Two Dudes and a Gay Porn: A Q&A With the Director of Humpday

The premise of Lynn Shelton’s third feature film, Humpday [2], borders on preposterous. The movie tells the story of two straight male friends, Ben and Andrew, who have agreed to make a gay porn together. Ben is a staid, married Seattleite who works as a transportation planner. Andrew is a bearded weirdo who blows in one night after a sojourn in Chiapas, Mexico. Yet the idea that they would perform in an “arty” sex film is completely believable in the context of the movie.

Shelton is able to make the semi-absurd seem utterly natural because of her filmmaking process. She develops characters with her actors before she starts writing an outline, and the dialogue in her film is largely ad-libbed. Because it is low-budget and collaborative, Humpday has already been lumped in with the Mumblecore movement [3]—a group of indie movies made for, by, and about passionless, quasi-bohemian young mumblers, as The New Yorker’s David Denby [4] puts it. But Humpday doesn’t really fit the mumblecore M.O. The film deals with big questions of identity, sexuality, and fidelity, and emotions run high throughout. Will Ben and Andrew go through with their plan? What does it mean that Ben really wants to have sex with his best dude, even though he’s supposedly happily married? In an interview with Double X, Shelton discusses what inspired her to make a movie that takes bromance to the next level, how she made the leap from actress to editor to director, why she describes her 20s as her “Geisha years,” and more.

I know the movie was quite collaborative. Talk me through the way a scene would be created.

Lynn Shelton: I start with people I want to work with. I started with Mark Duplass (Ben), and invited him to help create his own character. The second one to come into the process was Joshua Leonard (Andrew). We talked a lot about that relationship and its history and its backstory. That way, when I sit down to write a scene, I know who the characters are. I worked with [Mark and Joshua] for a few months and went back to write the outline. And I realized there were these giant holes because I didn’t have a wife yet. She was a question mark. So I had to get that role cast, so that I could figure out who Anna is, and can have her be as fully fleshed-out as the guys.

And what happens once you’re on set?

Shelton: Once we’re on set, there’s no rehearsal. They know exactly who they are, exactly what the history is, exactly what’s happened up to this point. They have to live the scene out. Sometimes we’ll try to figure it out beforehand, but usually we’ll just talk about what we’re aiming for and I’ll let them go. We shoot, on average, a 20-minute take, but sometimes we’ll go for 40 minutes. I let them overwrite, unless they’re going on some tangent that’s not going in the right direction. I’m watching the scene play out as an editor, which is my background. You could have made any number of terrible movies out of the footage. It’s really setting up a false documentary situation, and shooting as a fly on the wall. Documentaries get written in the editing.

It does have an almost documentary feel to it. Going in I was thinking: How is it going to seem realistic that these two straight men have agreed to be in a porno? But it makes complete sense when you’re actually watching the movie.

Shelton: It started as such a fantastical and base thing. The idea of these two dudes, who had known each other for a long time, and now they really have really different lives. And they somehow get it in their heads that they’re going to have sex with each other. The first reaction from both [Mark and Joshua] was, “This is impossible to do. It’s impossible to tell this story in a believable way.” Making it realistic became our number one goal. Every step of the way, everybody on the set was on high alert for false notes. If something didn’t quite feel right, we would reexamine it.

The movie raises a lot of questions about modern masculinity. Once the idea of Ben and Andrew having sex has been introduced, it becomes a weird contest between them where neither one wants to be the one to “pussy out” of gay sex. It seemed very real to me that doing it with each other turned out to be the only way they could prove how manly they were.

Shelton: Two dudes trying to out-dude each other! The ultimate irony

Did that motivation also happen through collaboration?

Shelton: I thought that if you bring up the concept of two straight guys making a porn organically, it would seem most believable. And that was how I came up with the whole context of the sex-positive art commune party. So it would be totally normal. Everyone there would be making a porno! And they all have to be cutting edge and artsy, so of course they wouldn’t be straight. Also there would be these girls [at the party] that they’re kind of trying to impress.

