Trailer: ‘Darling Companion’ starring Kevin Kline, Diane Keaton, Richard Jenkins, Elisabeth Moss, Mark Duplass, Dianne Wiest, Sam Shepard

Darling Companion: Beth saves a bedraggled lost dog from the side of the freeway on a wintry day in Denver. Struggling with her distracted, self-involved husband Joseph and an empty nest at home, Beth forms a special bond with the rescued animal. When Joseph loses the dog after a wedding at their vacation home in the Rockies, the distraught Beth enlists the help of the few remaining guests and a mysterious young woman in a frantic search. Each member of the search party is affected by the adventure, which takes them in unexpected directions — comic, harrowing, sometimes deeply emotional and ultimately towards love.

Director: Lawrence Kasdan

Writers: Meg Kasdan, Lawrence Kasdan

Starring: Kevin Kline, Diane Keaton, Richard Jenkins, Elisabeth Moss, Mark Duplass, Dianne Wiest, Sam Shepard

In Theaters: April 20, 2012
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Trailer: The Duplass Brothers’ ‘Jeff Who Lives At Home’ starring Jason Segel, Ed Helms, Judy Greer, Susan Sarandon

Jeff Who Live At Home: On his way to the store to buy wood glue, Jeff looks for signs from the universe to determine his path. However, a series of comedic and unexpected events leads him to cross paths with his family in the strangest of locations and circumstances. Jeff just may find the meaning of his life… and if he’s lucky, pick up the wood glue as well.

Directors: Jay Duplass, Mark Duplass

Cast: Jason Segel, Ed Helms, Judy Greer, Susan Sarandon

In theaters: March 16th, 2012
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Interview: The League’s Katie Aselton talks about her directorial debut, The Freebie!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 9:45 — 6.7MB)

Like most actors, Katie Aselton, the star of FX’s hilarious comedy, The League, loves her job. So, when the self-described “frustrated actor” got tired of leaving her fate up to others, she decided to do something about it.

Using her experience of working with her husband (director and actor Mark Duplass), she rounded up her friends and made her directorial debut with, The Freebie.

Katie also stars (alongside Dax Shepard) in the film about a couple who decide to give each other a ‘free pass’ in the hopes of saving their marriage. The film is a wonderful, intimate look at a relationship that you often don’t see on-screen.

I talked with Katie about the all-improv film, her training, The League and more!

The Freebie is available now on DVD and Netflix!

For the full interview, click the audio link above or download from iTunes.

So, what made you decide to make this?

Katie Aselton: I’m a frustrated actor! And I just, I love what I do and I wanted the chance to get to do it. It’s so frustrating to sit and feel like your fate is in someone else’s hands and it was just like my head was  getting sore from beating it against the wall. And I happened to be married to an incredible do-it-yourself filmmaker, Mark Duplass, who was really done with me complaining about it. He was like, “You know how to do it.  Make your own stuff. Make it happen for yourself.” And that’s very easy to say and then much harder to do. But I did it. Once I got over that hurdle of, “I can make my own movie,” cause the way technology is today, it’s cheap enough to make a movie that looks alright. It was then just finding an idea that I really connected with and could see from start to finish and felt like I had an original way to tell it and that came with this idea. Once that happened, everything fell very easily into place.

I know this is all improv. Did you write an outline?

Katie:  Yeah. It sounds like it was this loosey-goosey thing but worked from a very detailed outline. It was an outline that had every scene and the arc of every scene. The only thing that wasn’t written was the dialog. Because this is really just a two-person story and where I was playing one of the characters, it would’ve been very lop-sided if I wrote the dialog for both Annie and Darren.

I love to work this way. Its not necessarily the way I was trained but it’s the way I really connect as an actor. I feel like you can really find those awesome, cool, true moments when you’re just going on the fly.

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Re-Post: Exclusive Interview with John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill

If you have nothing to do this weekend, check out Cyrus!

I saw this back in March at SXSW and it’s one of the funniest movies I’ve seen this year.

I interviewed both John and Jonah for the film (along with the directors, Mark & Jay Duplass).

For the entire interview, click here.

For the Duplass Brothers interview, click here.

Here’s a quick excerpt:

You guys did a lot of – I know that the Duplass Brothers do a lot of improvising in their movies.  How much did you guys stray away from the script?

