Duplicity stars Julia Roberts and Clive Owen as a corporate spies involved in a complicated scheme and maybe with each other. What makes all this of interest to many observers who would otherwise have shouted "Check, please!" by the time they got to "corporate spies" is that the movie is the writer-director Tony Gilroy's follow-up to Michael Clayton. Profiling Gilroy in The New Yorker, D. T. Max recounts his journey from wandering soul to aspiring fiction writer to aspiring screenwriter to successful producer of paid-for but unproduced scripts to the man he is today. "One of the first [of Gilroy's scripts] to register with producers was R.S.V.P., written in 1985-86, a comedy about a couple who, as a joke, invite the President to their wedding and find that he accepts. In 1987 came Tempted, a high-concept comedy about a man who steals money from the bank where he works and then tries to put it back. Gilroy found screenwriting easy: 'I knew where the scenes were. I knew when to get in and out. All of a sudden, I had perfect pitch.' He was by now 'making a good living,' though he was frustrated that none of his screenplays were actually filmed. The first time he got an on-screen credit was for the 1992 The Cutting Edge, a teen-girl favorite about a love-hate romance between a princessy figure skater (Moira Kelly) and a sidelined hockey player (D. B. Sweeney) who becomes her partner for the Olympic trials. (One shot of Kelly's face taking on the look of a demon from hell as she shoots a hockey puck at Sweeney's head, then morphing into an expression of tender concern after the puck connects, will live forever in annals of the thin line between love and a not-guilty-by-reason-of-temporary-insanity plea.) After that, Gilroy's script for Taylor Hackford's version of the Stephen King novel Dolores Claiborne earned him a reputation as someone smart enough to crack material regarded as too tricky to be successfully adapted, and when Hackford asked him for a quick reshuffle of the steaming makings of The Devil's Advocate, he got, in Max's reputation, a "reputation as a guy who could fix broken scripts."

It was writing the three Bourne movies--scripts that he feels were essentially neutered by their directors-- that got him in a position to direct Michael Clayton, a movie that took his reputation to a new level as a man who crafts intelligent, stylish thrillers for grown-ups. This is not an unmixed reputation, given the current Hollywood wisdom that grown-ups don't go to the movies. The fact that Gilroy has had a busy career is partly attributable to the quality of his work, but it also has a lot to do with the fact that he sees himself as a professional with a game plan based on an understand of How It All Works. "His movies," Max writes, "follow two fundamental rules: 'Bring it in within two hours' and 'Don’t bore the audience.' Sitting in his office at the Brill Building one day... Gilroy picked up a copy of his script and riffled it. 'It’s all white space,' he said to me. 'It’s all about not writing.' ”

"Gilroy believes that the writer and the moviegoing public are engaged in a cognitive arms race. As the audience grows savvier, the screenwriter has to invent new reversals—madder music and stronger wine." It is perhaps to Gilroy's credit that Steven Spielberg, who was at one point considering directing Duplicity, apparently had trouble understanding the plot, which like other scripts by Gilroy, is not told in strictly chronological order. “In theory," Gilroy once said in reference to Michael Clayton, "if I make a real world, and there are some dramatic events taking place in there, I should be able to drop the needle anywhere 28 times and make something interesting out of it.” In the real world we live in, this sort of thing can result in some confused responses when the people at the test screenings fill out their comment cards. Gilroy is taking this risk to the next level with Duplicity, which is the sort of movie in which people are constantly running con games on each other, and the audience is kept in constant doubt as to who's playing who. One trick Gilroy uses this time is to put one scene, a dialogue exchange between Roberts and Owen, in heavy rotation. "Each time this exchange is repeated," Max writes, "the audience feels a fresh sense of vertigo. The success of Duplicity hinges, in no small part, on whether the audience will experience this sensation as pleasurable. Gilroy told me that he knew of no other movie where the same dialogue gets used five times for five reversals. 'What the fuck,' he said. 'I hope the audience thinks the film is broken.' ”