There’s another scene that’s key, the scene where they could be letting each other off the hook. But then they call each other out on it. Like, “I’m there, I’ll do it, I think you’re the one that’s scared,” and that’s the way they back themselves into it. So I could see that craziness being our key to making this work. I could see that dynamic really early on, but I was nervous about whether we could pull it off.

The dynamic between Ben and his wife, Anna, is interesting. I saw the movie with my boyfriend and two female friends, and their reactions were completely different. My boyfriend was quite sympathetic to Ben, even though he could acknowledge that Ben was not treating Anna right. The women I was with got incredibly angry at Ben. They thought that he hadn’t given proper consideration to his wife’s feelings. One fundamental problem with Ben’s character is that he has chosen this life of domesticity and is not 100 percent thrilled with it. Was that part of the initial premise?

Shelton: I didn’t see immediately what else was there, beyond the porn premise. I’m not surprised at what blossomed out of it, I feel like there were so many themes that ended up being threaded through this thing. And people pick up on different threads. They relate to different characters. So some people pick up on the relationship between two men, or the limitations and difficulties of certain kinds of friendships. And some people pick up on the marital relationship. And some people pick up on [Ben’s] identity crisis, of getting to this point in his life, and realizing, what have I created? Is this a prison I’ve created for myself? Am I bound to be uncool for the rest of my life? Or they pick up on Andrew’s shifting sense of self. His realizing, maybe I’m not who I thought I was.

At this point I feel like I need to ask you the question that all female filmmakers get asked: Why are there so few women directors? Any theories about it?

Shelton: I personally never felt like there were any barriers, though over the past year I had a couple of eye-opening experiences. I was on a panel with two other women directors about this topic. One of them was from the South. She was a documentarian, and she talked about working as the only woman at the local PBS system. When she worked her way up to director, she would get guff. And it was just one story after another after another where she had to become this ... bitch in order to exert her control. I’m from Seattle, and I’m working in this community that has dozens of female directors. There are a lot of short-film makers and documentary-film makers, but some feature-film makers as well. There’s a lot of female crew, but also a lot of men just totally comfortable working with women. And they have to be, because there’s so many of us! At the end of the panel, the Southern woman was like, good lord, I’m moving!

The other experience I had was at the independent film festival in Boston. I went to see a shorts program with Barry Jenkins, who directed Medicine for Melancholy [5]. He’s African American. The two of us were sitting together. And there were about a dozen short films, wonderful short films, and the directors went up on stage afterwards. It was this long line of young, white guys. Just seeing them all lined up: a dozen of them or 15 of them. It was just like oh my God! Now I understand! I really stand out, as does Barry. What the hell!

I think the percentage is not as lopsided for independent filmmakers, but there are almost no women directing studio movies.

Shelton: I can’t speak for anyone else, but I could not have done this before my late 30s. I just did not have the confidence, or the agency, or the voice in my 20s. When I was on the set of my first feature [We Go Way Back [6], 2006], I remember having this revelation: This is what I was always meant to do. When I was younger, I was an actor, and then I was an experimental filmmaker, and I got an amazing skill set out of that. But I really had to get to this point of confidence and maturity and life experience [to make a feature film].

It’s not just because I’m a late bloomer. I think a large part of it was growing up female. I was raised with supportive parents who told me I could be anything I wanted in the world, but it’s that same old Reviving Ophelia [7] story. I heard this woman talking about the different stages of her life—it’s actually in my director’s statement for [We Go Way Back], it’s really what the movie was about. She’s in her 50s now, and she described her 20s as her “Geisha years,” when she was really focused on pleasing other people, especially men. And I was just like YES YES! That was me! I was an actor mostly, in my early 20s, and my secret shame was that I couldn’t be a poet anymore, and I couldn’t do any of the things that I used to do because I just didn’t have a voice for some reason. And I do feel like that is common for females, sadly. And one reason I made that film was to try to address it, so young women would see it and hopefully snap out of it a little sooner or not go there at all.