What Jay Duplass Can’t Live Without

Look, you can get yourself a pillow, and if you’ve got a window seat, you can nudge up against it. But here’s the thing: You’re still going to lean forward, you’re still gonna nap-jerk forward. Your right butt cheek is gonna go numb. And you can’t really switch positions. This thing holds you in place upright and lets you relax everything in your body and go to sleep. It’s a head strap that you put across the front of your head, and it wraps around the back of the seat. There’s a little bit of padding in the back, and you can even rig up some eye-mask situation with a tip. It looks fucking ridiculous. It is not cool. I repeat,this is not cool. But if you don’t give a shit about looking cool, which is where I’m at, and if you’re on a plane, and you really need sleep, this thing holds your head in place in a way that it just beats the hell out of a neck pillow.

My son has lung issues, and during the pandemic, it felt like,Oh my God, they designed the perfect disease to take my son out. And so when we were also having fires in L.A. and losing power and stuff, I was like,I need to have an unstoppable way of running power to run his nebulizer so that he can clear his lungs, right? So that’s when I bought it. We got through all that. He’s growing out of that condition.

Since then, we have used that thing all the time. We live in Southern California, so we put it outside, and it gets enough power every day to power all our laptops, iPads, and phones. We go camping, we use it. We go on a road trip, we use it. We have a nickname for it: Donkey Butt. It’s inappropriate and it makes no sense. But we just plug all of our devices into Donkey Butt, even when we’re at home.

I grew up Catholic. I am not a religious person. I’m a spiritual person. And I was going through some old stuff lately, and I found this rosary from probably high school. When you grow up Catholic, you get a rosary when you graduate from kindergarten, elementary school, and high school. I took it, and I was like,I don’t know what to do with this. So I threw it in my pocket. And then I was just going about my day, and every once in a while, I would just realize that I have a rosary in my pocket. You can’t throw a rosary away, you know what I mean? So I just kept carrying it with me. Then I realized that I was getting this weird sense of comfort from rosary beads, which is not my style at all. And since then, I’ve been carrying a rosary around with me and just feeling a little more comfortable in the world. It’s a way to center yourself, calm down, and realize that other things are more powerful than you are.

I probably do about four chocolate bars a week. It took me a while to work up to that number. I remember the first time I tried 70 percent dark, and I was like,This tastes like chalk. It tastes like I went to a high school, picked up some chalk, and chewed it.But you eat it enough, and then you’re like,Wow, I actually like this.And, you know, just for health, the darker the chocolate, the better it is. There’s also lower sugar content and lower — what do you call it — milk content. So I just noticed the higher the percentage, the better I felt. Now I’m up to 85 percent.

I’ve always been a cyclist, and I love being on a bike for a million reasons. It’s less carbon footprint, more just being in the world. Also, you get exercise out of it, and you don’t need to find a parking spot. I grew up doing cycling as a sport, and I did triathlons for a while. It’s kind of sacrilege to get an e-bike when you were once considered a “real” cyclist on some level. But I live on the east side of L.A. There’s a lot of hills in my neighborhood, and I was not riding my bike to anything because I didn’t want to go to the grocery store and then ride a mile back uphill with all these groceries, right?

Then a few years back, REI Co-op had a sale ona really nice e-bike for about 800 bucks. And it had a return policy. So I was like, “Look, I’m just gonna give it a whirl, and see what it’s like. And if I don’t like it, I’ll return it, and I won’t have to be embarrassed in front of my real cyclist friends.” I never turned back. In fact, I can probably sell my other bikes now. I have so much fun stuff in my neighborhood that I can bike to now. There’s a movie theater and a public pool and my office is three miles from my house. All the grocery stores and restaurants and all that stuff is all accessible by bike, and I barely have to charge it once a week.

[Editor’s note: REI no longer sellsJay’s e-bike, so we’ve linked to the closest model in its current lineup.]

I’ve been journaling since I was probably 13 years old. To me, it’s a form of meditation. I don’t really journal much about what happened. It’s not really a fun history. I don’t think anybody should be reading my journals when I die. It’s more just me working stuff out. Whether I’m making a movie and I really need to plot what’s happening and have a look at it, or if I’m confused about something, or upset about something, and I need to process it. You know, it’s immediate therapy or immediate processing that slows my thinking down and makes it into a linear process that yields more results than just ruminating. So I find that there’s some crazy shit in my journals. This is my current journal for 2025. And this is what it says on the inside of my journal. It says, “Please return to” — and I give my phone number — “The reward is your own self-respect.” So, if you ever find a journal, please return it. It is of value to no one except myself. Nobody needs to read that shit.

