From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to the treatment, which can also hear at KCRW.com.

My guest, Tony Gilroy, as a writer, has a gift for putting his protagonist and the audience in situations where nobody knows where they are.

If we go from the Bourne movies to his directorial debut, Michael Clayton, to his new film, duplicity, it's always the circumstance where people are figuring out who they are and reacting, and we're reacting along with them.

First of all, Tony, thanks for coming back.

Pleasure to be back.

And it really is about that thing with a twist. We look at Dolores Claiborne. Almost everything you've done as a writer, even cutting edge, we don't know where we stand. And the characters don't know where they stand either. I don't sit out to work with that as a conscious intention. In this movie, I did. In this movie, I did.

Well, how duplicity I did?

It's not something

I'm navigating towards all the time, but I'm so, I'm so afraid of boring you. I'm so want to

hang on to your attention. I'm so craven about needing your attention that I'll do anything

to keep you watching. And one of the best ways to keep people interested is to move the ground underneath them. It's almost in a weird way, hitchcockian, in that sense where the protagonists almost never knew where they were, and they were asking questions at the same time we were as an audience. But that's life is, you don't know what's going to happen next. That's what life is. That's what great acting is making something happen for the first time over and over again. You know, it's always the first time. We should say that the police is a heist comedy starring Julie Roberts and Clive Owen. And one of the things I've noticed about the film, especially as compared to stuff Clyde Vaughan's been doing recently, he's looking people in the eye for the first time, but you don't know what that means when he's looking directly in the eye, and it's unusual thing to see him do. Well, he's played such a hard guy. He's played such a rough and tumble guy all the way up and down the line. When I met him, George Clooney introduced him to me and said, you should get Clive to do Duplicity. And I sat and had a couple drinks with him, and he was so loose and funny and such a bloke. And I thought, God, I haven't seen that on film. It was so perfect for Duplicity. I thought, wow, if I can be the first person to get that on film, I'll be very lucky.

And I think that, I mean, I know that that's what we've gone for here. I mean, it really is a different, it is him, but it's a very, very different version of him than you've seen. You're right. It's what we haven't seen. And he doesn't get that much dialogue often. I mean, he'll have a few lines, and then he'll, like, turn away to brood. And so he's in the conversation with people and fighting and talking and conversation and throughout the picture in this weird way fighting for his life.

What was great for Duplicity about his previous persona is he has all that.

I never have to convince you.

I do a little bit in the beginning to make sure to remind

you how tough and cool and man of the world he is. But he so possesses that. They don't have to

spend a lot of time in the rest of the film building up on that. And I can corrupt the other part of

I can corrupt that all the way through. He's not in charge all the way through this movie.

But I don't ever have to reestablish his cool. He comes with a full bag of cool when he starts off. But one of the fun things must be for you and for him as an actor to see him to do takes, which he never has done in the movie before. He's doing double-tags. You know, he has this rubber face. When you work with somebody, and I spent a year, over a year with him struggling to get the movie made, we really became co-conspirators on this. I think he's the kind of actor. I think he could have worked in silent films. I think he could have worked in the 30s. I think he could have worked all the way through the studio system. I think he could have been a noir actor in the 50s.

I don't think there's an era of movie making that he doesn't work.

And that's a very unusual.

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