Production

How the Duplass Brothers Built a Production Empire Without Leaving Austin's Orbit

· March 22, 2026

Published: March 22, 2026 | By texas.film

At SXSW 2026, Mark and Jay Duplass had two films in the program. Their Town — world premiere, written by Mark, starring his daughter Ora in her first feature role. See You When I See You — Jay's solo directorial debut, a Sundance premiere getting its Texas homecoming. A dual premiere party at Cinema Center drew Mark, Jay, Kaitlyn Dever, David Duchovny, Lucy Boynton.

Two films. One festival. One week. Two brothers who have been at this for 30 years and still count Austin as the origin point of everything.

This is how Texas builds a production culture: slowly, stubbornly, and over decades.

How It Started

Mark and Jay Duplass grew up outside New Orleans. They came to Austin in the early 1990s as aspiring musicians — University of Texas at Austin, mid-decade, when the city was still what Mark calls "very, very sleepy." The counterculture was different then. More individualism, less industry.

They discovered film the way Austin has always worked: by stumbling into a theater.

"We arrived when Slacker was at the midnight theater at the Dobie," Jay has said, "and we realized slowly that we actually loved movies more than music."

Richard Linklater, who had made Slacker in 1991 for $23,000, was their revelation. "Linklater was our hero, and still is," Mark said. "Someone we saw in jeans and a t-shirt and old sneakers making art — and we just thought, I thought you had to wear a beret and smoke skinny cigarettes to make art, and he just felt like us."

Then Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi for $7,000. The proof of concept was there. You could make a movie. You just needed to make the movie.

The $3 Film

Duplass Brothers Productions was founded in 1996 while they were still at UT Austin. Their first project — a short film — was shot in the kitchen of their crappy South Austin apartment for $3.

That short went to Sundance in 2003. It didn't win. But it got them in the room.

What they took from Austin wasn't a film school education — it was a mentality. "If you can make $6,200 a year doing your thing and making your art," Mark has said, "you are living the dream. That's where our priorities were."

The Puffy Chair and the Mumblecore Moment

The Puffy Chair (2005) was made for $10,000–$15,000. It went to Sundance. It sold. It launched a genre — "mumblecore," a term critics coined for the low-fi, naturalistic, conversation-driven films coming out of Austin and its peer cities at the time. Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha Ha (2002) was the first; the Duplasses, along with Bujalski and a small cohort, defined the movement.

The films were modest. The principle wasn't: make something real, on your own terms, for as little as possible, and trust that it will find its people.

It found its people.

The Pivot to Studio Work — and Back

After The Puffy Chair, the Duplasses moved to New York, then Los Angeles. They got studio access. They made Cyrus (2010, Fox Searchlight), Jeff, Who Lives at Home (2011, Paramount Vantage). Mid-budget studio films with real stars.

Then they course-corrected.

"We realized we actually needed a certain amount of money to do things the way we want to do them," Mark has said. "After The Puffy Chair, we thought we were just going to go become Hollywood studio filmmakers, and we did have that access, and we did make a couple movies. And we sort of learned over the years to take this independently minded sensibilities that we learned from Austin and Linklater and Rodriguez, and bring them into this Hollywood model."

The lesson wasn't to avoid the studio system. It was to understand what you're trading when you enter it, and to build enough independent infrastructure that you can always exit.

The Empire

Duplass Brothers Productions has been one of the most productive independent production companies in American film and television over the past 15 years.

Television:

Film (as directors):

Acting credits:

2026 slate:

What Austin Gets

The Duplass brothers left Texas. They live in Los Angeles. That's the reality.

But they keep returning. They've been SXSW fixtures for more than 20 years. Their Town got its world premiere in Austin — not LA, not Sundance, Austin. The dual premiere event at SXSW 2026 wasn't a marketing play for a city with no connection to the films; it was a homecoming.

And the influence runs the other direction too. When Jay told The Hollywood Reporter he was nervous about directing solo — "you don't want to be the person that leaves Fleetwood Mac" — he was expressing the anxiety of a person who has always understood that the partnership is the thing. That's the Austin lesson. The thing you build together is stronger than what you build alone.

The Duplass brothers built Duplass Brothers Productions in Austin. They took it to LA. They kept the sensibility. They keep coming back to show the work.

That's the model. Not "stay in Austin forever." Not "move to LA and forget where you came from." Build something real in Austin, take what it taught you, and come home when it matters.

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