Beyond bromance

The indie comedy Humpday imagines two
straight dudes who decide to make a gay
porn film

BALLSY: Joshua Leonard and Mark Duplass

By MATTHEW HAYS

What with all the horror stories about the collapse of the independent cinema, it’s a pleasure to witness the success of Humpday, the feature film from Lynn Shelton. Made in a week and a half by a gang of buddies, with a cast and crew of 12, the ultra-low-budget feature was invited to the prestigious Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, where it received a five-minute-plus standing ovation.

Joshua Leonard, one of the lead actors in the film, is well aware of just what an enviable position he is in—to have made a film that receives recognition. The ovation lasted long enough for him to eventually break down in tears. “When you get to do something this much fun with your friends,” he says, in town for the Just for Laughs comedy festival, “and then an audience begins responding, it’s a tremendously validating experience. Honestly, it’s something I wish for everybody.”

Helping the buzz around Humpday is its central premise: two old straight buddies, reunited after almost a decade, decide to do something entirely out of character—make a DIY gay porn movie in which they will star. The premise sounds silly enough that, in the hands of a director for hire and/or with Adam Sandler starring, it would simply be a dreadful venture. But when director Shelton and actor Mark Duplass approached Leonard, they had something else in mind. “This could so easily have become another shitty farce,” says Duplass. “We wanted to do something with real, human characters.”

No-budget risks

Early on, Shelton approached Duplass about making a movie on a dime, one where they’d take some real risks and be allowed to precisely because of the shoestring budget. They came up with a one-sentence pitch. Duplass e-mailed Leonard. “Mark e-mailed me and asked if I wanted to play his best friend in a film by his talented director friend, Lynn. I said yes immediately. I’m a huge fan of the films that Mark and his brother make, especially Puffy Chair, which just blew me away.”

“There was no script,” says Duplass. “Instead, we had worked out a detailed, 10-page outline. We liked the idea of having a strong sense of who our characters were and then going into scenes and improvising, while sticking to the main plot points of each scene.”

A key scene has the two getting more relaxed (ie. drunk and/or stoned) at a party when the topic of Hump Fest, a Seattle festival of DIY porn (which actually exists), comes up. The two basically dare each other to agree to do a gay porn together so that they can win first prize at the festival. While the two buddies soon realize they’re almost certainly not up for it, since it’s a dare, they feel they can’t back off. Thus Humpday becomes a dissection of male bravado, onscreen het-male bonding and homosexual panic, all at once.

“When we were working on our outline, the three of us got together with the one-sentence pitch and began expanding it,” recalls Leonard. “We looked at it with a healthy sense of scepticism. We had to reverse-engineer the film from that high concept into something that was really human, without making a message movie, without making something that was too didactic. It couldn’t be a thesis statement. We all liked to be entertained and we also like really naturalistic cinema. It was important for us to balance those things.”

And while Humpday does remain grounded in a certain reality, the lead actors concede that part of the film’s cachet rests on the ongoing taboo around intimacy between men. There’s something about the big screen and two men getting it on; witness the brouhaha about Brokeback Mountain, with some arguing the film showed too much and others saying the characters’ intimacy was too veiled.

Then there’s that strange irony about Hollywood, the town Liz Taylor once said was built by Jews and homosexuals. While straight actors know that playing gay or trans will put them on the shortlist for Oscar consideration (Tom Hanks or Charlize Theron, to name but two), for a gay actor to acknowledge their sexual orientation will mean no chance to make the A List. “It is strange,” says Duplass. “But you know, I think things have really changed. I know some gay actors, though I don’t know any who are famous and who are about to break out as a matinee idol who stars in action movies.”

For their part, Duplass and Leonard said they had no qualms at all about exploring their intimacy together. “Women seem to be much more fluid in that respect,” says Leonard. Though they hadn’t had much experience, they did do the full-on same-sex kiss for the camera. This, they say, was part of the process, and part of what the film’s plot called for.

Humpday becomes as much a buddy movie as it does a cliffhanger. Will they or won’t they? (No spoilers here.) The feature has been handed a publicist’s dream in terms of timing, arriving in cinemas in close proximity to the outrageous comedy Brüno, Sacha Baron Cohen’s not-so-subtle salvo at homophobia. This has led many reviewers to compare both films’ very different approaches to attitudes towards the gay thing.

And the gay critics, Duplass points out, “have loved the film. I mean, if anything, the jokes are on our characters. The people we play are intelligent, but they’re also buffoons. I think people have fun watching them squirm.”

HUMPDAY OPENS THIS FRIDAY,
JULY 24