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  1) While you are woodshedding and developing your craft, do not live in a big city with expensive rents. Find a place like Detroit or New Orleans, even the outskirts of Portland and Austin. These places offer a community of creative, smart young underdogs chasing their dreams, with affordable housing to boot. Live here until you need to live in one of the major markets (which is maybe never, by the way).

  2) Buy a house in this place as soon as possible. We realize that this sounds insanely difficult, but you can buy a home in the up-and-coming areas of Detroit and New Orleans for less than $50,000. Not to get all math dork up in here, but that means all you need to do is save up (or charge to a willing credit card) $5,000 for a ten percent down payment. Then your total mortgage, with taxes-insurance-upkeep, will likely be less than $750 a month. We know, $750 a month can be a lot. So…

  3) Get yourself some roommates to help cover the monthly bill. They can even pay you some advance rent to help with the down payment. Also, this roommate portion is just as important for community as it is for money. When you are young, you need people who know you and understand you to bounce your ideas off of. We have lived in houses with up to five people at a time, and it was invaluable to our developmental and creative process. Yes, the bathroom was nasty and the kitchen was roach-heavy, but it was worth it. Not to mention, if you can rent out two to three bedrooms in this home for $300 to $400 month, you will have your entire mortgage paid for (with maybe even a little rice-and-beans stipend left over) and will be living rent-free.

  4) Make sure the neighborhood where you buy has at least a few artists living there. Invite other artists to live with you and near you. Build a community around you, and as the cool factor rises (we know, dorky), so will the value of your home. Soon enough, you will have a huge home-equity stake in a neighborhood that has risen in value, and you will actually make money refinancing your home.

  5) This is the most important part. When you are hitting it big and don’t need this house anymore, please just hold on to it and rent it very cheaply to your roommates who have not yet broken out. They need your help, and you can give them that help now. And you should.

  How’d we do, Nicky?

  WHEN I TURNED fifteen and got my driver’s license, it was all over. My life as a high school freshman ended and my life as a de facto college student began. Every chance I got I would hop into the car and drive eight hours to Austin for extended weekend visits to see Jay. As long as I made my grades, our parents were supportive of the absences. And though it was clearly unorthodox, the family dynamic seemed to be working. Jay’s confidence was returning, and he and I were reconnected and as close as ever.

  As far as Jay and I were concerned, this was the time frame when we truly fell in love as collaborators. It was then that we became the inseparable soul mates that we always wanted to be. And being in Austin, which was full of great self-made artists in the early nineties, was a big part of it. From musicians like Daniel Johnston and Joe Rockhead to indie filmmaker heroes like Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez, we always had things to see and people to look up to. We would see Linklater give Q&A talkbacks at midnight screenings of Slacker at the Dobie Theater. He wore jeans and ratty T-shirts and old Nikes. He felt like a regular dude. Could he possibly be making important art films without a beret or a turtleneck? It seemed so. He made us believe that maybe we could actually be successful filmmakers too. And we continued dreaming together about who we could become.

  Summers during this period were a particularly glorious time. Jay would come home from school and I would be anxiously waiting with my acoustic guitar and our parents’ crappy video camera. Three months of living back in the suburbs, the world whatever we wanted it to be. We would work some sort of odd job during the day (landscaping crews, bussing tables, our uncle’s dry cleaner’s), but the nights were when we shined. We would record cover versions of our favorite Commodores and Lionel Richie songs on our used four-track. We’d go for three-mile runs in the middle of the night. We’d take the video camera and film ourselves jumping trains, trying to improvise a narrative and failing terribly. Then come home and use our guitars to live-score whatever dumb footage we’d shot until the sun came up. Then we’d jump into the pool, listen to late-album Steely Dan, sleep a few hours, and do it all over again. These were some of the happiest times in our lives. We still didn’t believe we would actually become successful artists, but we were playing house in a way. Pretending to live the lives of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan. Or the Coen Brothers. We threw ourselves into each other, distancing ourselves a bit from our friends, our girlfriends, and even our parents.

