but they opted to stay cheap and small. Four main cast members, a crew of ten, minimal equipment. Star Greta Gerwig, who plays sleepy-eyed flirt Michelle, handled her own wardrobe and makeup.

GRETA:
They gave me a budget for wardrobe, so I went shopping for this girl and I kind of decided who she was. I decided she was the kind of girl who never wore black. Somebody told her once that it made her look old so she only wants pastels. That was all just me making it up.

JAY:
We’re terrified of making bad movies, and this way is one where we know we can make good movies. Control is a big part of it, in the sense that this is a process of discovery. It’s not machine-generated. We go out to an environment with our friends and collaborators and we’re discovering what the film’s gonna be. We want to protect that process. With this film, it’s about desperate, unknown actors and one of the key ingredients that a studio would want is famous people in the movie. It wouldn’t have made sense. Secondly, the studios wanted to move it more towards a horror film because it would be more marketable. We get that, but at the same time, we were more interested in making a relationship movie that was funny and also scary.

MARK:
Jay and I will sit in the middle of the theater and just kind of watch people. We’ll see someone start to cringe and be like, “she’s going! She’s grabbing his hand!”

JAY:
We only watched ["Baghead"] play at South-by-Southwest because we didn’t get to go to all the festivals because we shot another movie in April. It was pretty wild watching the responses. Out of the three main screenings at Sundance, there were three completely different reactions. In one people were laughing and laughing most of the way through it, and then there was one really late night screening in a small theatre and it was terrifying. People were screaming, someone ran out of theatre. People are alternately laughing and screaming, then they yelp and laugh at themselves because they realize it’s just a bag. Why am I screaming?

A movie about a stranger with a bag on his head is flimsy. But take that image and throw it at a cluster of extremely vulnerable targets, it practically writes itself. And at times it seems that way.

MARK:
We structure the movie together, come up with the spine of the film so it has a solid arc. We believe that if you’re gonna make a shaggy improvised movie, it better have a smokin’ plot. I take a dictophone and speak out the whole script. We get natural dialog but it’s a mess. We transcribe and Jay QC’s it, helps fix it up.

GRETA:
The structure in the script is what you see in the film, but how we got from point A to B was up to us. Their greatest talent as directors is having a rigid structure that works as a film, and then they find these moments of life in the middle of it. The relationship between Chad and Michelle was less developed in the script than it ended up in the final product. It just became clear that those two characters had a lot of interesting things between them. [The ending] was not in the script. It came naturally, directly from the process.

The Duplass’ prefer to light and block whole scenes and let the actors play them out entirely with cameras trailing for up to ten minutes a take. The result is something like “Curb Your Enthusiasm” meets verite “Scooby Doo” with stretches of awkward silence and precious few one-liners. But over time the aesthetic starts to grow on you. You stop searching for the beats of a typical comedy, and that’s when the unrehearsed, eerily genuine responses make the film’s preposterously simple version of a psycho stalker into a something that’s, well, kinda terrifying.

JAY:

People get scared in the movie theater and we’re like “really?” I mean, that’s awesome but
 really??

MARK:
If Jay and I had set out to make a straight horror movie I don’t think we could have done it, because our movies change so much on set based on what Jay and I are interested in and what our actors are bringing. This movie on paper reads like straight horror, but we love close-ups and passive-aggressive dynamics.

JAY:
Someone gets their feelings hurt in a scene and I’m just on them. Baghead’s over there and I’m all over the crying.

When everyone starts freaking out, half-assed killer or not, it’s increasingly unsettling.

MARK:
We didn’t go for the [deliberate scare] approach, we have a lot of trust with [the cast]. We try not to betray that by throwing a dead fish in their lap.

JAY:
But that being said, we don’t do setups, say your line, film it. We shoot the entire scene, so if there’s someone with a bag on their head that’s going to be in it, [the cast] doesn’t know when that person’s coming or if that person’s coming. There is a naturalism to how things unfold.

