Ever been challenged to a duel? That’s exactly what happens to Dylan Sprouse’s character Colin in The Duel directed by Justin Matthews and Luke Spencer Roberts.
When Colin’s best friend Woody (Callan McAuliffe) finds out that Colin has slept with his girlfriend, Woody challenges Colin to an old-fashioned fight for honor, 1800s style.
In the above clip, obtained exclusively by MovieMaker, Colin hears about the duel for the first time.
“I think he wants to duel you,” Denny Love’s character Sam, who is also best friends with Woody and Colin, says in the clip.
“What does that even mean? You don’t just go around dueling people. That’s f—ing illegal,” Colin replies.
“Well, according to Google, it’s an arranged engagement in combat between two people — and or idiots — with matched weapons in accordance with pre-arranged rules,” Sam says.
This scene was shot at 3:30 a.m. in Indianapolis, the directors told MovieMaker.
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“That was a late night. We had a lot of night shoots on this film. We shot the two gas station scenes back to back,” Matthews said.
“Denny Love who plays Sam, anytime we can give him alts or one of the fun things is just getting enough of our coverage done so that we can let him riff — he’s a stand up comic, and as you can tell throughout the movie is great comedic timing,” Matthews added.
Love and Sprouse became genuinely close friends during the making of the project, and the above scene is an example of that friendship blossoming in real time.
“Dylan’s been doing this his whole life. So anytime the two of them are together, and we can let them go back and forth and genuinely get into an argument. They didn’t know each other before filming this movie and now the two of them are extremely close friends. And that process happened through the shooting of the film. So them pretending to be best friends in the movie and bickering as friends to started leading to them actually becoming friends,” Matthews said.
Directors Share the Origins of The Duel
Matthews and Roberts got the idea for the movie from a conversation with one of his friends on the phone.
“We were walking to the liquor store down from my apartment, we’d been working on a completely separate idea. Yeah, we’re still working on all these years later. But, you know, we’re going back and forth. And Justin got a call. Justin’s a West side guy, he lives in West Hollywood. And it was one of his friends from out here… he was basically relaying the story to us about a friend group that just imploded in a very, very similar way,” Roberts said.
In real life, the Woody character had to just go about his life living with the fact that his best friend had slept with his girlfriend. But it gave Roberts and Matthews an idea. What if you could settle your differences the old fashioned way?
“That was one of those moments was like, yeah, but what’s he going to do? He’s not going to go kill a guy. That’s terrible, that’s a bad idea. We got some beer, we’re going back to my house, and then the idea starts to come. There was a time you could do something,” Roberts said.
“Instead of it being a Western where guys who are gun fighters have a gun fight, or pirates with swords, in this case, it’s like no — there was a time when like two normal people, theoretically as long as they both agreed, could sort something out that was considered unfixable. So that was kind of the origination.”
The rest of the cast of The Duel includes Hart Denton (Riverdale, 13 Reasons Why), Patrick Warburton (The Emperor’s New Groove, Seinfeld), and Ronald Guttman (The Hunt for Red October, Isle of Hope).
The Duel arrives in select theaters on July 31.
You can watch the exclusive clip above.
Main Image: Dylan Sprouse and Denny Love in The Duel, Lionsgate/Grindstone