See You When I See You is Jay Duplass’ second movie as a solo director, but it’s still a first: the first time he has directed from a project he didn’t originate.
The film, which premiered at Sundance and now gets its Texas premiere as a Festival Favorite at this year’s South by Southwest, is based on Tragedy Plus Time: A Tragi-Comic Memoir by Adam Cayton-Holland, who had already turned it into a completed script by the time producers Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon brought Jay on at the start of the pandemic. Jay said, “They wanted the movie to be really earnest and heartfelt but also funny, and that’s what they said I could do that well, and I believed them in the moment, so I bit.”
Coming in, Jay’s approach was simple: He would preserve as much as possible of the book, but this was going to be its own work. “I did, from the very get-go, say, Look, if I’m going to make this as a movie, I need to make it a movie, and I need to make it the best movie I can make, and if you’re down for that I would love to do it. Because, at a certain point, this has to be a movie, and not the facts of what happened to a family.’”
Fortunately, Cayton-Holland was on board with Jay making the kind of changes that the adaptation process would require. Jay said, “He was really cool about it. He went, ‘Yeah, I just want it to be the best movie it can be.’”
That’s why Adam Cayton-Holland becomes Aaron Whistler, played by Cooper Raiff (Shithouse, Cha Cha Real Smooth, Hal & Harper). Like Jay, Raiff is best known for creating his own projects, and See You When I See You is the writer/director’s first film as solely an actor. This was a bigger project for Jay, who noted that “it wasn’t a given” that he’d be able to cast “a relative unknown” in the lead. Bigger names were discussed, Jay said. “But the way that I feel about Cooper is that it’s a rare 27-year-old guy who can go to all those places emotionally and also be super-funny, and also in particular be super-funny making fun of himself, letting himself look like an idiot. And then on top of that you have a guy with a broken brain who’s doing some unsavory behavior. You really need to like this guy, you need to care about him and root for him and like him, and Cooper is just a really likable person.”
That likability and humor is essential to counterbalance the darker elements of the script, which all revolve around Aaron’s slow acceptance that he has PTSD as a result of finding his sister’s body after she commits suicide. With PTSD, Jay said, “Your brain is firing in very inefficient and problematic ways, and you do have to learn how to retrain it.”
The big concern for Jay was that not many people may understand how common PTSD is, or how many people know how effective Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) can be as part of therapy. However, those fears were put to one side after the Sundance post-screening Q&A. Producer Mark Duplass said, “People in the audience kept going, ‘I have been through this,’ or, ‘My loved one has been through this.’ That was inspiring for all of us.”
“People would grab me on the street,” Jay said, “and not just after screenings. People would grab me and say, ‘I needed that.’”
Being part of that bigger conversation, of talking about PTSD and maybe helping some people, was an undoubted element of Jay’s decision to make the film. He said, “Mark’s been really public and opened up a conversation about mental health with himself, and men in general. It’s been inspiring to see how positively that’s affected people. It’s been a conversation Mark and I have had since we were kids. We just didn’t know that’s what we were talking about. We were just talking about our feelings in ways that other boys weren’t.”
See You When I See You isn’t just about Aaron’s healing and growth, but that of his entire family, and how their relationships metamorphize over time. That’s something Jay and Mark understand in their own bond: For decades, they were the Duplass Brothers, known for co-writing and co-directing right back to their debut, The Puffy Chair. But when Jay made his solo directing debut with The Baltimorons, and with Mark creating more projects independently, they haven’t really separated, just grown. Mark said, “What’s been so great for me and Jay in the last few years has been this new form of being able to support each other in the right ways a little bit more from the sidelines, with a lot of cheering and a little bit of clear-eyed honesty.”
“We used to be enmeshed,” said Jay, and now each can give the other some informed perspective.
A perfect example, Jay said, was how Mark convinced him to make The Baltimorons a Christmas movie. “The Christmas lights were already up!” Mark laughed. It was a similar experience on See You When I See You, when Mark helped him create a temp score on “a $99 Yamaha keyboard, and Jay and I spent two days making a temporary score like we were 17 and 14 years old again. “It used to be two idiots pushing a camel through the eye of the needle,” said Mark. “Now it’s just one idiot and one person who can see a little bit.”
“We have a summit about once a month,” said Jay, “where we just really talk about the stuff. Just getting that perspective is huge, because there’s that saying: Your siblings are your longest relationship. We’re very different people, but we have been making art together since we were children, and the nature of the process, the way that we go about it, the way that we know inherently what the other needs when making a piece of art, you can’t get it even from a therapist. Nobody can do it.”
