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

Photograph of Lynn Shelton by Getty Images/Stringer.

• 
• |
• 
• |
• |
• 4

The premise of Lynn Shelton’s third feature film, Humpday, 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—a group of indie movies made for, by, and about passionless, quasi-bohemian young mumblers, as The New Yorker’s David Denby 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.