When You Isn't You

2 May 2014 | 12:47 pm | Anthony Carew

Richard Ayoade won't make "epic" films - he reckons that's boring.

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Richard Ayoade is a well known face from English comedy, having found fame in The IT Crowd, cult in Nathan Barley, and strangeness as Dean Lerner. But watching The Double, his second feature, shows that the 36-year-old's true home may be behind the camera. It's an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novella that takes place in a surrealist dystopia: a nocturnal, oddball realm representing a “vision of what people in the '50s imagined the future would be”. It's, in Ayoade's estimation, a work that dares employ “non-realistic art direction”.

“What I like about silent films, old Hollywood films, is that they use the entire backdrop – the set, the music, the lighting, the framing – to communicate something about the characters, and the emotions they are feeling,” says Ayoade. “Now, I feel visuals are simply meant to be really epic and technically impressive, or just real. To me, both those ideas can be kind of boring.”

So, The Double stages a retro-futurist world of vast shadows, creeping darkness and foreboding buildings to communicate the loneliness of living in a city. “Loneliness is a huge part of everyone's lives now. People don't really connect with other people; everyone's lives are like endless work and consumption, taking place in parallel. And in [this] post-digital world, we're conditioned to feeling like we have complete flexibility and fluidity; that we could go pick up and leave, change our lives. So, I wanted to create this world that viewers felt like our character couldn't leave; that he couldn't just quit his job, or skip town; that he was trapped.”

'Our character' is Jesse Eisenberg's workaday prole, pining for Mia Wasikowska and spending his hours toiling at a bizarre datamining agency. Riffing on the original tale, he's horrified when the office hires a döppelganger who's everything (confident, charismatic, sexually experienced) he's not.

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“I like the idea that someone can be so invisible, so lonely, so put-upon, that when their precise replica appears no one even notices, and that when they point it out to everyone, no one cares,” Ayoade chuckles. “[It's] very relatable in an era in which everyone has these constructed avatars, these best versions of themselves online.”

At this point, promotional chit-chat gets plenty philosophical (“Being self-conscious just means being human”; “Does anyone give a straight answer to anything? Is anyone even capable of it?” and “It would be grotesque if you could be fully represented in an article, able to be summarised in a hundred words”), before settling on a sentiment. “Dostoyevsky said: 'Everyone's got different versions of themselves that they're prepared to admit, and a version that they're not even prepared to admit to themselves.' How people see themselves, and their concerns about how the world sees them, these persist through every era.”