‘Room 104’ Is Becoming Mark Duplass and HBO’s Secret Triple-A Baseball Team

In an age dominated by multi-million dollar shows from giant corporations, Mark Duplass has his own set of golden rules: Keep it cheap, keep it narrow, and don’t try to please everyone. That’s the mentality that’s turned the indie filmmaker into a producing powerhouse and has helped HBO’s quirky anthology Room 104 grow a staple of talented collaborators for Duplass, and the channel.

Created by Mark and Jay Duplass, the series follows a single hotel room where anything can happen. Stories swing wildly in tone from episode to episode, ranging from supernatural tales and silly adventures in pet ownership to horrifying examples in cannibalism. No matter what happens or who visits, every story has to exist in the same 400 square foot universe. Ahead of Room 104‘s Season 3 return executive producers Mark Duplass and Sydney Fleischmann spoke to Decider about what they’ve learned from the series they want to take to other projects, how Room 104 is becoming HBO’s secret Triple-A baseball team, and what we can expect from Duplass’ latest acting project, Apple TV+’s The Morning Show.

Decider: This new seasons just jumps right in with an episode that’s set before the hotel is even finished. Why did you decide to take the premiere in this direction? 

Mark Duplass: We knew we wanted to do an origin episode, and we talked for it a little bit about opening season 2 with it. But we were like, “Nah.”

Sydney Fleischmann: It felt a little early. But it’s that idea of like “Are people getting sick of the room? Do we need to shake it up a little? And so let’s shock them.

How did you get Luke Wilson on board? He’s great in this season’s first episode, “The Plot.”

Duplass: I feel that way about almost every actor that we have. We don’t pay anybody anything. It’s this weird thing where it very naturally weeds out the people who would not have fun there and it brings in the perfect people.

I worked with him once before on Skeleton Twins. And then Macon Blair, who wrote and directed that episode, is friends with him. They both live in Austin and so it’s just kinda you know a natural fit. Also in terms of the “Let’s see this person do something a little different you know then what they normally do.”

I also noticed most of the episodes are comedic this year, which is a little bit of a departure from seasons past. Why did you guys want to lean more into comedy this season?

Fleischmann: I don’t think we did. When we were doing that chart we were like trying to find that connective tissue, and I think every episode, even if its not laugh-out-loud funny, has those like weird funny, odd moments. Even the dramas or scary ones there is something.

Duplass: We don’t heavily curate each season. We try to let it be what it is, but if there was a curatorial element to Season 3 it would be trying to push the boundaries of what you would expect to happen in the room. Especially with the people who have been with us for two seasons, we want to sort of honor that and say “OK we’re gonna try to keep surprising you and not with necessarily hyperbolic storytelling but with what the room can be and what it can mean.”

That must be the coolest part about working on this show. you could do literally anything at any moment.

Duplass: Well, the whole film industry is predicated upon honoring only what has come before you and what looks like it so that it can also be successful, right? That’s the industry. Room 104 is the exact opposite. The only thing that is truly honored here is wildly unexpected about subverted my expectation which is the BEST place you could possibly be as a storyteller.

As the series has gone on it has become more experimental and has involved more varied creators. Is this kind of a playground for you to figure out who you want to work with?

Duplass: There’s definitely a little bit of that. The inside joke with HBO is that Room 104 is the Duplass brothers and HBO’s Triple-A baseball team where we’re seeing who works and then we pull them up for bigger things. We obviously hire a lot of first time directors and give them their shot at things, which is cool because it’s a hard thing to get your first job in this industry. And then we get so much positivity and love and hard work from them because of that.

Then I think that there’s a bit more of — just speaking candidly — of Syd and I realizing “OK we have done like 36 episodes” — we actually made 48 because we already shot Season 4 — “we’re going to have to open this world up to more and more storytellers to keep it relevant and keep it interesting so we don’t start repeating ourselves.” I’ve written the fewest episodes I’ve ever written for Season 4 to get new energy into the room. We’re turning it over to more people, and you’ll see in Season 3 our opening episode we really turned that over to Macon Blair, who’s a filmmaker we just love and his sensibilities dovetail. We said “Here’s a basic storyline. We want this to be X,Y, and Z but play it up.”

Since we’re talking about giving less experienced creators more opportunities, Sydney can you speak a little bit to your experience like coming up from being Mark’s assistant to an EP for Room 104?

Fleischmann: I started working with Mark on Togetherness Season 1, and I produced a couple things here and there for you. And then Mark had this idea for Room 104 for a while, and it just seemed like the time was right to really dig into it. We pitched it to HBO ,and I basically made the GIANT leap from assistant to producer on the show. I think that because I was obviously really hungry, really excited, and also very inexperienced it made the right fit for the show. The show didn’t need someone who was gonna to say “That’s not how we do things” or “Those are not the rules, you’re breaking all the rules…” I didn’t know any of the rules so I didn’t know any rules I was breaking.

Duplass: Which is exactly how I came up. We made up our own systems. I made a lateral move from the independent film world, and I didn’t know anything. Really our collective ignorance has benefited us. We just make shit up and everyone’s like “I can’t believe you guys did that!” And we’re like “Sorry.”

