What is a pretty strange title for a film actually makes sense when you hear the co-writer and director Miguel Arteta explain it, in a recent Entertainment Weekly interview, “Love is a mess. Love is messy: duck butter!” As you’re probably already aware, since you Googled the term earlier, “Duck Butter” is a perfectly appropriate title for a film about a, um, messy relationship.
In the first trailer for the film, we are introduced to two women, who after they meet at a concert, decide to spend a 24-hour period together, having sex at least once an hour. In that time, they try to fast-forward through a relationship, doing in one day what most people experience over weeks or months. As you might imagine, the result isn’t what they might have expected.
“Duck Butter” is co-written by its star, Alia Shawkat, and produced by The Duplass Brothers. The film also stars Laia Costa, Mae Whitman, Hong Chau, Kumail Nanjiani, and Kate Berlant.
During the aforementioned interview, Shawkat and Arteta mention how they filmed a majority of the film over a 24-hour period. Shawkat said, “We had such a chemistry…. We shot it in 24 hours, like a live play. We had two crews. Laia, Miguel, the DP, Hillary Spera, our first AD producer, and I, we stayed up almost the whole time…. We took a 20-minute nap and woke up and kept going. We had choreographed the scenes the week before…. but we’d only have a certain amount of time for each scene to get that real energy of actually being awake for that long [like the characters]. By the second half, when the other actors showed up, we’d already been up for 20 hours…. We were just running on crazy fumes!”
“Duck Butter” will have its premiere at the upcoming Tribeca Film Festival and will be released April 27.