Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard in "Humpday," Submarine Entertainment, 2009

It's also your second film, after 2008's "My Effortless Brilliance," to deal with the complexities of male friendship -- is that a favorite theme?

Romance -- male/female relationships -- have been mined more than male friendship. There are plenty of buddy movies out there, but it still seems like that territory that's less investigated. With "My Effortless Brilliance," I had never seen that explored before, a platonic break-up and the ramifications of it. It's a really different scenario [from "Humpday"], even though on paper it looks like it's really similar territory. There's not a woman to be seen for a hundred miles in "My Effortless Brilliance," so the inclusion in "Humpday" of the whole domestic situation with Anna and Ben is a huge component.

It was more accidental, more that I'm choosing this way of making a movie where I organically create something for a person I want to work with as a performer, and if they happen to be guys, then it ends up being a movie about guys. It's interesting to me too because I've always as a filmmaker worked from the inside out. A lot of my work is about being a woman, about experiences that are really specific to women. So to work more as a documentarian and say oh, here's a subject that I've always loved to closely observe, coming from the outside, is really fun.

The big question throughout the latter part of "Humpday" is one of will they actually go through with this or won't they -- had you decided which would be the case when you started?

No. We decided early on that we were not going to map that out. We had the whole thing mapped out up to getting to the hotel room. Neither the cast nor the crew knew throughout the whole movie, so it wasn't like as you were playing out a particular scene that you were thinking "Well, we know we have to get there." It just kept it completely open, completely dynamic and immediate. We shot the whole thing in order, so by the time we actually checked into that hotel room, we knew those characters so well, we knew the relationships, everything that had come before it. It wasn't like it was inevitable, but as we were playing every scene out, we were always double-checking: "would Ben really say this or do this at this point in time?" If something felt a false note, we would all yell "wolf" and stop. It was so exciting to not know and just follow them around. Then it really felt like a documentary because we really didn't even have a plan. It was amazing.

Definitely one of the themes of the film is trying to reconnect and to find that place where you once were. I think a lot of people have a friendship in their life, especially in their young life, when they're joined at the hip with somebody and it's just this total connection where they really were almost the same person. It's not something that you can maintain for long because you end up sacrificing your sense of self for this relationship, or you become too dependent on the other's validation. But it's also beautiful and comforting to be able to lose yourself in a relationship like that. I think [Ben and Andrew] really yearned to find that connection again and yes, I think it's the tragic quest of the movie in a lot of ways. But there really are levels at all points along the spectrum between melancholy and uplifting, and it's open-ended enough that you can write a postscript for yourself.

[Additional photos: Alycia Delmore; filmmaker Lynn Shelton - "Humpday," Submarine Entertainment, 2009]

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