ON a recent rain-slogged morning, seated against the scarlet banquette of a restaurant in the westernmost reaches of Chelsea, Lynn Shelton pondered the number of public screenings of the festival sensation “Humpday” she has attended — not graced, mind you, in the mode of many a nerve-jangled director, but sat through to the film’s talky, halting, bittersweet end. A rough count was abandoned somewhere in the double digits.
With the film’s New York premiere (as part of the inaugural BAMcinemaFEST) two days away, there was no question whether Ms. Shelton, who had flown in from her hometown, Seattle, to introduce the film and participate in a post-screening Q.&A., would steal away for a catnap or a stiff drink.
“The payoff for me is to be able to watch the film with an audience,” Ms. Shelton said. “I know that a lot of directors are obsessed with the things they wish had gone differently, so they find it painful because they see all the flaws. I was in the edit room for ‘Humpday’ the whole time, and I know all of the issues and problems that we overcame, so the flaws don’t scream to me. It’s the accomplishments that scream out.”
At Sundance, where the film made its debut in January, the film’s pitch alone — two buddies reunite a decade out of college only to find themselves agreeing to shoot an arty porn flick on a kind of regressive, Dionysian dare — hit the festival’s sweet spot, and not by accident. “I really felt like, ‘O.K., if this film doesn’t get into Sundance, I throw up my hands,’ ” Ms. Shelton said. “I thought I had as strong a chance as I would maybe ever have.” But it was the execution that gave “Humpday” a life outside the festival’s hermetic buzz factory. Within the confines of its dizzyingly high concept Ms. Shelton has created an exploration of the male ego and the passionate rigors of platonic, dude-on-dude love.
It was not until that first, raucous Sundance screening that Ms. Shelton, who was knighted “the female Apatow” by trigger-happy bloggers, realized that she had a comedy on her hands. Her main concern in telling the story of Ben (Mark Duplass), a happily married transportation planner whose edge has been dulled to the point of imperceptibility, and Andrew (Joshua Leonard), an itinerant, hirsute hipster who secretly fears he’s all cloak and no dagger, was capturing a naturalism — both behavioral and aesthetic — that could navigate even the most unnatural circumstances to access a messy, earned human truth.
“She is working from the perspective of making it real and making it true,” said the president of Magnolia Pictures, Eamonn Bowles who bought the film at Sundance, “and there’s so much humor inherent in that.” (The film opens in New York and Seattle on Friday.)
Having scored a distribution deal for this microbudget film she shot with friends in Seattle over a handful of days last summer, Ms. Shelton embarked on a sort of victory lap of the festival circuit. The film drew raves at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Tex., then headed to Cannes as part of the Director’s Fortnight showcase, where an extended standing ovation brought one cast member to tears.
“I was completely out of my body,” Ms. Shelton said of the reception. “Just truly surreal.” Concerns about how the distinctly American indie (how to translate “bromance”?) might play overseas were swept up in that cacophony: its sweet-sad, funny-tense cadence was confirmed as universal.
Hyphens abound in describing the film’s director as well: poet-author, dancer-actress, (trained for the stage, she appears in “Humpday” as one of the artists egging the gentlemen on) photographer-video artist, writer-editor and finally director.
Finally and at last: Although Ms. Shelton, 43, traces her artistic ambitions back to an audacious girlhood during which she ruled the school when she wasn’t writing short stories and taking clown classes (“I have this image of myself on the playground dragging three boys on each arm, like they were trying to pull me down, and I remember feeling so powerful”), in adolescence she felt that gloriously assured creative drive lose momentum. And while Ms. Shelton worked steadily in the theater, eventually moved to New York to study photography and then became an admired film editor, the resolve to venture into feature directing didn’t reach critical mass until her late 30s.
“I just did not have the confidence to do it,” she said, her voice rising with a mixture of outrage and sadness. “And then I had to find a backdoor way in. I couldn’t even go to film school, I had to start making my little movies and learning about editing.”
