The Duplass Brothers Have Kidnapped Hollywood!

Basically, our goal is to find movie stars and have them get weird with us

“Our time is worth a ton of money right now,” Mark Duplass said matter-of-factly, and indeed, he and his big brother, Jay, could have been spending this particular afternoon extracting large checks from Hollywood studios — setting up a feature film or toiling on a rewrite job. Instead they were in Jay’s garage-turned-office in Los Angeles, preparing for a sound-looping session for their microbudget movie, “The Do-Deca-Pentathlon,” and generally acting like stoned teenagers in faded black jeans. Jay rooted through cardboard boxes, searching for microphones. Mark watched, strumming an acoustic guitar. They called each other “Dupes” a lot, a variation on Duplass that they stole from a friend.

Together, the Dupes have directed five feature films in seven years, including “The Puffy Chair,” “Cyrus” and “Jeff, Who Lives at Home.” This year alone, there were three Duplass-connected films at the Sundance festival: Mark acted in “Safety Not Guaranteed” and “Your Sister’s Sister” and wrote the script for “Black Rock,” directed by and starring his wife, Katie Aselton. The brothers’ new film, “The Do-Deca-Pentathlon,” is a sports comedy about brothers engaged in a two-man, 25-event battle; the Duplasses filmed it in 2008, but put it aside when Fox gave them the green light to do “Cyrus” — they say this is the first time in four years they’ve had the time to finish the movie.

In a cinematic world that seems to make no-budget indies and “The Avengers,” with not much in between, the Duplass brothers have found the sweet spot, both in sensibility and in accounting. Because stars like Jason Segel and Ed Helms want to work with them, they can get studio money in quantities that amount to a pittance by Hollywood standards yet to the brothers seem like downright Caligulan extravagance.

Mark looked at Jay’s carpet, now strewed with mismatched cables, and nodded approvingly. If people could see their home-brewed methods, he declared, they would be appalled.