THE DOUBLE directed by Richard Ayoade, written by Ayoade and Avi Korine from the story by Fyodor Dostoevsky, with Jesse Eisenberg, Mia Wasikowska, Noah Taylor and Wallace Shawn. A D Films release. 93 minutes. Opens Friday (June 13). For venues and times, see listings.
I only ever see Richard Ayoade at the Toronto Film Festival, and that’s a shame. He’s a thoughtful director and an endlessly interesting conversationalist. Talking to him for 10 minutes just makes me wish I’d had twice as much time or more.
For example, we could have gone on a lot longer about the influence of eastern European filmmakers on his new movie, The Double. The grimy, bureaucratic hell through which Jesse Eisenberg’s nervous Simon moves is straight out of the bleak Polish films of the 60s.
“Yeah, definitely,” he nods, seated at the noisy bar on the second floor of the Lightbox. “Most people have said Brazil, but it really wasn’t that much in my mind. But Polanski definitely was – you know, all of his stuff, like Repulsion and The Tenant and Rosemary’s Baby.”
Those films share a common paranoia, which surfaces in Ayoade’s film when Simon meets his confident new co-worker James, who looks exactly like him, only cooler.
“It feels like there are lots of people who could play one [character], but you don’t feel they’d be able to play the other,” Ayoade says. Eisenberg “has the things you want – he is incredibly precise but very emotionally engaged. He didn’t feel ‘outside-in’ ever, but he is able to do all the technical things that are required for film acting as well.”
Those technical things were not inconsiderable, given how often Eisenberg appears with himself.
“The majority of it is stuff that hasn’t really changed from old Bette Davis films,” Ayoade marvels. “You do a close-up of one ‘person,’ then another ‘person,’ and it looks like they’re looking at one another. It’s a completely constructed space. So, yeah, in a way it’s remarkable when someone can do both on the same day, but it’s also what all actors do: they play multiple characters. It’s just that this is part of the narrative here.”
For the various characters with whom both Eisenbergs interact, Ayoade reached out to actors he knows and admires, like Sally Hawkins, Noah Taylor, Paddy Considine and Craig Roberts, who all starred in his first feature, Submarine.
“You want someone good to play each part,” he says, “and that part isn’t trivial. And so you want the best person you could possibly call on to do it.”
To play a brief role as an obnoxious nurse in a hospital emergency room, Ayoade could think of no one better than his IT Crowd co-star Chris O’Dowd.
“The last person you’d want to meet in such a serious situation would be a sort of slightly gossipy nurse who would not feel that situation sensitively,” Ayoade laughs, “and I knew he’d be able to do that. But now he’s done Bridesmaids and he’s famous.”
Speaking of breaking through in America, would Ayoade, who’s directed an episode of Community and starred in The Watch in the U.S., ever consider moving across the pond for more work?
“I’m biased toward filming within a drive of my house, really,” he laughs. “I have this theory that Kubrick developed his fear of flying around the same time he had children. I can understand why you don’t want to be called upon to leave.”
normw@nowtoronto.com | @wilnervision
