What do you do if you’re making a movie about making a porn flick? You do your freaking research obviously, which is the position “Humpday” star Josh Leonard found himself in when gearing up to shoot the indie movie about two straight college buddies who reunite in their 30s to make a gay porn in the somewhat misguided name of art.
“I started researching porn on the Internet about ten, twelve years ago, because I knew I would use it for something,” he joked with MTV News during a recent interview. “I thought it was important to be an aficionado. You’ve heard how Daniel Day-Lewis researches his roles – he goes deep. I’m following that template.”
The idea behind “Humpday” is pure farce, but from the beginning writer/director Lynn Shelton ("My Effortless Brilliance") put the focus on deriving a naturalistic, character-driven story out of the absurdist high concept. The entire project got started based on her desire to work with Mark Duplass (“The Puffy Chair”) and they ended up hitting on the straight-guys-make-gay-porn idea after she had a conversation with a friend.
“A straight friend of mine came to Seattle and went to this amateur porn festival, ‘Hump!’ and saw gay porn for the first time in his life,” she explained at the film's premiere party on New York’s Lower East Side. “He kept talking about how compelling and fascinating it was. So I started thinking about how funny the relationship between straight guys and gayness is and how even those most progressive, open-minded guys have this residual anxiety when it comes to this stuff.”
In a movie that was largely improvised based on Shelton’s outline, Duplass plays Ben, a married city planner who’s settled into a comfortable white picket fence existence. One night his aimless friend Andrew (Leonard) shows up at his door, and after an evening of booze- and pot-fueled jabbering, the duo decide to conquer that amateur porn festival by addressing one of the only remaining porn taboos: non-pro straight guys gettin’ it on.
As it turned out, “Humpday” (out July 10) is hitting theaters at a time when mainstream movies—from “I Love You, Man” to “Brüno”—are starting to challenge traditional gender roles. But Shelton and her cast never anticipated becoming so culturally relevant.
“The fact that we lucked into this bromantic Zeitgeist is total s--- luck on our part,” said Leonard. “The roles of a dude in society are really just being redefined as we get away from the antiquated, John Wayne notion of what a man’s supposed to be.”
As Duplass put it, “We are sensitive dudes and use a whole lot of estrogen in our relationship and are comfortable about it.”
That didn’t stop their apprehension about taking part in the movie. “My initial feeling was this sounds really exciting and this sounds like it could be absolutely horrible if we don’t treat it carefully,” Duplass said.
Leonard agreed to sign on before Shelton and Duplass revealed the full storyline. He says he told his good friend Duplass, “Okay, I trust your taste, but please never let me sign onto anything before learning what it’s about.”
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