The Light in the Tragedy of Magic Hour

Since setting the table for the microbudget revolution known as mumblecore in 2005 with The Puffy Chair, Katie Aselton and Mark Duplass have become an indie filmmaking power couple.

Take their latest film, Magic Hour, debuting at South by Southwest: Aselton directs from a script she co-wrote with Duplass, who also produces, Aselton also takes the leading role as Erin, a woman working through a life-altering change in the relationship with her husband, Charlie. That part went to Hamilton, and Blindspotting star Daveed Diggs, rather than Duplass. Why not act opposite her real-life husband, as she did in The Puffy Chair? Aselton grimaced comedically. “I don’t know if people could really stomach us being like, ‘Look at how in love we are. Isn’t it devastating? We’re soooooo cute.’”

However, their love and strong bond is the underpinning of the film and became a way to explore the existential angst inherent in a cherished relationship. “That existential angst is always there,” Aselton explained, and one way the couple decompress from it is to take a a vacation every January, just after the madness of the holiday season. “We say, ‘Kids, we’re out’ and we go away for a long weekend, just to reset.” In 2020, just before the pandemic throttled so many dreams, “the world was our oyster, and of course the big New Year’s question was, ‘What do you want from this year?’” Her response was two-fold: First, she wanted to get back to the DIY ethos of her earliest films as writer and director, and second that she wanted “a role I would never be cast in. I get oft sidelined as ‘the funny wife who won’t put up with the guff.’ I just want to stretch on both sides of the camera. And Mark went, ‘Great. So let’s fucking write it.’” So, on the road from Big Sur to Los Angeles, they recorded “a voice-to-text spiel of the movie.”

“It was deeply personal,” she continued. “It was like me and Mark but it wasn’t.” However, it was definitely built around hypotheticals spinning out of their relationship. “How do you grieve? How do you hold on to love? How do you process love, in general?”

In Erin, she gave herself the latitude to perform the kind of role she was yearning to play, a role that would allow her to “teeter on the edge of sanity.” What it creates is what can be called her Gena Rowlands moment, playing a part that shows a woman in all her extremities and intricacies.

However, Aselton also had her directing duties to consider. With her time split between behind and in front of the camera, she credited her team for creating “a net to come back to, and my editor [Stephanie Kaznocha] who was keeping it so beautifully connected. That’s the wild thing about being the actor and director, that someone has to rein me in eventually.”

There were, of course, discussions about Duplass playing Charlie, but they were brief. As soon as they met Diggs, Aselton said, “It was clear he just was Charlie, and made it very easy for me to be Erin next to him.” And now that Charlie-shaped space in the script was filled by someone other than Duplass, Aselton was able to reconsider the character with her leading man in mind. Take one key scene in which Charlie was humming along to a tune on the car radio. “Well, I have Daveed Diggs. There will be no humming. I believe he will be belting the song out of the back of the convertible.”

---

Magic Hour

Narrative Spotlight, World Premiere

Friday 7, 3:15pm, Rollins Theatre
Tuesday 11, 7pm, Alamo South Lamar

---

Catch up with all of The Austin Chronicle's SXSW 2025 coverage.