Filmmakers Jay and Mark Duplass honed their craft at the University of Texas. And though they weren’t Texas natives and now mostly live in L.A., they are still claimed as Austin locals.
Mark’s wife, Katie Aselton, has also been part of the filmmaking crew from the early days of their beloved film “The Puffy Chair” in 2005. Flash forward more than 20 years and they’re all still making movies with relatively low budgets and small crews.
Related: Austin’s 1990s film scene fueled Duplass Brothers’ ambitions
“Magic Hour” is written by the couple, produced by the brothers and directed by and stars Aselton – alongside Daveed Diggs, just to widen the circle a tad.
The Austin ethos
Though Austin is no longer hometown, Mark Duplass says it continues to influence his filmmaking ethos.
“Austin to me is sort of the epicenter of who I am as an artist in more ways than one,” Duplass said.
He first started visiting Jay at college in 1991 and remembers the early days of Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez’s filmmaking.
“And people were living in South Austin off of very little money making their art and it was not about getting it out into the world, it was about making art of subsisting. And it was so edifying for me,” Duplass said.
And so when he and Aselton started talking about making a film like “Magic Hour,” he says it was harkening back to those early days of how to do it simply.
“At the end of the day, the two of us really, I think, are at our best and happiest when we’ve got a small group of people making a very personal story, which to me is like what I was doing in Austin back in the day. So it’s really part and parcel with the town for me,” Duplass said.
Aselton pegs those same feelings to the first feature she made with the brothers.
“Sometimes the very best thing can come from just you and your friends and a camera, and you can do it small and you could do it simply and it can still be really special and impactful because I think for me that’s what ‘Puffy Chair’ did when I was 25,” Aselton said. “And it was my sort of north star when it came to making ‘Magic Hour.’”
Drawing inspiration from their relationship
They wrote most of “Magic Hour” during a car ride. They try to take a trip together, just the two of them, after the holidays each year.
“There’s really a perfect way to lose yourselves as a couple is to just like put all of your energy into family and events and everything,” Duplass said.
“Hosting, the whole thing, and it’s, you know, exhausting,” Aselton said. “So we love this trip in like the beginning of January when the kids go back to school, we try and do like a long weekend that is just like, not just a reset, but like a re-centering.”
On the way home, they started talking about what they wanted of the coming year. Aselton said she wanted to make another movie like “The Puffy Chair.”
“And I wanna go back to the way we used to make movies and not worry about the outcome and just make something that feels like it is like deeply personal and us,” Aselton said.
But what would that be exactly?
“I remember being like, well, ‘Puffy Chair’ was kind of about us, and ‘The Freebie’ was about people we sort of knew, and how do we mine our own personal lives without like – but we’re married with kids and are kind of boring now – how do we mine our personal lives and make it a good movie?” Aselton said.
They landed on codependency.
“Katie and I talk a lot about how we’re very, very close, and maybe, is it worth questioning whether we’re too close?” Duplass said. “Because it’s hard for us to be apart.”
On one hand, they celebrate that closeness and feel like it’s what most people crave out of life – and certainly, as Aselton said, it’s what all the country songs yearn for.
“But I know if you go to a therapist and you talk about that, like codependency is a four-letter word,” Duplass said. “And I think the confusing feeling about that and the fact that we didn’t have a stance and could use the movie to explore that a little bit, somewhat agnostically, was what got me excited.”
