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“It’s Like Funny Ordinary People”: Jay Duplass on See You When I See You
See You When I See You, courtesy of Sundance Institute. Twenty three years have passed since Jay and Mark Duplass made a seven-minute short titled This is John for $3—yes, three dollars—that premiered in Sundance in 2003 and effectively launched their careers. This year, Jay (who recently directed the intimately sweet The Baltimorons) is back in Park City as a director with See You When I See You, a darkly funny dramedy about coping with PTSD—and your family.
“It feels excellent,” Duplass says about his return to the Utah mountains that’s hosting the Sundance Film Festival for the final time, before next year’s move to Boulder, CO. “Some of my highest highs have been in Park City showing labors of love to the best audiences around,” the filmmaker reflects. “I was a struggling filmmaker. I was trying to find myself and it wasn’t happening. I was ready to give up on filmmaking as I was about to turn 30. I didn’t feel like I could do this to myself, my family and friends any longer. I was living in South Austin making the minimum amount of money, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and making bad art. But then Sundance gave me my career with this $3 short film that we submitted to the festival on a lark.” Duplass is especially animated when he remembers the call he got from Sundance’s Trevor Cross, informing him that they’ve been selected for the short film program. “David Zellner, the [renowned] filmmaker, edited that movie. So when I got a call that November from Cross saying this is one of their favorite short films of all time, I swear to God, I thought it was the Zellners playing a prank on me.”
After that, the Duplass Brothers went to Sundance three years in a row, with another short following This Is John, then with their first feature, The Puffy Chair in 2005. “So yes, Sundance gave me my career,” Duplass continues. “It changed absolutely everything for me. And this is [especially meaningful] as this is the last year that we’re going to do this in Park City.”
Following a successful comedy writer Aaron (Cooper Raiff) dealing with a severe case of PTSD after discovering the body of his sister Leah (Kaitlyn Dever) who commits suicide, See You When I See You is both the kind of emotional, happy-sad domestic dramedy one would expect from Duplass, and marks a brand-new territory for the director. Written by comedian Adam Cayton-Holland in an adaptation of his own memoir, Tragedy Plus Time: A Tragi-comic Memoir, the film navigates a number of impressively constructed fantasy sequences—which Duplass refers to as “psyche moments”—that represent Aaron’s mental journey in a unique way. Also starring an impressive cast that includes Hope Davis, David Duchovny, and Lucy Boynton in key roles as Aaron’s family members, See You When I See You is a pitch-perfect blend of the tragic and the witty through an honest exploration of mental health. In Duplass’ words, it like a “funny Ordinary People.”
Below is the conversation we had with Jay Duplass, ahead of the Sundance premiere of his latest. (Edited for flow and clarity).
Filmmaker: How did this screenplay by Adam Cayton-Holland find its way to you?
Duplass: It was a few years ago, pre-strikes when we were still recovering from the pandemic. The film’s producers and my friends Kumail [Nanjiani] and Emily [Gordon] knew me well enough to know that I really wanted to get back to making movies, not having made one in 10+ years at that point in time. They said, “Look, we have a script, and it’s based on the life story of the screenwriter. It’s a true story. It’s really tragic, but it’s also really funny and special.” When I read it, I cried and laughed hard. I had never made a movie that I hadn’t originated myself, but it just seemed the time to do it. Then we began a very long process of rewriting and trying to figure out how we were going to represent all kinds of internal things visually. It was all done for love— nobody really made any big bucks on this movie. And we are all standing on the shoulders of the Caton-Holland family.
Filmmaker: There is a throwback quality to the film, the era of James L. Brooks and Rob Reiner movies. Was this disposition apparent to you when you first read the script? What else excited you cinematically?
Duplass: I’ve made a career out of doing dramatic comedy. And this one was pushed very hard in both directions. The drama is tragic. And the comedy is dark and plentiful, since Adam is a standup comedian by profession. So when I first read it, I called Kumail and Emily back and I said, “It’s like funny Ordinary People,” which is a ridiculous thing to say.
Filmmaker: That’s actually spot on.
Duplass: I’ve told that to a lot of people, and they all shook their heads as it’s a break-your-brain kind of thought. How in the world could Ordinary People have been funny? It’s interesting that we’re saying that, considering we’re talking about last year in Park City and Robert Redford directed that film. But that’s how I felt about it. And immediately, I just started thinking about all these filmmakers that you mentioned: Jim Brooks and Rob Reiner, may he rest in peace. As I was rewriting it with Adam, Terms of Endearment was the movie that I kept in my mind: you’re watching this tragedy unfold and you’re laughing and having fun through the whole thing. That was the tone that I wanted to strike, which is tough to do. But I did grow up on those dramatically challenging movies that are also funny. What’s been incredible is that a few people who have seen the movie have said, “It reminds me of early Jim Brooks film.” It’s mind-blowing to get that comparison because that was my secret North star the whole time.
Filmmaker: And Kumail and Emily themselves have also made a great movie, The Big Sick, that’s about an illness, a kind of a family drama, but it is also a comedy. Even though that film leans heavier on comedy, it’s hard not to see a connection.
