How ‘See You When I See You’ Director Jay Duplass Got Back Into Filmmaking After More Than a Decade Away

Jay Duplass is a filmmaker who matured as a filmmaker with the Sundance Film Festival.

The first three films he directed with his brother Mark Duplass – “The Puffy Chair,” “Baghead” and “Cyrus” – all debuted at Sundance (in 2005, 2008 and 2010 respectively). Now, Duplass is back at Sundance with a new film – “See You When I See You,” an adaptation of writer Adam Cayton-Holland’s memoir “Tragedy Plus Time: A Tragi-Comic Memoir.”

In “See You When I See You” Cooper Raiff, another talented Sundance alum, plays Adam, a young man coming to terms with the loss of his sister (Kaitlyn Dever). According to the official Sundance program, Duplass “taps into the millennial milieu of masking sorrow with humor and the devastating mental toll that avoidance can take on the bereaved, ushering us through a parade of ill-advised coping mechanisms and the collateral damage that follows with his trademark sense of compassion and empathy at every turn.”

As it turns out, the project came to Duplass at the perfect time.

“I had not made a movie in like, 13 years and I got a call from [producers] Kumail Nanjiani Emily V. Gordon, and they said, ‘Look, we have a script that we want to make. It’s really special. It’s based on true story.’ Kumail and Adam are good friends from the stand-up comedy circuit,” Duplass explained to TheWrap’s Sharon Waxman at the Sundance Film Festival. “And they were like, ‘We think you should direct it.’ And I was trying to come back to directing. I didn’t even know that they knew that or were aware of that.”

(Duplass ended up directing one movie before “See You When I See You,” last year’s “The Baltimorons.”)

When asked why he had been away from directing for so long, Duplass explained that it was a combination of factors.

“It was so many things. Acting was a part of it. You know, we had made two movies in the mini-majors like ‘Cyrus’ and ‘Jeff, Who Lives At Home,’ and that’s when mini-majors were not doing great and everyone was switching to TV, and I made a TV show, and also my brother, before I even started acting, really started acting a lot,” explained Duplass. “And acting is a lot more fun than directing movies. I mean, directing movies is f—ing wonderful. But like, when people are like, ‘Did you have fun directing that movie?’ I’m like, ‘No.’”

Raiff, who was at Sundance last year with his television series “Hal & Harper,” jumped in to agree with Duplass, “F—ing wonderful is the way to describe it. And you don’t describe acting that way. You know, you’re not like, ‘It was f—ing wonderful standing in front of that camera.’”

Duplass said that actors attempt to direct, since they’re there on set all day and think, How much harder could it be? But that they rarely direct more than one project because it’s so exponentially more difficult than they could ever have imagined. Beyond Raiff, who is a director, David Duchovney has also directed and Cayton-Holland has created a TV show, so Duplass felt comfortable saying this.

“My brother has the best saying about it, which is that if directing a movie is being a single mother that raises children to fruition and then continues to parent them through adulthood, that being an actor is being the drunk uncle who shows up with a box of Oreos on Christmas and wins the day and your kids talk about him all year,” said Duplass.

Part of what kept him from making a movie, he said, was “fear, inertia and the momentum of the industry towards television.” Duplass said that directing a pilot is being a key part of the process but directing episodic television is quite different. He’s done it all but wanted to make movies again.

“I think ultimately the pandemic got in the way. I was getting back up on the horse, I got knocked off, and then the strikes happened. It was just a long, weird thing, and then suddenly it was 13 years since I had made an original movie,” said Duplass.

There was also the realization that his brother Mark no longer wanted to direct movies.

“That’s actually everything that I want to do, and figuring that out and consciously uncoupling, individuating, we’re very immigrant II in the way that we make things and not trying to hurt each other’s feelings,” said Duplass. “Just trying to love my brother and at same time, do what I want to do. And turning f—ing 50 during a pandemic and just being like, Okay, I don’t know how many years I have left. I want to do what I want to do. This is what I want to do. And yes, it’s going to kill me, but I’m going to do it.”

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