Dual Director Riley Stearns On Mentor Characters And Subverting Expectations [Interview]

In his films, writer/director Riley Stearns has often played around with morbid comedy, the dark relationships between mentors and students, and the challenges in finding one's place in the world –- all while his characters keep deadly straight faces. In his latest movie, "Dual," those themes are revisited in spectacular, downbeat sci-fi fashion as Sarah (Karen Gillan) clones herself in the wake of a terminal diagnosis. When she's inexplicably cured, she's faced with the surprising revelation that either she or the clone must die in a duel to the death.

In advance of the release of "Dual," /Film spoke with Stearns about audience expectations and making grounded sci-fi, as well as shooting a low-budget film at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I think I was expecting that as well, a "Looper" or "Gemini Man" situation. And instead it's so directly about the character. When you watch a movie where you see an actor playing against themselves, you're always curious about what kind of work they do or the director does with the actor to help them differentiate the characters. So in this case, how do you think you did that?

Karen gets most of the credit there because she's the one who actually has to do it, but we never wanted it to be so different, so split that it's ridiculous, that they're completely different people. We didn't want that. We wanted them to feel similar, but different enough. And that's a hard thing to describe and it's an even harder thing to actually do. So it really just came down to little details. Like one character tends to not care as much about how she dresses, puts her hair up usually, doesn't wear as much makeup or any at all. It's easy in this space and in this world for a character like Sarah to say "My favorite food is Mexican food." And then Sarah's double could be like, "I don't like Mexican food." It's almost like she was saying it to spite Sarah. And that comes in as part of the movie and part of the humor of it all. But yeah, at the end of the day, Karen's the one who's actually delivering the lines and being subtle, but not too subtle so that they feel the same is such a hard space to hit. So hats off to her and also having to learn all the dialogue that she did.

It's one thing to learn a big monologue. It's another thing to learn one side of the dialogue and then go back in and learn the other side and not have those wires get crossed. It's way more challenging than people realize. I'm not good at memorizing dialogue, period, but the second you don't have somebody else's dialogue to go off of, where they could give you a line and then you read your line next and then they read their line and you read your line — there's like a ping pong to it. When you're the one just ping ponging to yourself, that's a completely different animal. So Karen's way better at that than I would ever be.

The scene you're talking about with the Mexican food was one of my favorite scenes in the movie. It's their introduction to each other, and you see Sarah sizing up her clone. It's a very uncomfortable scene, because it's almost like she's threatened by this perfect version of herself. What made you think of drawing on those sorts of insecure internal conversations?

We all feel that way. I feel like we all have those moments, whether it's with somebody we look up to, somebody that we work with, or even people that we don't like, but we see why other people like them. I do think that there's an element of humanity in everything I do, despite the fact that it feels removed emotionally. I think this just says a lot about who I am as a person and why maybe my style is this way whereas other people feel like it's so crazy. This feels super normal to me.

My sister talks to me all the time about how for a while I was being like, "I don't know, it's like, everything's so stylized. The dialogue's so different than anybody talks." My sister's very adamant, immediately said, "Riley, you talk exactly like that. Like, you are the characters in your movie."

So I think that this space feels comfortable for me, but I get why it feels a little alien to other people. But then having that emotional beat still be something that everyone can relate to, despite the fact that it's in this world that may feel a little uncomfortable to you. That's interesting to me, and that's where my movies tend to live.

I was also thinking about "The Art of Self-Defense" and how in that movie, you have another similar almost-mystical mentor character. Aaron Paul's character in this movie is pretty benign, I think, by comparison. But what draws you to those personality types and those kinds of characters?

It's funny, because it's not necessarily intentional, especially with "Dual," to have another mentor, but all of my movies, including "The Cub," my short before "Faults," had an element of somebody learning from somebody else. And maybe there's a misplaced trust in the guidance of that person. So whether it's cult-like, or nefarious in nature, there's always an element of a person who is giving you information that is probably questionable.

I liked with this one that maybe we would set that up to be a little bit nefarious. And you think that Trent has some ulterior motives of some sort. At the end of the day, you just subvert the expectation in the opposite direction and say, no, he's actually a pretty cool guy. He may not be the best trainer in the town and he's definitely the cheapest, but he does genuinely care about Sarah.

That was a fun reversal of expectations and a different direction than I've gone for in the past, which tended to be, "How do you start with something bright and subvert it and show that it's actually really dark?" instead, this time, going around the other way.

The major subversion, of course, is that you open with an example of the duel. You open with this great action scene. And you're priming the audience, you're visually explaining the rules. You know that's not going to be the climax. But the viewers are expecting it, because they saw it play out already.

Going back to the Sundance of it all, it's so fascinating to me that there are people who probably assumed the movie would be this bigger action-y thing when it's an in-competition film at Sundance Film Festival. That should indicate where it's going a little bit, I would imagine, but I think people just wanted it to be a certain way.

I liked starting with this bang, explaining everything, having this really exciting action set piece and then just never coming back to that. So much so that the way that I described it to the crew when we were shooting, was that scene, over the two nights that we did it, was our biggest moment in the movie. It's like where all the adrenaline is, all the action, and it's only going to be downhill from here for the audience. And they laughed, but they also were like, "Well, if that's what you want, we're going to go big."

I think it was the only way that I could start and then follow through with the movie. It was the only way that made sense to myself. If anybody else made it, they would've made a different movie than me, but like, this is the movie that I wanted to make. It was the only way that I felt like that structure and story could work. So yeah, for better or for worse, that's the trajectory that we followed, and it's one that I love personally.