Duplass: See You When I See You is an heir to The Big Sick. But what’s interesting is, I would call The Big Sick a dramatic comedy and I would call See You When I See You a tragic, dark comedy. While working on the script and making the movie, Adam and I realized that we both lean darker in our drama and darker in our comedy, and we found a kinship there. And Kumail and Emily were the greatest producers and supporters of everything that we were doing. They said, “Absolutely, go go go!” We love them, and love The Big Sick, and felt really blessed to be the heirs. But this is distinct and different with its own tone.
Filmmaker: A big part of that tone is the fantastical sequences when we’re inside Aaron’s thoughts. They have their own visual language, operating outside of reality. How did you approach mapping them out?
Duplass: To be honest, it was terrifying. I had never done sci-fi elements before—not that this is sci-fi, but people will probably use terms like “flashbacks” or “sci-fi.” I don’t think they’re either. They are experiences [inside his brain] that are happening in real time, reaching back into the past and affecting the future. It’s really hard to describe and I was intimidated by entering that territory, while being excited about exploring the inner workings of a person. I really had my head and my heart around who that person was and what they were trying to do.
Adam and I have been calling them “psyche moments.” They weren’t originally written as evolutionarily, to progress as they happen. But they have their own storyline. They could go many ways and there are a lot of forces pulling on them. One of those forces is the EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy. I don’t want to give away what happens, but you’re really able to watch the progression of somebody who’s teetering on the edge of mental collapse. And so we were like, “How the hell are we going to do this?” It frankly got figured out in a room with Jim Frohna, my Director of Photography. He starts with the story and the images come second.
It would’ve been very easy to just shoot some badass sci-fi stuff and say, “Hey, isn’t that cool?” But he really approached it with me in terms of, “Where is Aaron in this very moment? And what is he being tempted by? And what is this internal mental journey?” And so we started there and talked about it until the very last day of prep. Those sequences were changing rapidly and fundamentally. Kudos to Jim Frohna, as he’s such an incredible storyteller in his own right. He and I were able to visually unfold what was happening. And then we would call Adam constantly to make sure.
Filmmaker: I love that you pointed out these moments are neither flashbacks nor sci-fi segments. I didn’t really think of them as traditional flashbacks myself either.
Duplass: That was all informed by us really talking about what PTSD is. It’s a minor spoiler that it takes a very smart and capable family a long time to realize that what our lead character is going through is not grief. He is grieving, but he’s actually grappling with PTSD; that’s part of what is unfolding in the movie. And what we started to realize is that if people have PTSD, they’ll say people are having flashbacks. But that’s not the experience of the person who is going through that at that moment in time. To the person who is having that experience, this is happening right now. You’re under attack right now in your bedroom. And when we started to really fully reckon with the fact that these are live things that are happening, that’s when the world really started to open up to us. That’s when we started to seamlessly slip real life into what would become a psyche moment where you’re not actually operating in the full reality of the moment. You’re operating in the reality of a broken brain. It’s very hard to talk about, but I’m really pleased that what we did visually actually expresses it. It was all about inhabiting Aaron’s experience from his point of view.
Filmmaker: Meanwhile, I love the story of how Cooper met you, basically tweeting at you with his short movie many years ago as a fan and young filmmaker. And now he’s in a movie that you directed.
Duplass: Cooper is my filmmaking son, there’s no doubt about it. I mentored him when he was making his first movie, Shithouse. And he was a big fan of the work that I had most recently done, which was Togetherness. He and I are really close and we see the world in the same way. We are both obsessed with feelings and comedy, and making them work together in synchrony. This isn’t a tiny movie, not a micro-budget like The Baltimorons, so it wasn’t a given that we could cast somebody like Cooper, who’s not a movie star. I was grappling with the fact that I need to irrationally love this movie and believe in it a hundred percent. I need the person to be beautiful and lovely. And I needed him to be very likable. I needed him to be a great dramatic actor with emotional access to everything, and I also needed him to be fun and funny. Cooper has all those things.
And he was a huge part of the process. I showed him a pass of the script in the early days, and he had some great ideas. It really solidified that he was the one that I wanted to star in it. And we were able to wrap him up in some people who had shinier stars in Hollywood to make the movie go.
Filmmaker: And what about the rest of the cast? Kaitlyn especially, since she has a very different challenge, since her character is already dead.
Duplass: I’m obsessed with similitude and it’s very important to me that these people look like they belong to each other genetically. Working with that limitation and with the fact that it’s very hard to get movie stars to come out and be in small movies now (TV is so competitive and agents are always gatekeeping their clients towards working on a single episode of television for $200K), we started with Cooper. I always knew that I wanted Kaitlyn to play that part. And it was a challenging time because she had just lost her mom, whom she was very close with. When she read the script, she was like, “The script almost killed me. I would love to do this movie. I just don’t know if this is the right time in my life to do it.” I was like, “No pressure at all. It’s yours if you want it.” And then David, the loveliest human being, joined and he looks like he could be Cooper’s dad. And then we got Lucy and Hope on board. When we got Kaitlyn, I was like, “Oh my god, Kaitlyn looks like she is David and Hope’s daughter. It is so dialed in.”
All these actors came and did it because they wanted to make a great piece of art to show love for the Caton-Holland family.
