Sarah Paulson and Mark Duplass Have Chosen The Greatest Female Rapper

If you enjoy movies that will leave you with a smile on your face to match the lump in your throat, now is the perfect time for you to check out Blue Jay on VOD. The film stars Sarah Paulson and Mark Duplass as former high school sweethearts that connect again 20 years later after a chance encounter. This story will stick with you long after you’ve finished watching it, and will leave you wondering “what if?” about not only these characters, but your own teenage loves. Blue Jay is so beautifully done, so touching and so effective, and that is due in large part to the chemistry between Duplass and Paulson. At a screening last week, they revealed they were social acquaintances via their mutual friend, Amanda Peet, but after seeing them on screen, it feels much deeper than just a connection between their former co-star on Togetherness and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, respectively.

Blue Jay was made as part of the Duplass brothers’ deal with Netflix to produce four films a year (Mark, along with his brother Jay serve as executive producers on the film) and is distributed in a unique model proving their understanding that the streaming world is where it’s at, especially for indie films, with Mark explaining, “Some people will see this movie in theaters, more on VOD, and millions will see it on Netflix.” The Orchard is responsible for distributing the film in theaters (it is currently playing in New York and opens this weekend in Los Angeles) and on VOD, where it lands today. You can expect to watch it on Netflix in time for the holidays.

There was no script for the film, only a two-page outline written by Duplass, in which “not a word was wasted”, according to Paulson, who admits, “I was scared. It was outside my comfort zone, for sure. I’ve just never worked this way.” She was so used to working closely with a script, that even on the set of The People v. O.J. Simpson, she “would be tossing my iPad underneath the desk in the courtroom,” right before the cameras started to roll. Even Duplass admitted, “I don’t think this is a model I should follow all the time,” but remains extremely proud of the film, saying, “I never get tired of talking about this movie.”

And so that’s what we did. I joined the duo at the Four Seasons hotel in New York, in the middle of a lively discussion about Duplass seeing “boobs and bush” in Revenge of the Nerds during a sleepover at 9 years old. It’s worth noting, that there are neither boobs nor bush in Blue Jay, but that should in no way affect your desire to see the film.

Congrats on this film, I love it. I’ve watched it both at home alone, and in a full theater with people.

MD: Thank you! You saw it twice?
SP: You’re a groupie, I love it.

I’m so glad I did!

MD: It’s a different movie, right? You’re one of few people who have seen it in both scenarios.
SP: It’s much funnier on the big screen.

Yeah, when people were laughing in the theater, I thought, “Get ready because these two are about to break your heart.”

MD: Yeah, fuck you guys. You’re like, ‘I know shit and you don’t know shit.’
SP: ‘You don’t know what’s coming!’ There’s a thicket!
MD: So much boobs and bush.
SP: So much boobs and bush coming, you have no idea. That’s what you should say so as many people go to see it as possible, just promise lots of boobs and lots of bush.

Let’s talk a little bit about it being black and white. The way I interpreted it was that perhaps it was in black and white because sometimes things in life are not always black and white.

MD: Oh, this is good. That is a grand metaphor for the movie. I wasn’t thinking that.
SP: (joking) I was, because it was my idea for the movie.

You spoke about it being an instinct you had for it to be black and white, but at what point in the process did you decide that?

MD: It was an instinct as it started to come together. But I was scared to think about it because I was worried it would come across as pretentious. And then I quickly checked that and we all did, and we all were like, fuck it. Why don’t we just do this, it’s what we want to do, it’s what our heart wants to do. And Alex (Lehmann, the director) said it really, really well, he was like, ‘Two people, two colors.’ There’s something great about it. If I’m gonna get a little heady about it, I feel like if there is a tide in independent film. It is now to make movies that can grab you with their poster, with their log lines, and to be as attention-getting as possible, to wade through the sea of many movies and get noticed. To me, that is like what happened in jazz in this city in the ’50s, where Coltrane got as loud and as crazy and as noisy as you possibly could and Miles Davis was like, well, there’s no where else left to go, so I’m just gonna make Kind of Blue and just honk my horn like four times on the whole record, and just got real quiet and real small. I was like, maybe quiet is the new loud, and maybe slow and steady will be fascinating, and I really focus on maybe, because we were scared, honestly. We were like, this could be lyrical and poetic and beautiful, or it could be fucking boring. We were relying a lot on our chemistry, honestly. That was what the movie had. And my sex appeal.

