It is a warm afternoon in the historic center of Rome, near Piazza Margana, and the film crew of “Duplicity,” a romantic spy caper, is doing repeated takes of a fifteen-second shot. The movie’s director, Tony Gilroy, who also wrote the screenplay, is at one end of an alley. The British actor Clive Owen stands near him, as does Julia Roberts. Nearby hover her makeup man and bodyguard, various assistant directors, gaffers, and carpenters, and members of the Italian crew. A black tarpaulin blocks the view of onlookers and the paparazzi. An assistant director calls for “last looks”—the final touchup by the makeup artists—and Roberts takes her mark, halfway up the street; Owen moves to the top of the alley. Gilroy calls “Action!” and is echoed by a “Movimento!” from the Italian assistant director who handles the extras.

Gilroy’s films evoke the Hollywood of the seventies, when thrillers featured complex characters. Photograph by Martin Schoeller

Roberts begins walking down the street, and the cameraman, using a handheld steadicam, precedes her in a backward crab-walk. On cue, three children race up the alley past her, kicking a soccer ball. Roberts looks over her shoulder and continues until she is off camera. Moments later, Owen begins to walk fast; he breaks into a trot, runs past the children, decelerates, runs again. He is pursuing her. He runs until he runs out of street.

“Cut!” Gilroy cries. “That look is so strong,” he says to Roberts. “That was great. That revealed a lot. Great.” Roberts, who has already done several versions of this scene, is clearly exhausted. “My mojo’s gone,” she says. She also has the flu and an ear infection. The cast began filming at 4 A.M., outside the Pantheon. Gilroy assures her, “Even at quarter speed, you’re still a thoroughbred.” Roberts sits in her folding chair and removes her espadrilles; someone’s hands take them from her. She sees the kids still playing with their soccer ball and adopts a mock-Chekhovian tone: “Oh, to be young and play in the heat and do it over and over and not complain about water or time or last looks.” She turns to Gilroy: “O.K., I’ve come up with something that’s really going to rock your world.”

“I need an after-lunch pick-me-up,” he says.

“Coming up.”

“Let it rip!”

They shoot the scene once more. The children chase the soccer ball again; Roberts looks over her shoulder again, this time more subtly. The viewer is supposed to wonder, What, exactly, is she looking for?

“Cut! Print that!” Gilroy is pleased. The actors and crew mill. Everyone avoids eye contact with Gilroy; one can read the hope on their faces. “Let’s do it one more time,” he says. “This time, no steadicam.” As the players take their marks again, he says to himself, “It’s good to be greedy.” He pauses. He wants this extra take. “Maybe, if you make a thousand films, you know what you need right away, but I can’t imagine not wanting to have that.”

“Yeah, that’s all wrong,” Gilroy is saying. “Her look falls in the wrong place.” He stares in silence; Owen and Roberts are now out of frame, but the children are still kicking the soccer ball. Gilroy is watching a screen in an editing suite at the Brill Building, in New York. It is more than four months later, early October. He is watching the footage that he filmed in Rome on an Avid monitor, a series of flat-panel displays with a disconcerting number of buttons. Half-eaten takeout food is on the table, and traffic from Times Square murmurs outside. The shades are drawn.

John Gilroy, Tony’s brother, is editing the film. Gilroy asks him to cue up more footage from Rome. Each take presents a small variation. In one, Roberts doesn’t look back at all. In another, the children steal the scene with their ebullience. The look that Roberts casts over her shoulder actually has an important structural role in the movie. Roberts plays Claire Stenwick; Owen is Ray Koval; both are career intelligence officers. Several years earlier, at a party in Dubai, Claire, then with the C.I.A., met Ray, then with MI-6; she seduced him, drugged him, then stole some military codes from his briefcase. For Ray, a ladies’ man—the script describes him as “Ray with the good suit and the easy smile”—there were multiple humiliations in this fleecing. He has spent the intervening years nursing not only his anger but also his passion for her. Rome marks their first meeting since that entanglement, and Gilroy wants the audience to be unsure if Claire knows that she’s being pursued. Perhaps she has laid another trap for Ray. Roberts’s glance must instill the viewer with a tantalizing sense of uncertainty just this side of frustration.

John runs more film, and Roberts keeps gliding by, her face expressive despite dark glasses. In one shot, she twists her neck. “That look is way too strong,” Gilroy says. In some takes, Roberts appears coyly amused; in others, she seems indifferent, a woman in a rush. Finally, in Take 5, Roberts gives a glance backward that is delectably ambiguous, turning back with a half smile. Is she looking at the children? Listening for Owen? Is she just enjoying Rome? A pigeon flies up behind her. The children play with fervor but don’t distract. Owen deftly navigates the street, his unbuttoned Armani jacket flapping in the breeze. He looks great.

