ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
Mark Duplass suffers from what he likes to call incessant creativity. In addition to his Emmy-nominated role as Chip on "The Morning Show," he has written, directed and produced dozens of projects over the course of two decades, often with his brother, Jay Duplass. Currently, Mark is the producer of "Out There: Crimes Of The Paranormal" on Hulu and "Penelope" on Netflix, which he also cowrote. "Penelope" is about a teenage girl who runs away from home to try and survive in the woods by herself. It's intentionally slow and quiet. He says the idea was inspired by watching the reality show "Alone."
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MARK DUPLASS: Where they send people off into the Canadian wilderness with 10 items, and you watch them slowly make a shelter for 12 minutes, learn how to build a fire for 8 minutes, sit with themselves. And I was like, well, this is fascinating. It's my perfect show. No one's going to want to watch this - except my kids were riveted by it. And I was like, could I make a show like this?
SCHMITZ: Mark Duplass joined NPR's Rachel Martin on Wild Card, where famous guests answer big questions about their life drawn from a deck of cards. Here's Rachel.
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RACHEL MARTIN: What period of your life do you often daydream about?
DUPLASS: When I was 20 years old, I took a semester off of college. I was at the University of Texas. And I used to work as a busboy at a restaurant. I'd saved up about $2,000. I decided I'm going to record my own record, and I'm going to book my own tour and live out of my van. And so I booked a 4 1/2-month tour. You know, a lot of it were just, like, open mic nights or whatever I could get and a lot of unpaid gigs. But that time, no cellphone, traveling by a Rand McNally map, getting lost a bunch, showing up, not having anywhere to sleep, offering a free CD to anyone who would put me up, giving myself into the energy and the belief that if I just jump off of this cliff with a little bit of naivete and earnestness, you know, and - that the world will catch me, and it will take care of me. And it did.
And I would go two to three days sometimes without speaking to someone if there were time off. And all I had were my books. And I would go hiking, and I didn't have a phone in order to escape. So I sat with myself in a way that no 20-year-old, I think, today is offered the luxury - I'm going to call it a luxury - to be able to do.
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MARTIN: One, two or three.
DUPLASS: I'll take No. 1, please.
MARTIN: How do you manage envy?
DUPLASS: Oh, my gosh. That's such a good question. I had a lot of it early on. Like, I had a really hard time being able to enjoy, like, John Krasinski and Zach Braff 'cause I was like, they're taking up my spots. (Laughter) It made me mad, you know?
MARTIN: They are only a certain number of spots...
DUPLASS: That is - exactly.
MARTIN: ...For white guys who are tall in Hollywood.
DUPLASS: Taking up my spots.
MARTIN: (Laughter).
DUPLASS: And so it's actually not really a big problem for me at this point. But it does rear its head every now and then. And, you know, I talk a lot about my own journeys with mental health on social media and whatnot. So it's less about, well, I'm feeling envious about this person because their independent film really knocked it out of the park and mine didn't this year, and I'm feeling bad about myself. So I really just have to go inward. And for me, there's a couple of just really simple solutions, which is, did you get your 8 hours of sleep? Did you get at least 20 to 30 minutes of rigorous exercise to get your endorphins going? Have you done your meditation? Are you eating good foods? And as long as I get those basic things in, I stay relatively centered.
MARTIN: So it's part of - envy is just part of the cornucopia of...
DUPLASS: It's exactly...
MARTIN: ...Emotions...
DUPLASS: That's exactly right.
MARTIN: ...And mental health stuff you're managing. Yeah.
DUPLASS: Yes. The way I describe my life is like, if I wake up feeling something - whether it's jealous, envy, sadness, overwhelmed - what I do is I do something I call the scan. I look up at the ceiling, and I throw all the elements of my life up on the ceiling, just like you fanned out those cards for me, right? And I'm like, OK, marriage, kids, work life, my jealousy, my envy, my this, my that. And usually if there's, like, one or two things wrong, that means there's something wrong with those things. And I'll pick those things out, and I'll solve them. But for me, usually what it is, is they all look wrong to me, and I realize it's not that overnight everything went wrong. It's something going on inside of me that I need to retool so that I can then look at them with clearer eyes.
MARTIN: I think that's helpful for a lot of people to hear. It's like, you don't need to fix it all at the same time.
DUPLASS: No, no.
MARTIN: You know what I mean?
DUPLASS: No.
MARTIN: You can just fix one thing, address one thing. And maybe not even fix is the right word because fix (inaudible).
DUPLASS: Let's say address.
MARTIN: Address.
DUPLASS: Address.
MARTIN: Acknowledge.
DUPLASS: Yes.
MARTIN: Right. Fixing - I don't know. OK, three new cards - one, two, three.
DUPLASS: No. 1, again.
MARTIN: No. 1 - oh, are you good at knowing when something should end?
DUPLASS: Wow. OK. Here is - here's what I'll say to that. My journey as an artist and a creative person for most of my life has been lockstep with my brother. And what that has meant is that I have only had to learn how to do a certain amount of things well because I had a partner who could do those other things.
MARTIN: Yeah.
DUPLASS: One of those things is the finishing of art. I am not good at it.
MARTIN: What do you mean? Get specific.
DUPLASS: OK. You...
MARTIN: Like with a story?
DUPLASS: You and I are hanging out, and we're like, let's make a movie together. And we come up with a concept. There's no - I really feel it strongly - there's almost no one better than me who will team build and begin this process better. I will look around and say, this person should be our DP. We're going to shoot it in this house. We're going to make it for $50,000. There's no way it will lose money. I have this power where I can just galvanize things and get them to the 85% completion mark extremely well. And then, like a relay race, you're watching me with the baton trying to pass it off, and my legs just start giving out on me. And I need a closer.
MARTIN: Yeah.
DUPLASS: And Jay has always been my closer, and he is excellent at it. But, you know, about five years ago, Jay really requested some creative space from being lockstep, making creativity together.
MARTIN: Yeah.
DUPLASS: So while we still produce together as a company, you know, I lost my closer and my partner.
MARTIN: Were you OK with that ending, though? The question's about ending things.
DUPLASS: Yeah.
MARTIN: Yeah.
DUPLASS: Yeah. Yeah.
MARTIN: Things end.
DUPLASS: Things end. I - my feeling about that is what has emerged from my brother's and my ending of our lockstep creative partnership has been unexpectedly quite incredible, where we're now on the sidelines of each other's artistic pieces, cheering each other on with zero competition, no fighting for breathing space. It's quite beautiful, but it was very hard.
MARTIN: Mark Duplass - he's the producer of "Out There" on Hulu, and he produced and cowrote "Penelope" on Netflix. Mark, thank you so much.
DUPLASS: Thank you. This was so fun.
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SCHMITZ: Follow NPR's Wild Card podcast to hear a longer version of that conversation. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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