Humpday could've been You, Me and Dupree plus homophobia, but instead, indie filmmaker Lynn Shelton's largely improvised story of two hetero male friends (played by Joshua Leonard and sometimes indie director Mark Duplass) who decide to make a gay porn is full of nuance and surprise. While in town promoting the film, which opened at Kendall Square Cinema on July 24, Shelton spoke to us about making a sensitive bromance that's hilarious even when it plays things, er, straight.
This isn't exactly the comedy about porn viewers might expect. Yeah, it's like a conduit for all this other stuff. I heard somebody say that I believe in getting a high concept, but then just move it to the side. That's not exactly what I did, but I think the reason it's about all these other things is that I wanted to work with Mark. I came to him with this premise, and we decided right away that we weren't interested in making a broad farce. We wanted to see if we could make it believable. At the outset, it just seemed impossible. But we were like, well, we're just going to fucking try anyway. In doing that, it ends up being about all of these other things, because you have to look for real motivations.
How do you do that, given the amount of improvisation in this film? The main thing is, I start with this: as the plot is evolving in a loose sort of way, the first thing that happens before anything can be cemented down is to figure out who the characters are. I want to involve the actors heavily in that process, so I can't really decide much until I bring them in. Then I'll know how they'll interact with each other and how those scenes will unfold. But I'd also tell them I want there to be a scene that answers the question that everyone is going to wonder: "Are they gay?"
Could Humpday have been a drama? We treated it as a drama. I didn't set out to make a comedy. I know that sounds disingenuous, but it's absolutely true. It was definitely going to be a - I hate the word - dramedy. Some audiences respond that way, but, at Sundance, it was nuts; they never stopped laughing. Ever. Even the stuff I thought was heavy. Then everybody called me "the female [Judd] Apatow." And I really like him, but I think we're doing two totally different things. Or, they're related, but there's a difference in the approach. He's looking for laughs, and we were always playing it dead straight.