Gilroy, leaning back in his lounge chair, smiles at his brother. “See, it just works,” he says. “She turns her head at the right moment. Where it falls—here.”

Tony Gilroy is best known as a writer of movie thrillers. The screenwriter William Goldman says of him, “Right now, he is as good as the game.” “Duplicity” will be the eleventh of his movies to be produced in little more than a decade. Among them are “Dolores Claiborne” (1995), “The Devil’s Advocate” (1997), and the three movies in the Jason Bourne series (2002, 2004, and 2007). One of Gilroy’s specialties is the potent, reflective, and often beleaguered action hero, a man with, as he says, “an incredible toolbox of skills that he has let rust.” In 2007, “Michael Clayton,” which he wrote and directed, received seven Academy Award nominations, including one for his screenplay and another for his direction. Clayton, played by George Clooney, is a fixer at a law firm; he helps the company’s clients when they bump up against police inquiries or uncoöperative judges. He gets friendly cops tickets to the game. He is oddly dignified in his cynicism. “I’m not the guy that you kill!” he shouts at his prime adversary, a corporate lawyer played by Tilda Swinton. “I’m the guy that you buy! Are you so fucking blind you don’t even see what I am?” Gilroy’s movie was taut and intelligent, and evoked the Hollywood of the nineteen-seventies, when thrillers were anchored by complex characters.

Gilroy and Julia Roberts, filming in Manhattan. Photograph fron Sharkpix / ZUMA Photograph fron Sharkpix / ZUMA

Today, the film industry considers adult-oriented drama a small target, and one that is getting smaller. Middle-aged Americans don’t go to the movies; young adults and teen-agers do, and they prefer action to talk, in part because they believe they know every possible movie character already. A screenwriter interested in human behavior can find himself ignored by big-studio executives looking for movies propelled by spectacle and superheroes. “The trend is making movies that don’t need screenwriters,” a top Hollywood screenwriter explained to me by e-mail. Gilroy is a canny player, though. He says that he’s “not into building blueprints of buildings that will never get built.” His movies follow two fundamental rules: “Bring it in within two hours” and “Don’t bore the audience.” Sitting in his office at the Brill Building one day, while his brother edited “Duplicity” in the next room, Gilroy picked up a copy of his script and riffled it. “It’s all white space,” he said to me. “It’s all about not writing.”

Gilroy loves puzzles, and “Clayton” was full of them. So is “Duplicity,” with its scheming, warily passionate spies. “If I told you I loved you, would it make any difference?” Claire asks Ray at one point. “If you told me or if I believed you?” Ray responds. Gilroy calls the film “counterprogramming—not the normal thing to do next.” It is fast, lighthearted, and intense. “ ‘Michael Clayton’ could have been a novel,” Gilroy says. “ ‘Duplicity’ could only exist as a movie.” Yet it, too, is out of step with current Hollywood practice. It is a thriller shot almost entirely indoors. Ray and Claire do not career through Rome in a Porsche. There are no police cruisers piling up behind them at the end. Their passion is communicated largely with faces, not bodies.

The engine of “Duplicity” is the question of who is tricking whom—and, thus, where reality lies. The movie has an array of flashbacks that scramble the time frame, a complication that almost prevented the film from being made. Steven Spielberg, who, at one point, was interested in directing it, with Tom Cruise in the Clive Owen role, was so confused by the plot that he organized a table reading in his office at DreamWorks to clarify who did what to whom. Later, he jokingly suggested that the DVD include, as a bonus track, a chronological run-through of the story. (Ultimately, he dropped out.)

The core of “Duplicity” is the screenwriting trope known as the reversal. Gilroy told me, “A reversal is just anything that’s a surprise. It’s a way of keeping the audience interested.” A camera follows a man as he goes up the stairs to an apartment; we see his wedding ring as he pulls out his keys. He pushes open the door, slowly—a husband coming home, trudging up the stairs with his briefcase. But a woman in black lingerie greets him: he’s seeing his mistress! That is a reversal. In “Good Will Hunting,” when Matt Damon, mopping the floor at a university, comes upon a complicated math problem on a blackboard and solves it, the audience suddenly realizes that he is not an ordinary janitor—that’s a reversal, too. “Duplicity” is so crammed with reversals that Stephen Schiff, a screenwriter who is a friend of Gilroy’s, says that the story “achieves a kind of meta quality.”

