If you read a lot of film blogs, you might have noticed a virus going around called Dentler Takes the Stairs. It’s all the brainchild of Matt Dentler, who is like the P.T. Barnum of the SXSW Film Festival, and who, by being the first person to program movies like Kissing on the Mouth and Dance Party, USA, has played a huge role in legitimizing this wave of no-budget American indie filmmaking over the past few years. Dentler conducted interviews with the major players in Hannah Takes the Stairs (the Joe Swanberg drama starring Greta Gerwig and filmmakers Mark Duplass, Andrew Bujalski, Kent Osbourne, Ry Russo-Young and Todd Rohal), and asked a number of us film bloggers to each broadcast one of these interviews on our blogs.
Matt asked me to carry the interview with Mark Duplass, and of course, I complied. I reviewed The Duplass Brothers’ The Puffy Chair, which Mark starred in and co-wrote, in 2005 after seeing the film both at SXSW and the Chicago International Film Festival. At the time I said this:
It’s amazing how [The Puffy Chair] nails the mealy-mouthed way people my age have of saying what we mean by dressing the same words, over and over again, in different kinds of inflection. Between Rhett and Josh, the word “dude” has a thousand meanings; Emily isn’t satisfied being referred to by any of them. Fleshing out that tension, between what is being said and what it obviously means, is where The Puffy Chair really succeeds.
After the jump, I turn it over to Matt and Mark, who talk about Hannah’s Atari-fueled set, Andrew Bujalski’s boxers, and what Duplass did to get the film’s mythic stairs cut out of the picture.
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Originally posted on:
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