Those “little movies” are actually a series of accomplished, handmade experimental films whose distinctly feminist sensibility comes to bear in the subtle, almost anthropological scrutiny of the male of the species in “Humpday.” Upon returning to Seattle in 1999 Ms. Shelton, who is married with a 10-year-old son, was embraced by a nascent film community and in 2004 was given a half-million-dollar budget to write and direct her first feature. The result, “We Go Way Back,” is a polished, impressionistic film about a young, drifting actress who is confronted by her 13-year-old self. Although working collaboratively was a revelation, the intrusive equipment and crowded set seemed to inhibit Ms. Shelton’s true passion: small, moving, organic performances.
At the Maryland Film Festival in 2006 Ms. Shelton became fast friends with the director Joe Swanberg, then 24, whose films exemplify the D.I.Y. filmmaking movement known as Mumblecore. “She could tell that we all had fun making the movie,” Mr. Swanberg said referring to “LOL,” a film he made with friends, a cheap camera, no script and $3,000. “And that we were still having fun, showing it at festivals. I think that was really appealing to her.”
Ms. Shelton was inspired to apply her own ideas about collaborative chemistry, pared-down production and improvised dialogue to her next project, 2008’s sharp, lucent “My Effortless Brilliance.” Her muse for the film, the story of a breakup between two straight men, was her friend, the former Harvey Danger frontman Sean Nelson (he will also co-star, with the author Sherman Alexie, in her next project), who had never acted before but was willing to infuse the role of a selfish, hollowed-out writer with his own experience and his own words.
“It wasn’t until she started making films in that way that she started really feeling like, ‘This is who I am,’ ” Mr. Nelson said. “In an interesting way, by listening she discovered her voice.”
“Humpday,” her third feature, added a more ambitious idea — one born of Ms. Shelton’s curiosity about the low-grade homophobia often exhibited by the average man — to this free-ranging style, and she proposed it to the actor and filmmaker Mark Duplass.
“We were fully aware that this movie might just fall on its face,” Mr. Duplass said. “And that to me was really exciting.” Speaking of the comfort level it took to “expose myself, no pun intended,” Mr. Duplass credited Ms. Shelton’s facility with actors, enthusiasm for the working process and, tangentially, her greater affinity for men: “You know those girls who are closer with dudes, in general? She’s got a little bit of that going on, so that obviously plays into it.”
It’s a preference several men expressed on Ms. Shelton’s behalf; when asked to confirm or deny it, she was briefly and uncharacteristically speechless — considering the sources, perhaps — then let loose one of her tumbling guffaws. Though admittedly cycling through a longstanding fascination with the male psyche, Ms. Shelton insisted that she favors humor, not testosterone, on set and off.
“She surrounds herself with people who are just flat-out, ridiculously funny,” said Alycia Delmore, who plays Ben’s wife, Anna, in “Humpday.” “But Lynn is not the one cracking jokes, she’s the one laughing hardest.”
At the screening Ms. Shelton, long-limbed in her sequined cocktail dress and a little bashful before the capacity crowd, expressed her delight to the audience in bringing the film to New York, her home for 10 formative years, before taking her seat within it. A few days earlier, discussing the film’s climactic hotel-room scene, she described her stars’ doubts after hours spent improvising the outcome of their porn-shoot pact.
“They didn’t think we had it,” she said. “They thought that there was some good stuff in there, but they weren’t sure we had the very ending. I was a little scared, but I had a lot more confidence than they did.” (“Lynn was operating from a place of love,” Mr. Duplass explained, “and Josh and I were operating from a place of fear.”)
As that final scene played out on screen, once again she received her reward: the audience was hers, rising and falling with nervous sniggers and full-bellied roars. “What, exactly, makes this a great piece of art?” Ben asks Andrew, in one of a series of half-hearted stalls. A few rows away Ms. Shelton’s vaulting laughter could be heard, even above the crowd.
Da The New York Times, 5 luglio 2009
