Mark Duplass, Alycia Delmore, and director Lynn Shelton on the set of "Humpday," Magnolia Pictures, 2009

When you're doing a Q & A at a film festival, you always get at least one question about your films' budgets. There's even a scene about it in "Baghead." Why do you think people want to know how much your movies cost?

There's the basic "I'm a filmmaker, I want to be up on that stage and I would like to hear that it was a very low cost so I can make it" thing. Or a "I would like to hear that it's a very high cost so I can justify why I'm not up there right now" thing. But there's been this allure about cheap cinema since the "Slacker" and "Clerks" generation. Some people come to a film festival and their enjoyment of a film is directly related to how cheap they think it is. Somehow they're getting "the film festival experience" by saying "I saw the $7,000 movie."

Because of the impact digital video has made on your career, do you ever stop and think about how different your life might have gone if you’d been born 20 or even ten years earlier?

I think about that all the time. I was a musician for a long time and I started making cheap digital records in 2002, but the technology had come much earlier. I felt like my records were really good, but all the good cheap digital records had been made ten years before me. As a filmmaker, I feel like I was in the right spot at the right time. Just as I was learning to make good movies, the cheap camera came out that could make good-looking cheap movies. I feel like ten years from now, someone can look back at "The Puffy Chair" or "Baghead" or potentially even "Humpday" and be like "Fuck, man, they already made all the good cheap ones."

You just completed a role in Noah Baumbach's next movie, “Greenberg.” How different was that experience compared to your previous roles as an actor?

It was different. It was good because Noah has a lot of respect for my movies. He knows my process well, so he knew what he was getting into with me. But they don’t improvise. Noah is specific about his script. So I had to honor that for him, which I was nervous about at first. Am I going to be able to be as good if I’m not making shit up on the spot? But it worked great and most of my scenes were with Ben Stiller, who was incredible. I would like to do more stuff like that.

Stylistically, in terms of the visual presentation, it’s a little cleaner. We use the RED camera, which has more resolution. But in terms of the storytelling, it’s a small personal story like we’ve always made. We have a script, but we improvised just like we always do. When we were making it, we were like, are we straying too far from what we do here? I watch it now and I’m like this is another one of our movies but there are some famous people in it.

There's this stereotype that the current generation of low-budget filmmakers only make movies for people who look like the people in their movies. What sorts of reactions do your movies get from older audiences?

I, like an idiot, always thought my audience would look like me. When we were marketing "The Puffy Chair," I told Roadside Attractions that I was going to send tickets to bands across the country and they were like, "That’s great, they’ll rent the movie on Netflix. They’re not going to come to the movie theater." Sure enough, on opening day, who's predominantly in the movie theater? Couples in their 50s and 60s. If you had to define "the art film audience," it's mostly older couples. And they love our movies. Go figure.

“Humpday” will open in limited release on July 10th.

[Additional photo: Mark Duplass in "The Puffy Chair," Roadside Attractions, 2005]

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