John:  Dialogue-wise we never really did the script.  There were a few places where we did what was written, but for the most part I mean, I thought that was a really kind of egoless way to direct a movie especially since they wrote it.

Jonah:  And it was a really good script. It was a great script. It was actually one of the better scripts I’ve ever read.

John:  Yeah, you know what needs to happen here.  We don’t have to say this. Just say it as honestly as you can to each other.  It was a lot of fun, very empowering, but also a big responsibility.

Did you ever worry that you were ever going to just like – were there a lot of scenes where it just didn’t work because you didn’t end up in the right place?

Jonah: Only one scene that I think….

John:  A couple places where scenes were…. what we found on the day didn’t exactly jive with what the structure of the movie needed to be in the editing room, so in those places I think they did those more creative voiceover things.  You heard dialogue while people are not saying dialogue.  Where they kind of layered, which I thought – it’s not what they intentionally set out to do.  It’s not that they filmed those scenes so they could do that, it’s that we improvised our way through a scene and they turned it into that.  It’s one of those cool moments where necessity is the mother of invention.  They created this new interested way to move the story along because they needed to because the scene that they shot was different than that.

The Duplass Brothers: “Honest and real and really unpredictable is what we’re really looking for”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 13:37 — 9.4MB)

Jay and Mark Duplass (The Duplass Brothers) are hot right now. They have Cyrus (starring John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill & Marisa Tomei) and are currently in pre-production on Jeff Who Lives At Home (with Ed Helms and Jason Segel).

To be honest, I’d never seen one of their films till Cyrus. I’d heard about them, especially once I got to Austin for SXSW, and was excited to see the film. The film is both hilarious and touching and you will love seeing John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill in different roles than you’re familiar seeing them in.

I got a chance to talk with them in a roundtable interview so most of the questions aren’t mine. I did ask some casting questions regarding John and Jonah. And check out the audio (above or on iTunes) portion for the whole discussion.

(For more on Cyrus, click here for my interview with the stars John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill)

How long have you guys been working on this script?

Jay: Good question. You know, we normally write our scripts pretty quickly when we it’s just us producing them because we know we’re gonna improvise the dialogue a bit so once the structure is rock solid we know we’re production-ready. But you know, this was a script where you have to write it well and make it attractive to actors and to the studios so that they want to greenlight it. So we just spent a little time making it look pretty, you know? The bells and whistles. We were, I think we worked on it for like a year or so on and off. We were doing other things at the time. But on and off before we actually got the greenlight.

Do you have any experience as children as of single parents dating again or knowing people in those situations?

Mark: No, none really. We are good little Catholic boys and our Catholic parents have been married for 42 years and are still together.

Jay: What we do have a lot of experience with is desperation (laughter). We have that in spades.

Mark: Inter-personal dysfunction.

Along those lines, when you guys have the photograph of breastfeeding (laughter), it was terribly icky, I was dying laughing. Were there other things like that that you took out because you were like, you know what, that’s just too icky? Or was that about it?

Mark: The level of ickiness was about what we had hoped it would be. There’s an ick-ometer that we have on set.

Jay: We were riding high at about a 3.8 the whole time. If you stay right there, if you go over, people start crying and it gets weird.

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South By Southwest: The Good, The Great

I’m back from South By Southwest (SXSW) and let me tell you, it was an experience! If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know what I mean.

In five days, I saw 10 movies and interviewed 19 actors and directors.

And now, I’m exhausted!

I interviewed:
Edward Norton and Tim Blake Nelson for their fun and incredibly entertaining film, Leaves Of Grass.

Kyle Gallner and Brittney Robertson for coming of age story, Cherry.

Jon Foster and Director Will Canon from the great film, Brotherhood. How good was it? Well, it won the SXSW Award for Narrative Feature.

Patrick Wilson, Judy Greer, Chloe Sevigny and Director Chris D’Arienzo for the hilarious, Barry Munday.

John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill and directors Jay and Mark Duplass for the also hilarious, Cyrus.

Lee Turgensen, Paul Fitzgerald and director Joe Infantolino for the incredibly acted, Helena From The Wedding.

Ashley Green and Shiloh Fernandez from Skateland. I loved this move… what more can I say?

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