Fleischmann: There’s no actual rules. You’re just making stuff up. Everyone’s making stuff up

Duplass: We also had a creative trust because we’ve known each other a few years and I had gotten to the point in my career where I was like “I’ve been collaborating so tightly and closely with Jay [Duplass] for so long.” But I also had a lot of success starting to collaborate with other people like Patrick Bryce and Lynn Sheldon. Jay was working a lot on Transparent and this was a great space to do something new together. It’s been great.

Because there are so many creators involved in Room 104, do you have anyone you want to do more projects with?

Duplass: I think Syd would make 10 movies and 10 TV shows a year with Arturo Castro if she could.

Fleischmann: I adore him. He’s so great.

Duplass: We gave some shots to some younger filmmakers like Lauren Budd, who was an intern of ours who was 19 years old when she wrote the “Josie and Me” episode. She’s come up with us and is someone who really feels like our discovery. And then Lila Neugebauer who is a big time theatre director who’d never directed TV before. We learned about storytelling in confined spaces that she done in theatre that we didn’t know yet. Those of the best collaborations. Sarah Adina Smith who did the first episode of Room 104, “Ralphie,” went on to direct the entire Hanna series on Amazon. We have a movie that we’re trying to make together.

Room 104 is like a really creative summer camp atmosphere. I never want it to come across that we’re being so altruistic to these people by offering their first-time directing gigs. There’s a part of it that’s like, yes. I want to give them that opportunity because I have survivor’s guilt. But we get a lot more than they get in the long run because of that pomp and spirit, that excitement and their loyalty to us. They really stick around with us and give us their best.

I feel like on a small scale Room 104 is exemplifying what the industry needs to do. You need to open up the space so more people can tell more diverse stories.

Duplass: I really think it does. Also I don’t think people really discuss that there are certain kinds of stories that just aren’t being told and certain kinds of storytellers that just aren’t given the platform for a number of reasons. A lot of people don’t want to take risks on those people because they haven’t directed a movie yet or they haven’t directed a Sundance movie yet or this or that. But I would honestly contend that if you offer that person a chance to tell a story and they only get that story to a B [grade], that’s still a massive win. We have representation on it for the first time, and it’ll inspire someone else to say “I love that story, maybe I could make it a little bit better.” You gotta start somewhere, so you gotta hit that swing.

HBO Max is really amping up its streaming slate. Now that we’re in the age of streaming wars, has your strategy for producing changed at all? 

Duplass: Our strategy has been for a long time: keep it cheap, keep it narrow, and don’t try to please everybody. Please a small portion of the people and they’ll be dedicated to you. And if your cheap enough you can stick around. So that really hasn’t changed too much.

If anything I’m doubling down on that now because as an actor I’m a part of The Morning Show for Apple. That is a show that is trying to get everybody. And I loved making that show, but I couldn’t imagine having tried to produce that show and the pressure of having all that suspense and all the people you have to please and how many viewers you have to get to make it worthwhile. They’re doing it, and it’s gonna work. But I would die if I tried to do that.

What we do in Room 104 is so freeing. All we have to do is bunt and make it to first base, and then we get to live to fight another day. Every now and then those bunts will turn into an error and you’ll get to home base. You won’t know why, the zeitgeist will tell you why. So I feel like we’re pretty well-suited as a company, and hopefully Room 104 as well, to take advantage of the streaming wars. The fact that everybody is trying to make tons and tons of stuff, to be the well-reviewed niche content that didn’t cost too much it’s like “Yeah, we’ll keep em around.”

I want to get back to The Morning Show but working on Room 104 has any genre really spoken to you that you didn’t expect? I know there have been a lot of musicals.

Duplass: We’ve all fallen in love with the musicals, I would say across the board with the crew and everything. We just wrapped a big-scale musical episode for Season 4 of Room 104, and it was probably the most fun we’ve had. I thought it was gonna be a lot harder. I was like “God, you gotta write the songs, you gotta record the songs and then sync them.” But they sing a lot of shit live, and Julian Wass who’s our composer and also one of my best friends, he and I go up into our attic. He brings his Casio and I bring my guitar and we write the songs in like 30 minutes.

Fleischmann: I think for me the documentary episode this year was one where I was so surprised by it.

Duplass: I saw your eyes when I told you I wanted to make a documentary episode.

Fleischmann: I love that we take risks, but I also like knowing what we’re getting into. In this we didn’t really know what were totally getting into and that’s really exciting. I have to remember that it’s really exciting and not be terrified of it. But that was a really cool process of just pulling the story out and figuring out where it was and what was going to be moving and inspiring and powerful about it.

The Morning Show, it has a lot of comedic actors in it, but from what we’ve seen, it seems very dramatic. Is it gonna be funny?

Duplass: I think it’s fair to say that it’s a drama with comedic elements to it. You’ve got Steve Carell and Jennifer Aniston in there and Reese [Witherspoon] as well. There’s gonna be funny stuff, and I would say they even brought more of it out then existed in the scripts. But there’s no doubt in my mind that this is an hourlong serialized drama with an intensely plotted story to tell. It’s not a situational workplace comedy.

Season 3 of Room 104 premieres on HBO and HBO Now Friday, September 13 at 11/10c with new episodes every Friday.

Watch Room 104 on HBO Go and HBO NOW