TORONTO—Adapted screenplays are tricky things in Hollywood. Not so long ago, the Coen brothers won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for a script based on Homer’s writing (O Brother, Where Art Thou? was supposedly based on the Odyssey), then later admitted, gleefully, that they’d never read the source material.

Since then, the earnest idea of modernizing a work of classic literature for Hollywood has been regarded with some suspicion, especially by interviewers.

But during an exclusive talk at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, British comedian Richard Ayoade admitted to having read—not only once but several times—The Double by Feodor Dostoyevsky, on which his film of the same name is based.

“It’s a hard book to follow, and it’s taken me quite a few reads, actually, to know what’s going on,” he said.

In fact, Ayoade spoke enthusiastically about not only Dostoyevsky as source material but several other works of “doppelganger folklore” in which characters reveal hidden parts of themselves.

“ ‘William Wilson’, [by] Edgar Allan Poe, Jekyll and Hyde to some degree, Fight Club—these are all stories about characters and their shadow personas,” said Ayoade, who’s best known to Brit-com fans for his work on The IT Crowd and The Mighty Boosh.

“That’s what [the reality-TV show] Big Brother is all about too—the players go in trying to be nice, but they end up playing the game by being true to their nature.”

In The Double, Jesse Eisenberg plays Simon James, a timid office worker who feels ignored at work and by his love interest (Mia Wasikowska). As in the novel, James’s life veers into bizarro world when a new guy, James Simon, shows up at work. The latter is, of course, his exact physical copy, though no one else seems to notice, and the new guy soon begins to take over his life.

Coming from Britain, Ayoade said he didn’t have much difficulty adjusting to American sensibilities, mostly because to him, characters are too finely tuned to specific origins and attributes to be painted with such broad strokes as “British” or “American”.

“I think there’s so many different types of character from America or England that one approach to a nationality would be insufficient,” he said.

Ayoade observed that Dostoyevsky’s novel was more a satire about pomposity and the petty bourgeoisie, with a main character who is puffed up and easily humiliated. The Double is more about the “idea of the shadow”, qualities that each of us carry, unacknowledged, until circumstances lead us to act in accordance with our better—or worse—natures. Ayoade added that as the world becomes more urbanized and spaces become more crowded, life grows more and less intimate at the same time.

“I suppose that everyone has a persona, the version you show to the world, and you have that real self behind it. The tension between these selves is something worth exploring.”