Nostalgia for a Promised Future in Their Town

Many directors keep screenwriters off their sets, but Katie Aselton (Magic Hour) had the best reason ever for keeping Mark Duplass away from the filming of Their Town: Someone had to stay home to look after their youngest daughter. “It’s a pragmatic puzzle when you’re trying to deal with family filmmaking,” said Duplass.

This wasn’t just about the husband-and-wife filmmaking duo. Their Town, which premieres Saturday at this year’s South by Southwest, was written with oldest daughter Ora in mind as Abby. She’s a teenager in Maine, cast in the high school production of Our Town opposite her boyfriend. When he unexpectedly drops out, a quiet newcomer to the school, Matt (Chosen Jacobs), is shoved into this emotionally intimate situation.

Duplass admits he considered directing the script himself, but quickly realized that this was a film for Aselton to make. In part, her sense of “visual poetry” was more in keeping with the words on the page, but a bigger factor was her relationship with her daughter, and how that would influence the film. “Katie and Ora are very, very similar,” he said. “They’re both so beautiful, emotionally intelligent, sharp, kind of intimidating when you meet them and they’re both still deeply insecure, and I find that one of the most charming and most confusing things about them, and that was required for this film and this role, and I thought they could do this together.”

Their Town elaborates on themes that appeared in his indie TV show, Penelope, especially in how teens increasingly reject modernity and technology. However, the script was in many ways also a reaction to what he was seeing in the YA TV series being aimed at his kids – or rather, what he wasn’t seeing. “The characters on screen didn’t feel like my kids or their peers,” he said. “They are a really introspective, somewhat hopeful, fairly sad, deeply anxious group who [are] desperate for real connection – way less horny than Amazon and Netflix would have me believe, and more into the platonic ‘I need someone to wrap my arms around because the world is so fucking scary.’”

That’s why the story is centered around Our Town. Thornton Wilder’s play is “a big piece of Americana lore,” Duplass said, but unlike just about every other artsy kid in an American high school, he never took part in or even watched a production. “I never did theatre,” he said. “I was always an indie film nerd and a book nerd and a music nerd.” However, his own connection to the play was less important to him than how it resonated with other people, and how that connected to what he was seeing with his kids and their friends. He said, “It’s dripping with nostalgia, and it’s this thing where you have people wondering whether life is going to be as hopeful, as sweet, as fulfilling as the generations before them have told them that it could be. And there’s a feeling of sadness and that that’s never going to be the case.”

Bangor soon become the ideal setting and shooting location for this kind of discussion. Duplass knew the town well as Aselton’s family lives nearby, and it felt like a place where kids could walk around freely at night and feel a connection to the pre-cellphone era. He said, “You go through one street and it looks like progress. ‘Ah, the box stores came through, Target and Walmart and Chick-fil-A,’ and it’s the classic story of small town America that’s been overtaken. But then you walk down this other street and it’s this downtown area that has been very much architecturally preserved. It’s this struggling, middle-of-America town that hangs on.”

That sense of an aching quietness became a way to have the characters “time travel, in an organic kind of way, to the place they’re all looking for right now.”

Filming in Bangor is also part of an important lesson that Duplass is always eager to share with filmmakers early in their career: Don’t go to a big city. “They don’t want you there,” Duplass said. “They will try to charge you an arm and a leg to shoot anywhere. But when you fly into somewhere like Bangor and nestle into a few Airbnbs, they’re really very welcoming to you.”

Their Town Narrative Spotlight, World Premiere Saturday 14, 5:30pm, Alamo Lamar  Sunday 15, 11:30am, Alamo Lamar Tuesday 17, 5:30pm, Alamo Lamar Find more of The Austin Chronicle’s continuing coverage of SXSW.

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