SP: And his pecs.

There was a part of me that was thinking ‘Why aren’t these two friends on Facebook?’ but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Facebook might diminish the chances of a story like this being told in the future. Do you see that with social media, that we are in everyone’s business, but that these two characters got to genuinely reconnect?

MD: I’m on Twitter and I’m on Twitter only and I have an outward relationship. I put things out and I don’t receive them. So I don’t know what my ex-girlfriends are up to. I think I actually am one of the few people who can have this experience in real life. But I think that’s a really astute point of yours. I don’t know that we consciously ever said, let’s make a movie without social media in it, and let’s get back to that. It felt comfortable that Jim was the type of person who probably, as a dry wall dude isn’t that savvy about it.

SP: Look at my work!

MD: And we never discussed it for Amanda, but I would venture to say right now that like, Amanda’s got her fucking life on the rails, she doesn’t need to go digging into a bunch of that stuff. She’s just trying to hold that stuff together.

These two bond over some of their favorite ’90s songs, so who is the greatest female rapper?

MD: Did you not see Fallon last night?
SP: It’s me obviously. The greatest female rapper? It’s probably Missy, isn’t it? I think it’s Missy, but back in the day, I mean, Latifah was pretty great. But I think Missy because she also does things where I’m like, ‘I don’t know what you said.’ She’s like ‘briga borga shuga buga.’ And I still don’t understand, did they lay it down, flip it and reverse it, or was it ‘It’s your shmiga merga berga.’ Wait, is she speaking backward or did they flip something? Anyway, I think Missy probably, when you really listen to some of those words in her raps.

And also her videos are so amazing.

MD: The fact that we’re having this conversation at all in relation to this movie, just really makes me happy. There was nothing about rapping in the outline, by the way. When we were talking about what should be on the tapes, it was written that, when they turn the tapes on you just hear them going to their play acting. And then the day before we get in, I was like that’s gonna feel false, there should be like a false start, so that it not only gives us a laugh going into it, but so it feels a little more genuine that something might have gotten taped over, but I had no ideas of what it should be. Then we had done an improvisation about Lisa Lisa and then we were like, what if they’re just like rappers and I’m like ok! So we just did it, and then started chasing the rap thing and it became this plot point though it. That’s the fun about these movies is that you can find these little surprises, that if they work, you can chase them a little bit.

And you get to talk about Missy Elliot.

MD: And now we’re talking about Missy muthafuckin’ Elliot.

When you want to have a dance party what do you listen to?

MD: Oh, my kids and I do ’80s dance parties for dessert, while my wife’s out of town right now filming in Vancouver. So we eat dinner at 5:15 every night, I fucking love eating dinner early, and if they, because I’m an idiot American parent, I’m like, ‘Eat all your dinner and you get some dessert,’ which is so fucking stupid. But then we get ice cream popsicles and we go outside and I put on the ’80s Pandora station and I get them their music education and we just fucking dance and eat ice cream.

SP: I like a little Motown. I like a little “Runaround Sue”, and I go crazy. But I’m just jumping like a pogo, there’s nothing good about it.

Your characters in Blue Jay listen to audio cassette tapes that they recorded 20 years ago. As it is one of the few things we don’t get to see them do on screen, what was it like for you two to record those tapes?

MD: I loved it.

SP: I think it was really fun. We did it down in the basement, remember that? That one bottom bedroom in the house.

MD: And we were just kissing our hands and then immediately—

SP: We did both go like—

MP: Ewww!

SP: It was just the kissing sounds!

MD: I think our postures got weird, because we were trying to get our voices slightly pitchy and slightly breathless. What was really fun about it, at least for me, was that this was a complicated movie, in that when Jim and Amanda should have chemistry and when they shouldn’t. In my opinion, from the script, they shouldn’t really start to light up until they get back to the house. So even when they get there, it was always reserved to a certain degree. When we got to do the tapes, we got to be—

SP: THEM.

