By WILLIAM J. WRIGHT
Set in the very near future, DUAL, a unique new thriller from Riley Stearns (The Art of Self-Defense, Faults) stars Karen Gillan (Doctor Who, Guardians of the Galaxy) as Sarah, a woman whose life has become a monotonous grind. Nevertheless, she’s become comfortable in her rut. Overshadowed by Peter (Beulah Koale), her absentee boyfriend with whom she mostly speaks via video chat, and a controlling mother (Maija Paunio) who refuses to respect her boundaries, Sarah has faded into the background of her own life.
When Sarah is diagnosed with a terminal illness and given just a few months to live, she turns to a popular commercial cloning service to alleviate her loved ones’ potential grief. With a limited time to imprint her personality on her new double (also played by Gillan), Sarah initially bonds with her clone, but soon comes to resent her when Peter and her mother begin to prefer the company of the double. In an ironic twist, Sarah discovers that she has been misdiagnosed and has many years ahead of her. Happy that she’ll be able to return to her “normal” life, Sarah is more than ready to have her double terminated. However, the clone, who now enjoys a passionate love life with Peter and a warm relationship with Sarah’s mother, has become content in Sarah’s life and exercises her right to continue existing. The law is clear. To determine who will live out Sarah’s life, the two must battle to death on live TV.
A dark satire with frightening implications, DUAL raises pointed questions about identity, the quality of life, and how we deal with death and grief. Shocking and often funny, DUAL is content to leave the audience to its own conclusions. Rue Morgue recently sat down with writer-director Riley Stearns to get some insight into this complex film.
Riley, thanks for taking the time to speak with Rue Morgue. I saw DUAL last night and really enjoyed it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it. It’s an amazing film.
Oh, great! Thank you so much.
What was your inspiration for DUAL, and how did the film change and develop from your initial idea?
I’m mean, initially, the boring answer is that I just wanted to have an actor act opposite themselves. So I had this short film that I didn’t end up making between my first feature and second feature. I sort of recycled the idea of doing a doppelganger, clone, twin sort of thing. But I didn’t know what that idea would be yet. I knew that I had this vision or this visual that I wanted, but I didn’t have the idea, and eventually, I came up with the idea of the alternate reality where you could have yourself cloned if you know that you are going to die so that your family wouldn’t have to miss you. But I still didn’t think that was enough of a movie for me. I felt like I still was missing something. I started asking questions about the concept and of the concept. One of them ended up being, “What would happen if that character went into remission?” And for some reason, the very first thing I thought of was, “Well, of course, they’re going to duel each other to the death.” So I knew that was the movie, and that’s when DUAL really became DUAL. It’s where I really kind of had the structure of the film figured out. From that moment on, I knew what the beginning, middle, and end would be and just trusted that process. Then, it was a matter of sitting with the idea long enough where you can start filling in the gaps and really fleshing out the story.
Most films that deal with cloning seem to focus on the technology and world building. Why did you choose to not address the technical aspects at all?
Well, it’s funny. There’s definitely world building in the movie, but it’s a different sort of feeling. Instead of engaging with the technology of it all and the exposition of it all, I felt like that wasn’t really what the movie was about. It’s like, it happens to have clones in it, and it happens to have this sort of sci-fi element to it, but at its heart, it’s about these people and their situation and specifically, Sarah’s situation, so instead of going down the path of explaining, I thought it was more interesting to just not really talk about it – have it just exist – and then, also have our lead character kind of jokingly not let our audience know more about it, specifically when she’s watching a tape about how the cloning procedure works. When she gets bored with it, she starts fast-forwarding. So anytime the audience is about to get some bit of information or exposition, I liked that our character was like, “Nah. I’m good.” We as the audience then are with her. We don’t get any more. That said, I wrote a short story version and got about halfway through it before I put it aside and let it sit for a while and never went back to it and ended up going to script instead. But I know why cloning exists. I know kind of how it works, so it was like, I had the answers to those questions when the actors would ask about it or the production designer or the cinematographer would ask questions, but I didn’t feel like it was relevant to the film itself.
Without giving anything away, you set a very specific tone in the opening of the film that you totally upend, twice! Were you consciously thinking about subverting audience expectations?
Yeah. For better or worse, that’s my intent with everything I make. It’s like not to be antagonizing or be like, “Haha! Tricked you! You thought I was going to do this, but I did that!” We’ve seen so many movies and read so many things, I just want to make sure that if I make something that there’s a reason that it needs to exist. So I don’t want to take the road more traveled. I want to go down my own path. And usually that means doing, not even really a bait-and-switch, a little bit of a juke, so the audience is expecting one thing and you want to subvert the expectation of what that is. I feel like between DUAL and The Art of Self-Defense and Faults, they’ve all had elements of that to a varying degree, but with DUAL specifically, again not to give too much away, I knew that we were going to start with this big opening and maybe not get to that point ever again.
The film is also very steeped in pitch black humor. It’s funny in very disturbing, uncomfortable ways. Maybe I’m off base here, but tonally, there are things about DUAL that reminded me of A Clockwork Orange. In terms of genre, how would you describe DUAL?
How interesting. [A Clockwork Orange] is a fully-imagined world, so that’s cool! I was doing an interview the other day, and somebody pointed out that, obviously, in A Clockwork Orange, you’re making somebody confront violence and showing them all these things because you want them to be disgusted by the violence, and in our movie, we do the exact opposite with Sarah where she’s actually having to get desensitized to violence where she accepts it as a good thing. It’s funny. I didn’t even put those two things together. So there’s a little bit of a connection there in a weird way.
