Jay Duplass came to Arkansas to give a talk he called "How to Make Movies in the Apocalypse."

That sounds scary, but maybe that's where we are. The world where small movies -- comedies and dramas about recognizable human beings -- could regularly find their way into theaters is, if not gone, then on life support. It feels like the end of something. And yet, Duplass insisted, artists can still make movies. In fact, they must. What else are you going to do? One of the best things about film festivals, especially Arkansas Film Society's Filmland, is how they de-mythologize artists. It's one thing to think of Martin Scorsese or the Coen brothers as figures in the ether. It's another to sit in a room with someone like Duplass -- who's been there, who's failed, who's still at it -- and realize human beings actually make movies. They're not conjured by demigods on high. They're written and acted and cobbled together by people who once lived in lousy apartments, with one good shirt to wear for their office temp jobs. And if they can do it, maybe you can too. Making art is within your ken.

Duplass grew up in suburban New Orleans in the

'80s. His parents were working too hard to drive him to theaters, and anyway, his father dismissed "Star Wars" as "planes zipping around killing dragons." (Not entirely wrong, though it misses the point.) So Jay got his film education from HBO, coming home from school and watching movies he had no business watching -- middle-aged divorce dramas, suburban malaise. At 13, he rode his bike to a multiplex to see "Raising Arizona." He saw a photo of the Coens and thought: They look like me and my brother Mark. Maybe this isn't impossible.

At UT-Austin in the early '90s, Richard Linklater's "Slacker" played every night at midnight. It was made for $20,000 -- a lot, but not a fantasy number. Austin then was anarchic and permissive: art on lawns, movies in backyards, bands everywhere. The Duplass brothers tried to be the Coens. They weren't. Seven shorts, three features, all bad. Poverty at 24 feels romantic; at 30 it's just poverty. Jay was ready to quit.

Then Mark bought a $3 VHS tape. He told Jay to come up with something to shoot in the apartment. Jay remembered his meltdown trying to record an answering-machine greeting. Mark put on Jay's one good shirt, named himself "John Ashford" (the tag inside the collar), and improvised a full nervous breakdown on tape. Twenty minutes, cut to seven.

They sent it to Sundance, half as a joke. And Sundance called: "This is one of our favorite films." Duplass assumed it was a prank. It wasn't.

That seven-minute tape changed their lives. It also changed the way they saw themselves. They weren't the Coens. They were something else.

Their first feature, "The Puffy Chair," came next. It was shot on a Panasonic DVX100, the digital camera that made "cheap" look cinematic. Sundance, 2005: It was the cheapest film in competition. Netflix bought it.

It became the first film ever streamed on the platform. (Duplass swears he once said aloud: "Who would ever watch a feature on a computer?" The joke is on him. On all of us.)

That's the refrain of his Filmland talk: You can't control the market, or the buyers, or the algorithms. All you can do is make something undeniable.

That phrase -- "something undeniable" -- he returned to again and again. You can pour years into a project and still find it sunk in the ocean of Netflix, invisible unless it cracks the Top 10. A friend of his made a great film, toured festivals, sold out screenings, and still couldn't sell it. Distribution is scarcer than ever. The mid-budget movie is an endangered species.

Yet there's his film "The Baltimorons," which screened at Filmland. Duplass met Michael Strasner, a Baltimore comic who'd bottomed out, sobered up, and wanted to tell his story. They shot guerrilla-style, with a permit from the city that cost $45. No stars. No budget. It won the audience award at SXSW, got a release. Because it is an undeniable work of art.

He digressed, as you might expect, into AI. It's coming. It'll destroy jobs, create others. He's not naïve about it. But he sees the real danger not as technology but homogenization -- everything made to look and feel the same. That flattening of culture into something that can be sorted and recommended by an algorithm.

He's not wrong. But his own kids, he said, are rejecting sameness. They're buying vinyl, shooting 35mm. They don't want the frictionless, the fake. They want something that feels made by hand.

Film festivals remind you that artists are people. You sit in a room with a humble guy striving to make art and see the seams, the mistakes, the doubts. You hear him admit to making bad films for a decade before stumbling onto something that works. That's the gift -- it collapses the distance. It tells you this is possible.

The business is crueler than ever. The odds are bad. But the prescription is still the same: Don't confuse meetings with movies. Don't mistake intentions for art. Don't wait for permission.

You make work by making work. You keep going until you make something that cannot be ignored.

And maybe that's why his talk lingered. Because in an era when everything feels fake, the most radical act might be to make something real. Something undeniable.