This is a notebook that I bought when I went to the Colosseum in Rome in the year 1996. It was four lire and ten cents from a long time ago, so that’s wild. And then apurple Pilot G2 0.7is my always go-to pen.

[Editor’s note: The linked journal is similar in size and format to Jay’s souvenir from Rome.]

I found an old 35-mm. camera at the beginning of this year. I started shooting with it and discovered that shooting stills with a film camera is about ten times more fun than shooting stills on an iPhone or a digital camera. You have to wait for those pictures to come out, and there’s a beauty in them because of the nature of film. It’s not computerized in any way. And I think we feel that as human beings. It’s a fun hobby, but it also gets me engaging with the world more, like an electric bike. I’m in the Muskoka Lakes region above Toronto right now, shooting a television show. And it makes me want to go outside and take walks more.

Here’s the current camera that I’m working with: It’s a half-frame 35-mm. camera. When you hold it this way, horizontally, it shoots a vertical frame. So if you want to shoot landscape, you go vertically. I bought it used, and I’m really hoping it works ’cause when you shoot half-frame, you get 72 photos on a roll. I’m trying to get the price down on what everything costs. And I’m hoping that this half-frame cam is going to be it for me because I think it’s very reasonably priced at that rate. Currently, I’m shooting withKodak Gold. I’ve never shotPortra, but I would like to do that.

If you are a 52-year-old man who is starring in a horror film, as I was in Ireland, and you are running around like an idiot, getting beat up, and doing fight scenes, screaming and yelling, and your body hurts, and you’re lucky enough to have a very smart lady named Jessica Chastain say, “Hey, this will help you fix your body,” and loan you her red-light therapy band, you would realize,Holy shit, this stuff works. So that is now nonnegotiable for me. This is not only in my luggage here at the hotel, it comes on set with me, just in case some shit goes down and I need to tame an angry hip. It is shocking how well it works.

A lot of times, when you’re having trouble while traveling, it’s the middle of the night and you don’t want to be walking into a Duane Reade. So I like having this multipack where there’s probably about 40 different kinds of things in there that I need. This size is the right size. I’ve had many of these packs, and this is the right one. It’s like a tiny little medicine cabinet that I carry with me. And I inevitably use something at some point on every trip I take.

Goodr is a local company in Los Angeles, and what’s great about them is that they create polarized sunglasses for a really good price. They’re really good for sports like running and cycling because they’re super lightweight. But yeah, I’m almost always using these sunglasses. I’m friends with Alexi Pappas, who’s a runner and a filmmaker, and she gave me a pair a while back when she was sponsored by them, and I was like, the sponsorship worked.I’m in, you know? They’re the best. And because they’re 26 bucks, you don’t have to feel terrible if you lose them.

This is the biggest one of the whole list because I have not made an original film in 14 years. I fell in love with movies in the very early days, and when I sawRaising Arizonain 1987, all I wanted to do was to be the Coen brothers 2.0 with my brother. That dream became a reality in 2005, when I got my first feature film into Sundance, and it was a little bit of a hit. We went on to make five movies in six years and it was great, but then a bunch of things happened that derailed me from making movies.

My brother became a famous actor, and boy, is acting more fun and easier and more lucrative than directing independent films. I moved into television when most independent filmmakers were also moving over to TV. I also became an actor accidentally. I got cast inTransparent. There was a pandemic, and during the pandemic, it was more expensive to pay for a COVID budget than to pay for an entire independent film. So for little independent films like this, it just wasn’t feasible. Then we had strikes. And at the end of those strikes, I woke up, I was turning 50 years old, and I was like,I don’t know how this happened, but I haven’t made an original film in 14 years. And if I’m ever going to do this again, I’ve got to do it now.And so I backed the independent-film truck into Michael Strassner’s life and used his origin story. I got Liz Larsen onboard, and two weeks after the strikes ended in 2023, we were on the ground, on December 1 in Baltimore, making a movie on the streets with a very small group of people in the freezing cold during Christmas with the Christmas lights in the background, just swinging for the fences.

It’s a small movie with no stars, and everyone was telling us, “Don’t do it, you know, you can’t sell that movie, you can’t get it out there.” But we won the audience award at South by Southwest. We sold the movie, we made our money back. We’re getting a theatrical release this fall with over 200 screens to open. So miracles happen. This movie is proof of that, and this movie is a little bit about dreams and miracles and unexpressed potential energy. So it’s a little bit like life imitates art and art imitates life in the making of this film.