MARK:
It’s like theatre, they get time to ramp up, they get the time that they need. It’s not like “okay, we’re gonna start the scene and when we’re rolling I need you to be experiencing the death of your three sons and weeping aaaaaaand roll camera!” I say give ‘em some time, let them ramp up.

GRETA:
I’ve never done horror before. It was hard. Jay and Mark had never made a movie that was scary before, I had never been in one that was scary before. The only person who’d ever done anything like that was Elise, who played Catherine. She’s been in, like, shark movies? She’s been in “Man Shark” and a bunch of sci fi shark movies. She’s on the sci fi list, that’s what she told me. She could scream really well, and we’d all kind of watch and imitate her. But no one knew how to make a scary movie so we had to do lots of takes of things. We didn’t know what was going to be scary and what was going to look stupid. I think if you’re a die-hard horror fan, you will be disappointed by this movie. But if you’re a Duplass Brothers fan, you’re gonna love it. Obviously.

The other benefit of eschewing horror cliché is a decidedly less difficult shoot.

MARK:

People ask [about us co-directing] all the time, but to us it’s just kind of obvious. When Jay and I were little and we’d fight, our parents discovered quickly that if they became a greater enemy, we’d join forces against a greater evil. Which was them.

JAY:
We’re always on set together, helping with the energy. It’s like “I can’t deal with this scene anymore. Any ideas?”

MARK:
There’s also an unspoken thing that happens between us, whether it’s an interview, or we’re writing, or directing or editing, it will become very obvious to us within the first half-hour of showing up which one of us is more “on” than the other. Without even saying it, both of us will know “you’re gonna be a little bit in charge today and I’m gonna be your Sancho.”

GRETA:
They’re great as co-directors. When one gets tired, the other picks up the slack. There’s always somebody saying something really positive to you. They’re feel-good directors. Their technique is not to get you to place where you feel bad about yourself and you’ll do whatever they say. Their technique is make you feel like you’re the best actor in the world and then they get you to do whatever they want you to do. I call it the compliment sandwich.

Gorehounds will probably slash the seats, but fans of Christopher Guest or Cassavetes or Larry David can buy ticket knowing they won’t be subjected to fountains of entrails on the screen. “Baghead” is a comedy first and foremost. Take the opening, a classic swipe at the fringe festival circuit (with supporting MVP Jett Garner playing
Jett Garner), as a direct indicator of what’s to follow.

JAY:
We met Jett Garner in an acting class in Austin, Texas. It was a Misener Acting class and it got us inspired in the type of acting in which you don’t fake anything. You don’t try too hard and you make sure to stay in the moment and keep it organic. Jett’s an actor and he also makes some of his own films. He’s a smart dude and he’s funny. He improvises a lot of dialog in the Q & A. He knows exactly what he was doing.

MARK:
We cast actors a little to type, but we’re not the kind of people who are like “oh I’m gonna cast her because she’s perfect and she won’t even know it!” They know what they’re doing, they’re confident in themselves, they can put themselves on screen and poke-fun a little bit. We like to have people who are comfortable in their own skin.

GRETA:
Hopefully it will find an audience word-of-mouth, between friends. I think people will really enjoy it. I would be hard-pressed to find someone who didn’t enjoy themselves when they watched it.

For Mark and Jay, the focus was more on that lingering question “can a bag be scary?” than a typically bloody catharsis of mortal terror.

MARK:
There was definitely a lot of time spent in front of the mirror and at dinner. It’s the shaping of the bag that’s key

GRETA:
Bags have never particularly been my fear. It’s funny, some bags aren’t as scary as other bags, we discovered. Burlap sacks are really scary. Way scarier than grocery bags. They’re terrifying. We went through a number of bag options.

JAY:
The shape determines the result you’re going to get. If you mash the head and the neck around, you’re gonna have a really hostile, scary baghead. If they eyes are misaligned you might have a mentally challenged baghead. Or if you just wear a square bag straight out of the grocery store you’re just going to look like a dork.

MARK:
But if you think about that too long, that will become the scariest.

“Baghead” opens in limited release tonight before sacking theatres nationwide.

image courtesy of slackerwood

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