QUOTE: Tony Gilroy on corporate espionage.
My girlfriend recently left a copy of Fast Company magazine at my apartment, telling me about the article on Chris Hughes, a founder of Facebook and how he helped Obama win his campaign. Flipping through, I found this short Q & A with Tony Gilroy, writer/director of Michael Clayton, discussing corporate espionage in his new movie, Duplicity.
FAST COMPANY: How did you get interested in corporate espionage?
TONY GILROY: I’ve done a lot of spy movies, law enforcement, and military-intelligence things, and I’ve built up contacts in the intelligence community. Most of the spies in my address have gone private. I watched them set up companies or join ones, and make more money than they ever though they would make. You’d see them two years later, and they’d have their teeth done, a new suit, a new wife. So I thought there was something fresh there for a movie. Nobody had done it. It was surprising that it was so untouched.
You don’t hear much about this, especially from companies.
There’s no upside for the victim or the victor to talk about it. You’re not going to see a press release saying, “Hey, our $60 million idea just got ripped off.” Most of this remains unreported. But when I was working on the script a few years ago, there was an espionage war between Proctor & Gamble and Unilever that got out.
It was a pretty good story that changed my opinion on Duplicity. Fairly recently, I realized Gilroy followed up Clayton (which I think is probably one of the best screenplays in the 21st century) with this movie, I thought it was a pretty weak follow-up based on the marketing, advertising it as a super-lame Rom-Com between corporate spies trying to rip-off their employers. However, when I read this article, I now realize its at least worth seeing.