  By the time my senior year of high school came around, I was faced with a decision to pay full tuition at UC Berkeley and build my own life out in California or take a full-ride scholarship to UT Austin like Jay did. It should have been a very difficult decision. But it wasn’t. The thought of not being with Jay felt, quite simply, like a divorce. I still don’t know if it was healthy. But it was what it was.

  So in 1995 I moved to Austin to attend the University of Texas as well, and by the time I arrived the new brother dynamic was squarely in place. Jay wasn’t the leader anymore, and I wasn’t the follower. We were more like peers. Almost like twins. We could finish each other’s sentences, we shared the exact same tastes. We could spend hours on end together, never tiring of each other’s company, never fighting. The only real issue we had was our constant discussion of whether we should be pursuing movies or music as a career and whether we were doing ourselves a disservice by trying to pursue both simultaneously. And with Jay’s impending graduation from UT, we both had the feeling that “shit just got real.” That it was time to figure out how to make a living and see if this artist’s life was a possible reality. At the time, I had a slight lean toward music and Jay toward film. He would play in my bands, but I was more of the leader there. Meanwhile, we were discussing ways that Jay could make money as a recent college graduate. So we devised a scheme. I needed a conversion van with a foldout bed to go touring, as I was pursuing a solo singer-songwriter career at the time. (Yes, I had sideburns and a soul patch. And Tevas.) And we decided that, since we’d both learned how to edit movies in film school, we would buy an editing machine and start an editing business. Jay could be the leader of that side of our collaboration, make his living, and learn more about filmmaking in the process.

  We sold both of our cars, pooled our money, and scraped together enough to buy me a shitty van and also the baseline Avid computer to start our editing business. We rented an office from a friend for $100 a month (a box with no windows), and in 1997 we officially started Duplass Brothers Productions. The company released my first solo album, a thousand pressed CDs that I sold from the back of my van on my self-booked tours, and we edited all the low-budget features being made in Austin at the time at the cool rate of $15 an hour.

  We didn’t realize it at the time, but a tiny shift was occurring. One that was very important to the future of our careers. We were, ever so slightly, moving away from the “we are one person” way of operating and into the area that we now call “president and vice president” mode, whereby one of us leads ever so slightly on a given discipline or project. (More on this later.)

  And we functioned like this for quite a few years. Jay played with me in my music projects when he could, and I edited with the business when I wasn’t on tour. It was an unusual separation for us, but it worked well and allowed us to have a bit of space while still working together. Still, success was not coming in either field, and we were wondering where we would end up. In the back of our minds, both of us were thinking that we’d probably have to give up soon and try to get into some sort of graduate school and ultimately find real jobs. After all, the touring was barely enough to get by, and the editing business was barely turning a profit. Times were tight even for our less-than-$250-a-month rents. (To save cash, we lived on the outskirts of tow
n in shitty apartments with too many roommates.)

  Eventually a huge opportunity fell into our laps. Through a high school friend connection, a former Fortune 500 start-up hired us to make a documentary about their company. They apologized for the “small budget,” offering us half a million dollars to make it. We tried not to excitement-vomit in their faces in the meeting. But when we left we danced in the alleyway behind the building, punching and slapping each other with unbridled joy. The project would be a perfect fit for us. I would create the music score, Jay would do the on-the-ground filming, and we would edit it together along with our new employee, Jay Deuby (who would eventually become our longtime collaborator and unofficial third brother).

  We ultimately made the film incredibly cheaply, which allowed us to pay our friends and collaborators extraordinarily well and still pocket a large chunk of cash ourselves. And, in a moment of great irony, just as we handed the film over to them, the dot-com bubble burst and the company folded. No one ever saw the film.

