Clive Owen and Julia Roberts star in Tony Gilory’s new spy drama Duplicity which follows two corporate spies who share a steamy love affair in the midst of trying to scheme their respective bosses out of lots of money. Roberts, Owen and Gilroy share what it was like working with one another and how scorpions making love is the perfect metaphor to describe the film.

Q: Can you tell us about the inspiration to make this film?

Gilroy: I started having conversations about six or seven years ago with Steven Soderbergh who wanted to do a movie about spies. I said the only thing that is really fresh that I can think of right now is all the people I know who are in intelligence are going private, a corporate espionage thing. And it’s a huge thing, and no one is doing it. We started having conversations about this, and we said we should do it as a love story. It really came out of those conversations. It was originally written for him back then.

Q: What was it like working together again after the film Closer?

Roberts:  A golden opportunity.

Owen: A beautiful thing.

Roberts: When you have to get to know a person and spend that time together, which is important and vital to what you’re doing, you spend that time figuring out how they work and what that relationship is about. For us, we just knew and didn’t care.

Q: Tony Gilroy uses the metaphor “how would scorpions make love?” to describe your relationship in the film. Can you explain that?

Roberts: My birthday is in October, so I have a little objection to that metaphor.

Owen: He never told us that, so we don’t know where that is coming from at all.

Roberts: He is just trying to infuse sex into our movie. It’s a marketing ploy.

Q: Please explain the scorpions making love metaphor once and for all.

Gilroy: That’s the nice way to say it. These two people whose lives are based on not trusting anything and being completely untrustworthy themselves. What kind of relationship or love affair can they have? And who can that be with? These two people who meet each other are of the same species, and there’s a huge attraction to meeting someone who does exactly what you do. How are they are going to build on anything? And you have the complication that they actually get off on not trusting each other. That seemed to be really interesting territory to explore.

Q: Can you tell us about your characters in the film?

Owen: We are a couple that is crazy about each other but don’t trust each other. But they are crazy about each other.

Roberts: Yes, They can’t live together, but can’t live apart.

Q: What did you learn about this world of corporate espionage?

Roberts: It is a deep multi-layered thing that is just devilish. There are bad, evil, twisted people up there.

Q: Who can you trust in this movie?

Owen: Me.

Q: What can audiences expect from this movie?

Roberts: I saw it, and I am a terrible judge of movies that I am in. But I honestly had a grin from start to finish; I was so wrapped up in whatever they were doing and if I believed what they were doing. You get so caught up in it.

Gilroy: They shouldn’t expect anything. It’s meant to be surprising along the way. It’s meant to be continuously surprising. It’s a movie about people who are betraying one another. There is a lot of betrayal in the story telling. And there’s a very clear punch line, I hope. And everything wraps up tidy in the end, but along the way there is a lot of betrayal.

Q: What was it like working with Tony Gilroy?

Owen: He is a freak.

Roberts: He is the ultimate word smith. He knows every word and he uses all of them. And I think that is an admirable quality.

Q: Can you talk about his use of dialogue?

Roberts: Amazing. That’s really something that we go back to time and time again. Because it is like a lost art, there are so many effects, and so much plot, and so much stuff that you can use to fill up the movie screen that people have forgotten about the words and how to put them all together. And he is really a craftsman that way.

Q: Can you talk about what the cast brings to their characters?

Gilroy: They make me look really smart, and make my life look easy. That’s the real dirty secret of directing; if you cast really well and you get a script that works and just surround yourself with really great actors you are sort of three quarters of the way home. So I have Paul Giamatti, Tom Wilkinson, Dennis O’Hare, Tom McCarthy, Kathleen Chalfant; it’s just a great cast up and down.