'Humpday's' Joshua Leonard on the Opposite of Sex
Source: AOL
Posted: 07/23/09 9:33AM
Filed Under: Film
By SORAYA ROBERTS
In lots of ways, Joshua Leonard is a latter-day hippie. His head is a mess of hay-coloured hair, his chin is buried beneath an unkempt beard and he wears very comfortable looking white canvas shoes. "I used to wear Chuck Taylors, but can’t stand the laces now," he says. "This is the closest thing to a slipper that I can wear out in public."
Leonard is best known for his role as Josh in The Blair Witch Project, which is currently celebrating its ten-year anniversary. Today he is in Toronto to promote his new film, Humpday, considered by many critics to be the modern day bromance. Lynn Shelton’s feature revolves around two old friends (both heterosexual) who agree to star together in a homemade porn movie, ostensibly in the name of art. Leonard plays Andrew, the free sprit with itchy feet, while Mark Duplass is Ben, the married homebody.
"It was always the idea that we were going to have two characters on opposite sides of the responsibility spectrum," Leonard says. "[Mark had] recently gotten married and had a kid so he was more interested in playing the domesticated dude."
Sitting before me half asleep in a plaid shirt and professorial blazer, Leonard is not hard to imagine as Andrew. You can see him making a porn movie just to prove he can or even living on a kibbutz for several months. Nor would Leonard be out of place hanging out with the sort of sexually liberated New Agers he finds himself among in Humpday. Yet, he is not as unconventional as he purports to be, which may have to do with the fact that he was brought up in America's heartland.
Leonard grew up in State College, Pennsylvania where his father taught theatre at Penn State. But beyond the oasis of the academic world, beer flowed like water and football was the order of the day. Leonard’s “redneck” surroundings may be responsible for making him a little more macho than most artists. "Both Mark [Duplass] and I are, in very different ways, pretty type A kind of guys, deceptively so," he admits. "We’re super ego-driven and dominant."
Leonard, co-star Duplass and director Shelton built their Humpday characters in collaboration, to ensure that they were not creating one-dimensional caricatures. Ben, for example, reveals midway through the film that he has had sexual thoughts about other men. Meanwhile, Andrew pulls out of a three-way when his female bed mates refuse to put away some sizable sex toys. This was not unlike Leonard’s reaction when Shelton revealed how she envisioned the film's sex scenes.
"Lynn [Shelton] started sending videos of how she imagined the more intimate sexual stuff playing out," Leonard says, slowing down as though he’s preparing me for the punch line. "She sent like YouTube stuff of Joe Swanberg’s Young American Bodies; It's all like hard penises and [close-up] vagina shots."
Though Leonard is no porn neophyte ("I've done my research"), the graphic aesthetic of Swanberg's erotic films made him a little nervous. That's not to say he did not have a history pregnant with sexual experiences to draw from. As a delinquent kid, he was sent to a boy's home for rehabilitation where he was exposed to various X-rated situations.
'I'd be lying in bed – we all slept in single rooms – and I'd hear: "Hey, Jimmy, wanna whack my s--?" ' Leonard looks slightly embarrassed. "I didn't whack anyone's s---. I did my best to keep my head down."
Leonard did not keep his head down for long, though. After briefly enjoying an acting career post-Blair Witch ("I only got that because I can shoot a camera"), the wannabe director took bit parts in films like Men of Honor and Deuces Wild in order to pay off his bills. This year he will embark on his first feature film, an independent movie called Everything’s Alright. Leonard wrote and directs the film, which stars Kelli Garner (Lars and the Real Girl) and 50 Cent.
"I like telling stories on film. Sometimes I really like doing it as an actor, sometimes I like doing it as a director," he says. "I guess when I decided to get into cinema it was on the other side of the camera."
When he initially got into film, Leonard was an editorial photographer. He transferred to the production side after being exposed to 90s art house cinema in New York. Leonard was attracted to low budget movies like Hal Hartley’s Trust and Kids by Larry Clark and still prefers this approach to filmmaking.
"The joy of making a film like Humpday, is you succeed or fail on your own terms," he says. "It's a small enough amount of money that you buy yourself the autonomy to do whatever you want. Every once in a blue moon, it works out and you make the movie you wanted to make. And once in a rarer blue moon, that film you made connects with an audience."
Humpday opens in select Canadian cities on July 24.
100 %
0 %