  But we didn’t care. We were twenty-two and twenty-six. For the first time in our lives, we had some real money in our bank accounts. Money we had made as “artists.” We talked and talked into the night about what we should do with it. A big part of us wanted to invest the money. Or even buy a house. We knew that artists had to save, that when the cash came in you had to be smart and put it aside for the dry spells. But, again, we were twenty-two and twenty-six. And we were dreaming big. So even though we had yet to write and direct any kind of narrative film (even a short) that was remotely watchable, we decided to use our profits from the documentary to make our first narrative feature film. We wanted to be Linklater and Rodriguez. We wanted to go for it.

  Within six months we were in preproduction on Vince Del Rio.

  IF THERE WAS ever a heyday of our brotherly connection, it was during our time in Austin. Once we were back together in the same place we were like a couple reunited after World War II. Okay, not really. But we were dorky, we were excited, and we were soul mates.

  It was also during this time that we both were embarking on long-term romantic relationships. Jay met his girlfriend senior year, and I met mine freshman year (we will hold back the names to protect the innocent). These two amazing women were somehow able to look past Jay’s sideburns and my hemp necklaces, and both couples quickly became fairly serious. Jay’s girlfriend was roughly the same age as me and my girlfriend, so the chemistry worked pretty well for us as a foursome. And, in truth, in all the time we were dating there were very few conflicts, considering how close Jay and I were and the potential for disaster awaiting all of us in that four-way soup. But looking back on it now, we can see how unhealthy it all was.

  First of all, we had no idea how to respect the privacy of a romantic relationship. Whatever was happening behind closed doors with our girlfriends was immediately opened up for brotherly conversation and analysis. Some of the things we shared were downright disrespectful, but we had no clue that this was inappropriate in any way because we were soul mates and we shared everything. The endgame of this was simple…no matter how close we got to our girlfriends, there was no way it could compare to the closeness that we shared as brothers. And while we sensed something was off in the way we were relating to our girlfriends at the time, we couldn’t quite put our finger on it. In all honesty, these were fantastic women we were dating. We were both lucky to have them choose us. But there was a barrier there. And neither of us could truly see through the present to any potential long-term future with them. Part of it was that we were still young and a bit immature, but there was also something much deeper and more dysfunctional at work. We didn’t realize what it was until we had a conversation one day with a set of identical twins who were regaling us with tales of what they described as their “hopelessly fucked-up love lives.” They had recently decided that they weren’t going to date anyone who was not also a twin. Their theory was that no one could understand that specific bond that they shared with their twin unless they were also a twin. Anyone else that they tried to date would always feel threatened and never understand that, no matter what, no one would ever be as close to them as their twin sibling.

  This conversation hit us like a lightning bolt. And we immediately understood what was happening. We had been dating our girlfriends for a few years, but the relationships had stopped progressing. And it was most certainly due to the level of closeness that we shared as brothers. At the end of the day, we shared our deepest and darkest secrets with each other and not our girlfriends. When we needed a shoulder, we turned to each other. And not them.

  Kinda sweet.

  Kinda fucked up.

  In the end, our graduations came and we all went our separate ways. I went on tour, Jay stayed back with the editing business, and our foursome that had so much potential broke up. It was a sad time, and we both felt a bit soul-sick about the way things ended in our first grown-up romantic relationships.

  In the middle of the tour I had a short break, so Jay flew out to meet me in Las Vegas for a few days. Jay brought with him two vintage pastel suits and two Hawaiian shirts. We dressed up like late-seventies tourists and roamed the streets of Vegas. We took stupid pictures, we got onstage with a low-rent casino’s house band and played a tight version of Toto’s “Africa” with them. I talked about the loneliness of touring and Jay talked about his fears about making our upcoming first feature film. It was a beautiful but bittersweet couple of days. It reconfirmed how strong our bond was, how even at this somewhat awkward time in our lives our simply being together could raise our spirits and make us stronger. But we could also feel the dysfunction of our closeness. That our union was most likely the reason things didn’t work out with our ex-girlfriends. That we might never find anyone we could be as close with as we were with each other. That, quite frankly, we might end up in Vegas thirty years from now wearing these suits and doing all the ridiculous things we were currently doing, but without a hint of irony. And that was a really fucking scary thought.

