Interview [Written]: Richard Ayoade (“The Double”)

From The Dissolve:

Whatever you do, don’t ask Richard Ayoade whether his new film, The Double, was inspired by Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. He’s heard it before. In fact, the comparison has proven so reflexive that, by the close of the festival where the film premièred, the soft-spoken but exceedingly eloquent British TV star turned indie director was already a bit too familiar with the question. In a Film.com interview from TIFF, Ayoade graciously explained that the reference “just feels inaccurate in some respect, and more to do with production design ultimately, and even then I don’t think it’s particularly analogous.” Ayoade’s response wasn’t petulant, and he was quick to acknowledge that it’s something of an honor to be mentioned in the same breath as Brazil. But he’s right to observe that his film is its own beast.

Perhaps The Double — which Ayoade co-wrote with Avi Korine and directed as a follow-up to his well-liked Submarine — has been inviting incessant comparisons to Gilliam’s classic because Ayoade’s film about a young man forced to confront his shadow-self feels like the dark shade of a softer story from another time. Adapted from the Dostoyevsky novella of the same name, the film is more of a Kafka-esque spin on Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. (Comparisons may be futile, but they’re irresistible.)

Set in a bureaucratic dystopia with the foggy borders of a nightmare and the look of a steampunk Pyongyang, Ayoade’s confident second feature follows a meek office clerk named Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg) who is shocked when his company’s newest hire is his shamelessly confident doppelgänger, James Simon (also Jesse Eisenberg). Most horrifying of all, nobody in Simon’s office seems to notice that James is his carbon copy. The strange arrival seamlessly squirrels his way into Simon’s life, taking credit for his work and romancing Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), the cute co-worker Simon is obsessed with. Simon is challenged to assert his value as an individual and own the side of himself he’s suppressed his whole miserable life. With a surgeon’s precision and a hangman’s humor, Ayoade peels apart the male psyche. The Dissolve sat down with the director in Magnolia Pictures’ Manhattan office, where he spoke about his new movie, the perils of three-dimensional supporting characters, and why Michael Bay is contemporary cinema’s most influential filmmaker.

The Dissolve: In the world of your film, everyone is miserable, and no one is doing anything about it, including the protagonist. Simon meeting his doppelgänger is maddening for him, but is it also the best thing that’s ever happened to him?

Richard Ayoade: It was important for Avi and me in the writing for the doppelgänger not to feel like an event. There’s a version of this where you have someone who’s slightly apart from everything, and doesn’t fit in. Or, conversely, everything is going just fine for him, and then one day something happens that upsets the balance. But really, the doppelgänger is an indication of a psychological state.

So rather than being an inciting incident, as Robert McKee would put it, it’s a materialization of something that’s occurring to him. In a way, I feel that the Dostoyevsky book prefigures the idea of the shadow — the idea that there are things you can’t accept about yourself, that you have a side to yourself that is not completely altruistic and caring, and if you can’t accept that you have these base and destructive urges, you’ll have a crack-up. That’s really what the doppelgänger is.

The Dissolve: Essayist Victor Terras said about the novella, “The human will, in search for total freedom of expression, becomes a self-destructive impulse.” Watching your film, I felt the opposite, that denying freedom of expression can be destructive as well. Simon seems caught in a very uncomfortable middle ground between the two.

Ayoade: Well, he’s unable to get over himself, and he’s unable to connect to other people, and that’s partially a function of the world and the norms of it. No one is interested in having a relationship with anyone else, which is an extreme form of city life. It’s impolite to look at people in a city, and in a way, you dedicate yourself to not engaging with people, because it’s dangerous, because you feel like “What if I can’t get rid of this person?” And people are terrified of that, because there’s no way of controlling that. It feels like it’s too big to govern, and it’s just not rounded. But also he’s overly concerned with himself and his own place in it, and he’s brooding quite a bit, so I don’t think he’s a blameless character.

Here is a trailer for the movie:

For the rest of the interview, go here.

Comment Archive