Jay Duplass

“We are going to start with Slacker. I showed up in Austin, Texas, in 1991 when this movie was in the Midnight theater, and it is the first time that I realized that a normal person could make a movie, because I grew up in New Orleans and I just wanted to be a musician... So I saw this movie, and it cost $20,000. And then I was walking around and we went into a coffee shop and a friend of mine was like, 'That’s Rick Linklater.'... I was like, 'Oh, a normal person can make a movie.'”

“Now we’re going to go to a Coen brothers movie, No Country for Old Men. It blew my mind in a million ways. But what I want to say really... When I saw Raising Arizona in 1987, it’s the first time that I thought to myself, 'Oh, people make movies.'... I wanted to be the Coen brothers. I went to film school at the University of Texas at Austin. I tried to make Coen brothers-type films. I failed at doing that. The Coen brothers are really, really good at being the Coen brothers.”

“I started making movies about myself and my friends and the desperate stuff that we did, and that was heavily influenced by John Cassavetes. Husbands is one of his lesser-known movies and less celebrated movies. It happens to be my favorite. There’s a very simple operating principle with Husbands, which is: a group of guys, one of them dies, and those guys go nuts. They go on an adventure... And it’s a weirdly well-built driver of a movie. And they improvised the whole damn thing.”

“We’re just going to go across the pond to Secrets & Lies. I don’t do impressions, but I will do one briefly when she says, 'Sweetheart!' 'Sweetheart!' That’s what’s been said a lot in this film. And that phrase comes to mind a lot when I’m trying to wrangle my children. 'Sweetheart! Sweetheart, what’s wrong, sweetheart?'”

“Let us go beyond across the pond to Iran. Close-Up. This is the story of a man in Iran who impersonated a filmmaker called Makhmalbaf... Abbas Kiarostami... Went and made a movie of this guy’s trial and hired this guy to play himself in the reenactment of the impersonation... It is a movie that works as a fictional narrative. It is a movie that works as a documentary. It is a movie that works as a social service... This movie, there’s no other movie like this movie.”