“Some writers base their entire career around these ecosystems,” Tony Gilroy, writer and director of the Oscar-winning film Michael Clayton and the new film Duplicity explained. “And here it’s like a feudal kingdom—there’s a leader, court, knights, serfs, but no moats.”
Gilroy was referencing neither the rainforest nor medieval England but rather the world of corporations. Gilroy sat down at the Apple Store in SoHo earlier this week with star Clive Owen for a public Q&A session to discuss his obsession with big corporations and spies.
Duplicity stars Owen and Julia Roberts as two former operatives (he’s ex-MI6, she’s ex-CIA) as two spies who meet by chance and fall in love. As they plan a heist of the two private corporations they are working for, they deal with the ultimate question—how can they fall in love when their lives are built around lying?
It was this question that drove Gilroy to write his original draft. “I wrote the script about six or seven years ago when Steven Soderbergh brought me an idea of spies in love.” The idea evolved when Gilroy became interested in the world of corporate espionage, or, as he explained, the politically correct term “competitive intelligence.” “I’ve written a number of different spy movies around intelligence research, and I’d talk to many of my sources, and they’d say ‘I’m going private.’ And I was shocked about how huge of a business it is.”
Duplicity exhibited a very different take on corporations than Michael Clayton did. “On Michael Clayton, the whole thing was to be uncomfortable—to make George [Clooney] uncomfortable. It was awful, cold, bleak, and dark. This was very different—a lot lighter, faster, and much more vanity.”
It helped that Gilroy’s script, according to Owen, was impeccable from start to finish. Owen explained that when Gilroy sent the script, he simply had to do the film. “When I got the script, it was one of the best I had ever read. It had dialogue to die for. I finished the last page and I immediately grabbed the phone.” But putting two big movie stars together is always a gamble. “No director knows how any two people will be in front of the camera. Three weeks in we were shooting this big, long scene in the hotel, and it really shows the colors of the relationship,” he said.
In terms of what an extremely fast-paced and absurdly fun film really means, Owen tried to explain the film in terms of his character. “In the beginning of the film, he thinks he’s the best,” Owen commented. “But then he meets her and he meets his match, so a lot is simply coming to terms with that.” Gilroy gave a much more unique answer. “In many ways, this is like a Cold War thriller except across Park Avenue instead of an ocean. If you take away the humor and the tone, they are quite similar. I would like to know what John le Carré thought of this movie.”
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