  It wasn’t until much later, when we finally met the women we would eventually marry, that we learned a much harder truth about all of this. That we would somehow have to create space inside our bizarre order of the brotherhood to make room for successful romantic relationships to grow.

  WHILE WE OBVIOUSLY collaborate as brothers quite a bit, the truth is we work with a much larger group of people on a weekly if not daily basis. And we’ve come to understand that this large group of friends and colleagues with whom we collaborate is an integral part of our process.

  We often get asked how we make so many projects in a year. All false modesty aside, our output can be pretty bananas; this year alone we’ll make multiple indie films, a few TV shows, some international commercials; we’ll engage in multiple acting roles, finish a couple of studio writing assignments, write this book, etc. It all adds up and seems like a lot if you think of two brothers trying to crank all of this out on their own. So…how do we do it? Well, one answer is that we have a fundamental desperation to make things, and we are willing to destroy ourselves to get those things done (more on this extremely helpful-dangerous element of our personalities later on). But the simplest answer is that we don’t make all of these projects on our own. In fact, we don’t make any of them on our own. And part of the reason for this is time constraints, but mostly it has to do with an ideology we have developed over the years about what it means to be an “original” artist.

  For a while, we thought we wanted to be auteurs. This is a dangerous and, quite frankly, stupid word. In our opinion, most of the bad films we see come from people being close-minded and unwilling to compromise their “vision” of a project. To be clear, some people really can visualize a piece of art and see it through and, somehow, make it great. It seems that people like the Coen Brothers have a specific vision of what their movies will look like from the moment they begin writing them, and then somehow are able to realize tha
t vision and make those movies, for the most part, inspired and impeccably amazing. We, however, are not the Coen Brothers. We tried that approach once and we failed miserably (more on this later as well). We have realized that we are in fact human beings who are good at some things and not so good at other things. We are capable of being right and wrong at any given turn in the creative process, and we need help from the smart people around us to be the best versions of ourselves we can be.

  And this is why we have implemented the “Eighty is enough” approach to making films, partly an homage to the fantastic Dick Van Patten television show of the early 1980s but mostly a theory that has resulted in years of us failing at making decent art, eating crow, and finding smart people nearby to bail us out. In other words, try your best to get your work at any given stage to what you think is at least eighty percent as good as it can be. Then, when you hit a wall, share it with someone you trust and see how it can be improved.

  Let’s say we have an idea for a movie. The two of us will spend a ton of time talking it over, coming up with scene ideas, hammering the characters and plot into somewhat legible shape. Then we tend to go off and begin the oral storytelling phase. At dinner parties, over lunch, while taking walks with friends, etc., we begin to tell the story to people. Inevitably, we will look into their eyes and see where their interest piques and where it wanes. And when it wanes, we just ask them how they felt, what they liked, and what they wanted more or less of in the story.

  After a few rounds of this, the two of us will put together a written outline for the film. Again, we hammer it until it’s about eighty percent there (or roughly as far as we can take it until we lose perspective and risk making changes that might actually ruin it). At this point, since it’s only a few pages, we will share it with quite a few writers and also with one person who does not work in the film business whatsoever. It’s not a huge time ask, and if we’re lucky the multiple feedbacks will dovetail in a way that tells us what’s missing. Sometimes everyone agrees and it’s easy. Sometimes the feedback is more disparate. Our job is to figure out what makes the most sense and, often, to find what people call the “note behind the note”; i.e., sometimes people say they want “less of this character” when they really just want more of another character. This phase can be a little confusing, but ultimately we take that feedback and adjust our outline.