MD: And all you had to do was one thing, just play unbridled love and enthusiasm and simplicity.

SP: If I remember correctly, that was something that you actually wrote. We actually did that word for word, what he wrote on the pages and we were reading them.

MD: Yeah, and it happened quickly too.

SP: It happened quickly and you had done it, I think you had done it that morning or even the night before or something and I remember looking at him like, how the fuck did you just do this? Sometimes I think, and maybe this isn’t true, but that he did it for me, because he knew I was so scared to have nothing to stand on. I would sometimes say, I’m afraid I’m going to get lost in terms of where the train is headed. That if you can just tell me what the beats of this scene are, what we want, even though sometimes he would be like, ‘Yes but now go away from that and stay with this, and do more of this and let go of that and this is working’ or whatever. So sometimes he would have like a 2 page, 3 page, 4 page, depending on the scene, and it was never anything we had to adhere to, but the ideas were there about what was needed from a narrative standpoint. That was always really helpful, but we very rarely said what was on the page. But with the stuff with the tapes, we really did exactly what he wrote.

Did you record it right before you shot the scene with them?

SP: Yeah, we did everything sequentially, so we were able to use all that.

Can you talk a little about having three female producers on this?

MD: I’m glad you brought that up. This is an estrogen-laden film—
SP: Most of it coming from Mark.
MD: Most from me, and from Alex, honestly. My company is run by all girls, and I don’t have an exact reason for that. If I’m being perfectly honest, these are three of the smartest people I know and I wanted around this project, but I think serendipitously it was very very good because, as the main writing force of the project, I am coming from a somewhat male perspective and I represent at least 50% of that, so having all girls around to rally around some of the Amanda opinions was good. That being said, strangely enough, I think I’m a lot more like Amanda than I am like Jim in some ways, personally. I’m much of the, ‘Fuck, my life’s good and great but theres something kind of sad and weird and I don’t know what it is!’

I think we all have a little bit of that.

SP: (joking) Not me. Definitely not me.

MP: Sarah just cradling her Emmy and crying all night “I thought you were gonna make me happy!”

SP: I had a friend say, ‘I guarantee you’re going to wake up the next morning like, is that it? That’s it?’

Have you had the experience, and I love this because I think we all do it, seeing someone you know and then pretending you don’t see them until they say hi to you?

MD: I do it all the time.

SP: Oh my god, all the time. I just think there’s always to me a tiny bit of danger because if it’s somebody that you knew, and even if you knew them well but you haven’t seen them in a long time, sometimes I think there are reasons. I’m really good friends with, I mean my friend Carla, I’ve been friends with since I’m 11 years old and in a very constant, active way. Some of my friends that were my best friends in high school I still text occasionally, but I haven’t seen them in years. So there’s always that moment of going, what if I don’t, what if who you’ve become or what I was, all of a sudden I find it upsetting that I was friends with you because you seem really strange? There’s so many possibilities and some of them require a lot of effort. I almost feel like I would never go up to someone that I saw if they didn’t see me, if it didn’t happen at the same moment.

MD: You want to be on your own trip. You have a specific energy space. Here’s something real fucking dark I’ll talk about right now. I avoided my brother at an Emmy party.

SP: No! What?

MD: The reason I did it, I saw him coming up and I could’ve easily gone up to him and gotten the energy, but I was in a very specific conversation with someone where I was nimble and moving around. You go to these Emmy parties and you see everybody you want to see for the year and then you go home and fucking sleep. And I was like, okay I’m doing this thing, and I remember feeling like Jay knows me so well that he will see the falseness in the way that I am behaving with this person, and I don’t want him to see that because he’s gonna be disgusted with me and I’m gonna be disgusted with myself. So I literally just turned and I was like, I’m gonna keep this grossness to myself.

SP: And that’s okay.

MD: Tough stuff dude!

[Watch Blue Jay on Amazon Video]