I think of DUAL as a dark comedy, first and foremost. I feel like it exists in a sort of a space where it’s less about the realism and more about the world building. While it’s very dark, I never want it to lose its sense of humor, even when horrible things are happening around our character. I want there to be some sense of levity, and again, always subverting expectations. There’s a tendency in the previous movies I ‘ve made where that lends itself to a darker subversion, so it starts as something you think is pretty safe or good and then have it become more nefarious as the twist. With DUAL, I think a lot of things that start off as feeling a little bit darker actually end up being a bit more optimistic. It’s a very weird opposite version of subversion where you’re setting something up to be dark, and it actually ends up being pretty positive.
Karen Gillan is amazing in both roles. Fans who only know her from Doctor Who or the Marvel films may be shocked by her performance. Tell me about directing her. Did you have to rein her in to get that deadpan, simmering discontent that Sarah exudes?
Yeah. The Doctor Who, Nebula, Guardians, Jumanji sort of world that she’s in – I think that’s why I was really interested in her being in a thing that she hadn’t really done before. She’s a really incredible actress. She’s very, very good at what she does.
Karen is such a natural performer, so she’s used to getting laughs on set and being funny in a very overt sort of way – like a traditional sort of funny. Sometimes your tendency as a performer is to get that laugh on set, and I always had to kind of think about the overall picture for this world, so it may have cracked me up, and I may have broken behind the director’s monitor, but then I would have to think about, “Was this right for Sarah and this world?” Oftentimes, it became a joke where she would be like, “You want me to do the Riley Stearns version, right?” And I would be like, “Yeah, can you just give me the Riley Stearns version? Then she would do it, and then we do something we called a “fun run” where she would just kind of wing it and do whatever came to her mind. She would do it, and almost every single time, she would say, “You’re never going to use that. Anyway, moving on.” And we would go on to the next thing. We had a really great working relationship, and she completely trusted me in what we were after.
Sarah comes alive when she finds a sense of purpose in killing her double, but Sarah’s double eventually succumbs to the banality of Sarah’s life and relationships. Tell me a little about how you approached that duality.
I don’t think the movie is about how life is horrible in these big ways. If anything, it’s making fun of the fact that little things can weigh us down when they add up over time. So something as simple as a text message from your mom at 9 a.m. trying to schedule brunch for next week or whatever can be really annoying in the moment. It’s just poking fun at the banality. I keep saying that it’s all about the mundaneness of our lives and how that can weigh us down. I like that Sarah starts in a place of complacency and safety in her life and feeling just comfort. Comfort can be very dangerous. I think she’s gotten in a place where she hasn’t really been active in her choices and where she’s going. Something like Sarah’s double coming along, who has the world at her feet, and she can do whatever she wants, she’s looking at this life and saying, “This is great.” But I like that through the course of the film, they almost switch places and you see the real sense of urgency that Sarah has when you see Sarah’s double slip into that pseudo-complacency herself. I feel like that’s just playing around again with the things that we all are guilty of at times, which is falling into a safety net of sorts. Or maybe, at some point, we have something that happens to us that makes us say, “I’m actually going to take my life back. I’m going to be more active, and I’m going to go after this thing.”
The expected commentary on cloning ethics never comes directly, however DUAL does seem to be saying some very pointed things about how we in the Western world have become disconnected from death and dying. Was this your intent?
That’s definitely fair. That would be there, but you can also look at the effects of capitalism and monetization of things, and in this movie especially, the monetization of your own life. Yeah. I think all of those are fair. At the end of the day, I don’t ever want to make a movie that “teaches” people. I don’t want to preach at people, but I think if you present things to people and they can form their own opinions, even if it’s just like very, very hidden underneath the narrative, and they’re either able to take that if they want to or not think about it and just enjoy it as a movie, I’m fine either way. But I definitely have things in there that I feel like relate to opinions or views that I have.
Do you feel that the very familiar world of DUAL is where we are heading?
Specifically with the way that people talk to each other and that removed emotionality, probably not. Would people actually do this cloning procedure? Probably not. But I do think that there’s a comment on the disconnect and the way that technology has put distance between us and all of that. There’s definitely hints at where he future’s going in my opinion throughout the movie, just maybe in a more exaggerated sort of state.
Finally, what do you hope audiences take away from the film?
Again, I’m not trying to like, preach at people. I hope they do find some humanity in it. I think at the heart, even though it’s a very emotionally distant world in the way that people relate to each other, there’s humanity there. There’s an actual thinking, breathing human being that feels feelings. They just don’t present those to other people in the same way. And maybe it helps people look at the way they treat other people and talk to other people and relate to people. I hope that people find that it’s overall an optimistic film, even though it’s very dark and takes some turns that are a little less than optimistic and satirical. I think that maybe I’m not necessarily somebody who considers the film a satire, but maybe it has some elements that poke fun at our lives. Overall, I hope people enjoy it, and I hope they have a good time, even if it’s not exactly a movie they would normally see, or if it’s not the movie for them, they can’t say it’s something they’ve seen before. I hope that people are at least able to look at it and say, “That’s new!”
DUAL is now playing in select theaters across the United States.
“At the end of the day, I don’t ever want to make a movie that ‘teaches’ people. I don’t want to preach at people …”
