'Like a Demo Tape From Your Favorite Band:' Mark Duplass Talks Improvisational Filmmaking

The very busy Mark Duplass (star of Your Sister's Sister and Safety Not Guaranteed; writer/director of Jeff, Who Lives at Home and The Do-Deca-Pentathalon) talks to Fast Company's Co.Create about why he favors an improvisational style of filmmaking.

He says, "I would say that making a movie with a perfectly constructed script that took two to three years to write is probably going to make the best movie in the long run, but if you’re making them quickly and shaggy and cheaply, I believe that allowing your actors to improvise will make a better movie usually. What you achieve is that wonderful quality of a demo tape from your favorite band, like if you listen to the demo tapes of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot from Wilco. It’s raw, it’s loose, some of it’s a little out of pitch and a little out of time, but you feel like you were there the moment the idea was birthed. And there’s something very special and intimate about that, and I love that feeling, I think that’s what improvisation brings to narrative cinema."

Read the full interview here.