Not only are reversals the building blocks of Gilroy’s dramas; they are often how he apprehends the world. In May, 2007, he was in a taxi, on his way to pick up his eleven-year-old daughter at Chelsea Piers, the sports complex by the Hudson River. The cabdriver was talking on his cell phone and ran a red light. The cab hit another car. Gilroy, peering from the window, could see that the other car had been totalled. He did not think that he had been hurt. “So they’re lifting the other guy out of the car, and I’m thinking, I’m lucky,” he said. “And—it’s a great shot, but it must have been done a thousand times—I’m sitting there watching them take the other guy away and I’m thinking, Great, I’m the lucky one. Then I see them come at my cab with those things, the jaws of life.” Gilroy had fractured a hip and a rib.

Gilroy believes that the writer and the moviegoing public are engaged in a cognitive arms race. As the audience grows savvier, the screenwriter has to invent new reversals—madder music and stronger wine. Perhaps the most famous reversal in film was written by William Goldman, originally in his 1974 novel “Marathon Man,” then honed for the movie version. Laurence Olivier, a sadistic Nazi dentist, is drilling into Dustin Hoffman’s mouth, trying to force him to disclose the location of a stash of diamonds. “Is it safe?” he keeps asking. Suddenly, William Devane sweeps in to rescue him and spirits Hoffman away. In the subsequent car ride, Devane starts asking questions; he wants to know where the diamonds are. After a few minutes, Hoffman’s eyes grow wide: Devane and Olivier are in league! “Thirty years ago, when Bill Goldman wrote it, the reversal in ‘Marathon Man’ was fresh,” Gilroy says. “But it must have been used now four thousand times.”

This is the problem that new movies must solve. As Gilroy says, “How do you write a reversal that uses the audience’s expectations in a new way? You have to write to their accumulated knowledge.” Before Gilroy wrote “Duplicity,” audiences had been trained by the mixed-up time schemes of “Memento,” “Amores Perros,” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Moviegoers got used to an aesthetic of disorientation. They also have DVDs, so they can watch a film twice to untangle its story, and the Internet, which allows them to look up a bit of jargon or insider information. Reality is a confluence of fragments, to be apprehended bit by bit; watching a movie has begun to approximate the rhythm of a Google search. Gilroy bragged to Variety about the nonlinear structure of “Clayton”: “In theory, if I make a real world, and there are some dramatic events taking place in there, I should be able to drop the needle anywhere 28 times and make something interesting out of it.”

A central challenge of “Duplicity,” in Gilroy’s estimation, is its humorous tone. Although breaking from chronology is an established convention of the noir genre—at the start of “Sunset Boulevard,” William Holden is floating dead in a pool—a comedy audience does not expect a test. Moreover, “Duplicity” is expensive. Movie stars don’t come cheap, so “Duplicity” has to make money at the mall. Taylor Hackford, who directed “Dolores Claiborne” and “The Devil’s Advocate,” says of “Duplicity,” “I’m not so sure it’s a picture that’s going to play to sixteen- or seventeen-year-olds, but who knows?”

If you worked in Universal’s marketing department, and you wanted to make the plot of “Duplicity” sound simple, you’d probably say that it’s a corporate-espionage story: two former spies work together to steal a valuable secret formula developed by a consumer-products company. A moviegoer lured in by this summary, however, will soon realize that it’s equally possible that Claire is tricking Ray, or that Ray is tricking Claire, or that the company with the formula is gaming them or being gamed by a rival.

“I suppose you’re worried about your little peasant benefits.” Facebook

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The movie makes an effort to keep the viewer off balance. The action skitters between Dubai, Rome, New York, London, the Bahamas, Miami, and Cleveland. The scammers are scammed, and those who look defeated suddenly bounce back. A whimsical score reminds you not to take any of it too seriously. Watching “Duplicity,” viewers hear nearly the same conversation between Claire and Ray five times, and each time it upends what they think is going on in the movie. The first time is in New York. Ray, now working for a rival conglomerate, has just been assigned to track Claire, who has taken a job with the consumer-products company. At first glance, it’s one of those happy screwball-comedy coincidences that so many movies depend on. The two confront each other at Lord & Taylor, in midtown. Claire says she doesn’t know who he is. “I’m not great on names,” Ray says to her. “Where I’m solid? People I’ve slept with. That’s been a traditional area of strength for me. You charm me. Seduce me. Screw me. Then you dope me and ransack my hotel room. And how sick is this? Last thing I remember before I passed out was how much I liked you.”

Claire responds that she has no idea who he is. Does she really not remember him? Is she pretending? Or are they playacting together, knowing that someone else is listening to them?