Mark Duplass is an actor, producer and filmmaker who has featured in a plethora of television and film projects, with one of his notable roles being in Apple+’s The Morning Show. His performance in the series earned him an Emmy nomination in 2020 and a Golden Globe nom in 2022.
Mark also starred in the praised HBO series Togetherness, which he and his brother Jay co-created. His extensive filmography includes The Puffy Chair, a film he co-wrote and co-directed, along with Zero Dark Thirty and sci-fi pic Safety Not Guaranteed. His other roles include Bombshell and the Creep horror series.
His newest venture, A Long Long Night, had its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival this week. It’s a six-episode series written by Duplass and award-winning actor, playwright, Barret O’Brien. The story follows childhood friends Pete and Carroll, who reminisce about a disastrous incident that happened in a motel room six months before, and these two guys are nowhere over it. The series is a tragicomedy as the two men scramble to build adult lives that contain some semblance of meaning and purpose.
A Long Long Night was written and shot over the course of the pandemic and is produced by the Duplass brothers’ entertainment company that aims to take small budgets and create grand stories. Deadline talked to Duplass about A Long Long Night, some of the goals of his production company and why independent cinema matters.
DEADLINE: You act, produce and direct. How do you balance it all?
MARK DUPLASS: I don’t know. Sometimes I get it right, sometimes I don’t. I think that I didn’t do it well for a long time. I had the feeling of the scarcity mindset of independent film and TV. I realized that if anyone is going to try and do this to make a living, they better be willing to deliberately throw their lives out of balance. I am 46 and it’s starting to shift a little bit, and I think the pandemic had something to do with that, which naturally slowed me down like a forced respite.
DEADLINE: During the height of the pandemic, none of us really had a choice.
DUPLASS: I only do things that I feel like are going to be beneficial for me spiritually and so, that shaves off a lot of the things I used to do. I’ve set up this company (Duplass Brothers) where I now have folks who run my company and they really take a lot of the weight off me that I used to put on myself. My life is way more balanced now than it used to be, but I’m still trying to figure that out.
DEADLINE: That’s an interesting idea that delegation creates balance.
DUPLASS: Healthy collaboration is everything to me right now. I think I had that fear that if I don’t touch everything, will the work be less good? Am I the special sauce that’s making everything work? That’s totally egocentric in my opinion. While it took a couple of years to get collaborators in place, what I have right now is awesome.
DEADLINE: Now that you have the Duplass Brothers company, what’s your goal for the type of material you want to produce?
DUPLASS: We don’t have a strict edict about the kind of content that we’re trying to make. We’re chasing things that we find meaningful. I find myself attracted to the kind of story most studios won’t want. That’s where I’m the most passionate. I’m using my own career and money as venture capital funding into Duplass Brothers to go make the stuff.
DEADLINE: Let’s talk about A Long Long Night. What was it like working with your childhood friend? How do you strike the chord of a working relationship?
DUPLASS: Barret and I went to high school together. We weren’t very close back then, but we knew each other. We became very close in our 20s when I invited him to move into my apartment in Greenpoint into essentially a 6-by-6 closet that he could rent for $300 a month. And we’re very much spiritual kindreds. It was during the pandemic when it hit that this idea that was lingering in my head from Barret’s original idea.
DEADLINE: Sounds like the pandemic was a springboard for your creativity and A Long Long Night sort of deals with some of those pandemic themes like guilt and isolation. Can you expand on that idea?
DUPLASS: My productions are all about making art within the constraints of the money you have. I had some time off from shooting The Morning Show because of the pandemic so, I was like, “Barret, write us a movie that deals with all these issues and puts these two guys in the motel room, and let’s go for it.” And Barret is an experienced playwright and brilliant actor, so we set up the movie, shot that movie in about five days, edited it together, and we weren’t happy with it, so we had to start from scratch. We promised ourselves we wouldn’t rush the process.
From there, we just started engaging in these conversations about what it means to deal with toxic masculinity in this space, in a story told by two white guys. Out of those discussions sprang the next iteration of the project, and we expanded it to become a television series where these two men are reflecting back on this crazy night they had six months ago. They have time to examine their actions.
DEADLINE: That’s quite the revelation, right? When you see your work and have to admit to yourself it’s just not good.
DUPLASS: It was honestly just super fun and rewarding. For me as an artist, while it’s a little painful, it was really good for me. Making micro-budget movies is my skill set. I invited Barret into that, and we made it work. It’s OK to go back to the drawing board sometimes. There are artists who can see a project from front to end and execute it meticulously and I am just not that. I love to dive in a little unprepared, a little excited and make a mess, and then gather my community of very smart people around me and help me fix it, and I’d love to do the same for them. A Long Long Night is the best example of that.