In “Biosphere,” the world has ended.
In the film, which had its premiere at the newly reopened Vidiots video store and opens in theaters July 7, Mark Duplass plays Billy, the conservative U.S. president whose actions are largely responsible for the environmental cataclysm. The only reason he’s still alive is that his best friend since childhood, Sterling K. Brown’s Ray, is a scientist who built a biodome for the two of them to escape end times.
Inside their safety zone, they’ve got books, plants and fish that reproduce and keep them fed,; the two spend their time exercising and debating the relationships between Mario and Luigi in “Super Mario Brothers” even as they feel haunted by a mysterious green light outside their home.
“Biosphere” is a two-hander, a comedy within an existential crisis that’s asking questions about identity and evolution on numerous levels. It was written by Duplass and Mel Eslyn and directed by Eslyn, president of Duplass Brothers Productions, the company Mark founded with his sibling Jay.
Duplass, who said in a recent phone interview that they wrote the part for Brown without knowing if he’d say yes, is thrilled to give Eslyn, a veteran producer, her first turn at the helm, overseeing these two men as they try sorting out their feelings and their lives.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Do you see things as hopeful or hopeless – both in terms of world and climate change as well as interpersonal relationships?
Wow, that’s a big question. I’m an optimist by nature but I’m not a blind optimist. I’m essentially a cockroach — you just can’t kill me because I’m so willing to pivot to whatever is working and I find some glimmer of hope and positivity and put myself into that. I’m an uber-realist who has a sense of, “Man, I’m just lucky to be here in the first place” — not just on the planet but also in an industry that pays me to make weird art like “Biosphere.”
Q. How did this movie come about?
I’m a man who grew up in the South and went to an all-male parochial high school where we were told, “You are the smartest and most powerful and you should be the leaders.” I’ve been slowly unwinding that element of my masculinity for a while, as a person in therapy and inside my art.
Then I brought in Mel, and with her perspective as a queer woman, it became something bigger. That’s something I’m really enjoying lately –for a while it was just myself and my brother against the world and now I’m collaborating with lots of different types of people. There are things I don’t have the authority to do or I’m not good at doing that they bring into the mix.
Q. This film, your 2019 film “Paddleton,” and your new series, “The Long, Long Night” are all focused on male friendships.
I was just following my instincts with my art but here’s my b.s. armchair analysis about why I’m doing these projects about platonic relationships: I met the love of my life when I was 24 years old in Katie [Aselton]. That element, with the ups-and-downs, the great sine-cosine waves, the “will it work or not” was filled for me, so the great area of exploration took the form of familial and then platonic relationships — that’s where I experience crushes, heartbreaks. So that’s why I’m drawn to it.
I have this interest in telling these male intimacy stories. I didn’t think it was a unique perspective because of how my brother and I are, but when I put it on screen people would say, “Wow these guys are wildly different than your average North American males in how they relate to each other.” That encouraged me to explore it a little further. “Biosphere” use almost a fable element to go into reaches of places I haven’t really gone before.
Q. There’s a lot going on in the movie — about environmental calamity, gender identity, friendship, mortality and the deeper meanings of the relationship between Mario and Luigi. How do you balance it all?
It’s not a message movie at its core. Our goal was just to give people a great ride and let them laugh. But finding the tonal balance, where you need to hold “Dumb and Dumber” and “Waiting for Godot” inside, was challenging. Mel and I really believed we could do that, but we were nervous. It took a long time to get it right.
No filmmaker does this on their own. We showed it to hundreds of our closest filmmaker friends and let them tell us, “This is not working” or “This is not as funny as you think it is.”
Q. You’ve been doing this for so long and have your own sense of humor, so if they say that but you and Mel think it’s funny, whose judgment do you trust?
Usually, they explain, “I know why you think it’s funny, but I was ahead of you at this moment so if you shave off three frames it’ll be funny the way you think it is,” or “The score was so mysterious here that I was losing the humor.”
Q. There’s a lot of science in the whole biosphere concept. How much do you sweat the details of that versus focusing on emotional truths?
We filled the script full of the real science and then pared it back. Our goal was to give people as little as they need to feel comfortable that they were in good hands with the story and then focus on the interpersonal dynamics. Those scientific elements are just the support system for what’s going on between the two men in the film.
Q. You’ve plumbed the depths of the Mario and Luigi relationship. What’s left for you to explore?
We had this film under wraps for a long time, so we were relishing that people are just starting to see it now. Then Mel and I were on the phone yesterday and we started doing what we always do, asking, “What’s the next movie?” We caught ourselves and said, “What if we didn’t ruin our enjoyment by worrying about that – what if we just enjoyed the release of “Biosphere.” It’s an exercise in self-restraint.
Q. Why was it exciting to have the Los Angeles premiere at the new Vidiots Foundation theater at Eagle Rock, of which you are a founding member?
Vidiots is my heart right now. I grew up in New Orleans going to a movie theater called Pitchers that had drinks and food and was a second-run art house. It meant so much to be able to learn about independent filmmakers there. That’s been missing in my life. So when Maggie Mackay called me and said, “I want to try and bring Vidiots back,” I said, “You want to try and bring back a physical video rental store with an art-house movie theater?”
It was so anti-capitalist and so against the grain that I said, “Let’s go for it.” If “Biosphere” is about anything, it’s about magic and keeping little flickers of your dreams alive, even when they don’t seem practical.
