Masters of mumblecore grow up When Andrew Bujalski, 24 at the time, was directing his first feature, Funny Ha Ha, initiating a movement in American independent film was the last thing on his mind. "It was funny to me that Funny Ha Ha got pegged as the beginning of anything," Bujalski said. "I always felt that given the tradition I was working in" - a zero-budget character study shot on 16 mm film - "I wasn't kicking off the indie movement of the two thousands. I was just a really late straggler, making the last indie movie of the early nineties or late eighties. I thought this was probably the end of something, much more than a beginning. And yet that's not how critics saw it a decade ago. Much was made of the so-called mumblecore movement of low-fi independent films that emerged in the wake of Funny Ha Ha. Eleven years after its modest debut at the Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival in Birmingham, Ala., and eight years after he uttered the tongue-in-cheek label that would come to be attached to an entire generation of do-it-yourself-minded American moviemakers, Bujalski is ready for another beginning. So, too, are other prominent directors associated with mumblecore, a moniker equally employed to celebrate and denigrate the shot-on-the-cheap, talk-centric, variously improvisatory films largely made by and about young post-grads. At the time, the sudden confluence of films focusing on the vernacular and mores of such a particular demographic was certainly worth noting, especially as "the scene" developed, with participants turning up in one another's films and caravaning together to film festivals. But mumblecore was always a frustratingly imprecise designation, ignoring not only major differences among films and filmmakers, but also the long legacy of American independent cinema that placed these new iterations, pace Bujalski, on a continuum rather than a vanguard. The term continues to have currency here and abroad - "When I was in Berlin in February, I had journalists from all over the world asking me about mumblecore," Bujalski said - yet its signature representatives have decidedly moved on. Now a 36-year-old husband and new father, Bujalski has taken a left turn with his formally adventurous and eccentric new period piece, Computer Chess, which opens later this month in Canada. So, too, has his fellow festival fixture Joe Swanberg. His Drinking Buddies is a spiffily produced romantic comedy that, after his 14 flagrantly non-commercial features, showcases stars such as Olivia Wilde and Anna Kendrick. They join their kindred spirits Mark and Jay Duplass, who way back in 2010 graduated from the microbudgeted road movie The Puffy Chair to the more mainstream Cyrus, starring Jonah Hill; and actress-writer Greta Gerwig, who parlayed parts in Swanberg and Duplass films into collaborations with Woody Allen (To Rome With Love); and Noah Baumbach (Greenberg and Frances Ha). It's not just that these upstarts have done well for themselves. It's that they've done so on their own divergent terms - some under the aegis of Hollywood (Mark Duplass has acted on TV and in films such as Zero Dark Thirty), others, like Bujalski, following a more idiosyncratic muse, and all seemingly free of the expectations of the movement they helped to define. The reasons for these departures are varied but also indicative of what it means to go from idealistic twentysomethings to working artists in their 30s. Like Bujalski, Swanberg, 32, and Jay Duplass, 40, also have young children, and none is the festival road hog he used to be. "I've felt it's time to not just be a self-absorbed filmmaker," Swanberg said. It's about time that we grew up a bit. "I was very much itching to get paid making movies," Duplass said. If you have a kid, you've got to make money. It's a sentiment that Bujalski echoes: "I kind of can't put that off any longer." While Bujalski's low-res Computer Chess isn't likely to rake in millions, it's such a stylistic departure from his previous work that anything could now be in play. Swanberg finds himself in a similar place. And in light of the pigeonholing that accompanied the career-starting benefits of mumblecore, it's where they both need to be. "It's hitting the reset button a bit," Swanberg said. I feel like Drinking Buddies is my first film, in a way, that I've just had the best 10 years of practice that a filmmaker could have before making his first feature.