She’s Ex-CIA. He’s Ex-MI6. Together They’re Stealing a Fortune
Duplicity movie storyline. Julia Roberts and Clive Owen star as spies-turned-corporate operatives in the midst of a clandestine love affair. When they find themselves on either side of an all-out corporate war, they discover the toughest part of the job is deciding how much to trust the one you love.
CIA officer Claire Stenwick (Roberts) and MI6 agent Ray Koval (Owen) have left the world of government intelligence behind for a scheme to cash in on a highly profitable cold war raging between two rival multinational corporations. Their mission? Secure for themselves the formula to a product that will bring a fortune to the company that patents it first.
For their employers-industry titan Howard Tully (Tom Wilkinson) and buccaneer CEO Dick Garsik (Paul Giamatti)-nothing is out of bounds. When the stakes rise, no one knows who is playing whom, and the trickiest part for Claire and Ray becomes how they play each other. As they each try to stay one double-cross ahead, two career loners find their plan endangered by thing they can’t cheat their way out of: love.
Duplicity is a 2009 romantic crime comedy film written and directed by Tony Gilroy, and starring Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. The plot follows two corporate spies with a romantic history who collaborate to carry out a complicated con. The film was released on March 19, 2009 in Australia and on March 20 in the US and the UK. It had its world premiere on March 11, 2009 at London’s Leicester Square.
Secrets and Lies: Duplicity is Imagined
After he helmed his critically acclaimed 2007 directorial debut, Michael Clayton, writer / director Tony Gilroy decided to return to the arena of corporate dirty tricks…but this time with an eye toward romance. He created a story filled with twists and turns, using the backdrop of a cutthroat race between rival titans vying to be the first to bring a miracle product to market. The heart of the story, however, is the emotional warfare between a pair of romantically challenged, strong-willed lovers who happen to be on either side of the corporate battle… or so it seems.
The idea for Duplicity started with Gilroy’s fascination with the intricacies of industrial espionage. His years of research as the architect of the screenplays in the blockbuster Bourne franchise had introduced him to many people in the intelligence community, and he had noticed that many of them had recently gone into the private sector. Gilroy crafted a nimble script set in this world that combined elements of the screwball comedy with the plot reversals of a classic caper.
Of his research and inspiration for the story’s setting, he shares, “The statistics of corporate theft are somewhere between $50 and $100 billion every year. There isn’t a major corporation on the planet that doesn’t have a competitive intelligence department with some form of either defensive or offensive intelligence gathering, which are basically spy units.”
The filmmaker designed a cold war between two giant corporations in which the spies are actually trying to dupe their employers. He constructed an intricate web of deceit between the rival magnates, and he inserted agents into the mix whose love is as high stakes as the scheme itself.
This star-crossed pair is ex-CIA agent Claire Stenwick and former MI6 operative Ray Koval. Gilroy underscores that their personal entanglements are complicating their jobs, and the constant deceit makes it hard to know where they stand with one another. He says, “They never tell the truth. Everybody’s gaming everybody; everything is constantly not what it seems.”
We meet Claire and Ray through a series of flashbacks that track their relationship-beginning with their first encounter in Dubai in 2003 and taking us through the plotting of their big heist in Manhattan of today. When he imagined the couple, one curious question kept coming to the filmmaker’s mind: “How do scorpions make love?” Of the idea, Gilroy elaborates: “I wondered what happens if two people fall in love who are both professional liars. It’s really hard for them; who else is there for them? They’re their own species.”
The first time they meet, then-MI6 operative Ray is simply a mark for CIA agent Claire. She seduces him at a consulate party in Dubai, drugs him and then ransacks his room to steal Egyptian Air Defense codes. Elaborates Gilroy’s production partner, producer Jennifer Fox, of the setup: “Claire leaves Ray with this smile on his face. He’s both completely taken with this woman and incredibly frustrated. He needs to find her. They meet again in Rome, have a lost weekend and decide to work together and leave their jobs with the CIA and MI6 and go private…to cash in and have one big giant score that will allow them to be together.”
Gilroy adds, “After Dubai, they don’t see each other for a long time, and they reconnect under very unusual circumstances. The whole movie is about the two of them deciding whether they’re really in love, whether they can trust each other and whether they’re going to get rich in the middle of this corporate espionage war.”
Gilroy also created Howard Tully (head of Burkett & Randle) and Dick Garsik (head of Omnikrom), two giants among pharmaceutical world whose ambition and hatred for one another is matched only by their egos. He says, “This feud between Tully and Garsik is the engine for everything that happens in the story. It’s a cold war set on Park Avenue between two huge, giant corporations instead of two countries…but fought just as bitterly and with just as much complexity.”
For Duplicity to be plausible, Gilroy knew the stakes for the characters had to be as high as they would be in an actual cold war. That meant imagining a race to patent a drug so hotly in demand that it would tip the market for any patent holder and render competitors impotent. The filmmaker elaborates: “We needed something everybody was chasing, in which the stakes were really high-the holy grail of everything financially.”
Producer Fox agreed with his instincts. “One of Tony’s great strengths is creating characters who are strong, dynamic and smart,” she notes. “I think he’s done that here with Claire and Ray. Audiences will have fun with the film and enjoy puzzling out the story. In the same way that the characters are conning one another, Tony is playing a con game with us, and the surprises don’t let up until the last moment.”
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Duplicity (2009)
Directed by: Tony Gilroy
Starring: Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, Billy Bob Thornton, Tom Wilkinson, Paul Giamatti, Rick Worthy, Carrie Preston, Ulrich Thomsen, Thomas McCarthy, Lisa Roberts Gillan, Kathleen Chalfant
Screenplay by: Tony Gilroy
Production Design by: Kevin Thompson
Cinematography by: Robert Elswit
Film Editing by: John Gilroy
Costume Design by: Albert Wolsky
Set Decoration by: George DeTitta Jr.
Art Direction by: Steve Carter
Music by: James Newton Howard
MPAA Rating: PG-13 language and some sexual content.
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
Release Date: March 20, 2009
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