Hollywood in the Circle City: The Duel premieres after filming in Indiana

INDIANAPOLIS — The glitz and glam of Hollywood is coming to the Circle City this weekend.

‘The Duel’ will premiere at the historic Hilbert Circle Theatre in downtown Indy this weekend. The film is about two best friends in love with the same woman. They decide to settle their differences with an 18th-century style duel.

”It’s modern guys who take to historical solutions to solve their problems,” said Zachary Spicer, CEO and founder of Pigasus Pictures.

It’s headlined by big names like Dylan Sprouse from the Suite Life of Zack and Cody and Beautiful Disaster, Patrick Warburton from the Emperor’s New Groove and Seinfeld and Callan McAuliffe from The Walking Dead.

Among the big-time actors is another star of the show: Indiana.

”The majority of it took place here within 465,” said Spicer.

The entirety of the film was shot over several weeks in August 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

”It was a weird miracle that this movie happened,” said Gordon Strain, co-owner of Pigasus.

The more than 60 people who made up the cast and crew had to adhere to strict COVID-19 guidelines or risk the movie having a premature end.

”If a single person caught COVID you had to shut down for two weeks and you couldn’t do anything for two weeks,” Spicer said. ”A production our size, this is a small budget film, we wouldn’t have survived that. So, we tested every person every other day for the better part of eight weeks.”

For the cast and crew that didn’t live in Indiana, they were sequestered to a Hamilton County home in near complete isolation, outside of each other.

“Basically on a farm,” Strain said. “With no car.”

But, somehow, the cast and crew made it work.

”The only place we could have any chance of making this movie possible was here in Indiana,” Spicer said. “Even though it’s set in California and Mexico.”

Sharp-eyed Hoosiers might recognize a few Circle City and Indiana spots in the trailer and film.

Midland Art and Antiques in downtown Indy was used to film scenes at the “duelers emporium.” Some of the antiques in the store even made it into the movie.

”To dress an antique mall would take forever but if you have one that exists and you’re just kind of zhuzhing somethings up,” Strain said. “It was easy.”

The beach and sea featured in the trailer aren’t actually the Pacific Ocean. It’s Lake Michigan and a beach in Michigan City, Indiana on a windy day.

Crews even ventured underneath the downtown City Market to the catacombs below for a few scenes.

The big, fancy mansion you see in a majority of the trailer is actually Asherwood, the former estate of Mel and Bren Simon in Carmel.

”You get a location like that you want to film as many days there as you physically, possibly can,” Spicer said.

A whole day of filming also happened inside Fountain Square bar The Inferno Room.

”We’ve done weddings here, we’ve done all sorts of private parties but never filmed a movie,” said Chris Coy, the owner of the Inferno Room.

Strain said the original bar scene was supposed to be shot inside of a “whiskey dive bar.” But when he took writers and directors Justin Matthews and Luke Spencer Roberts to The Inferno Room for dinner, they decided it was the perfect place.

Coy was even an extra in the movie, cast as a background character.

”I was directed to be a phone zombie,” Coy said. “So that’s what I did.”

Now he’s created a special drink in honor of the film called The Coconut Explosion. It’s a whiskey-based tropical drink with a literal fire finish.

Spicer and Strain sat down with FOX59/CBS4 at the Inferno Room bar to talk about their mission.

”We built our mission and the core of our company on making things here in Indiana, hiring people here in Indiana,” Spicer said.

Both IU grads, Spicer and Strain said when they were growing up, the message to young, wannabe filmmakers was you had to leave to make something of yourself.

“The idea when you grow up here is if you want to do something of this size and of this scale or that ambitious, you have to go somewhere else to do it,” Spicer said. “You have to go to Los Angeles, you have to go to New York.”

Now, they’re trying to change that idea.

”Being able to expose to a whole new generation of kids to show they’re capable of much more than what they might think themselves to be able to,” Spicer said.

The Duel is the seventh film from Pigasus Pictures. It will be shown in more than 500 theaters across the country on July 31. It could be the biggest film shot in Indiana since…

”I gotta imagine it was Rudy,” Spicer said, referencing the classic sports movie filmed at Notre Dame.

In fact, Spicer said when they showed it to the executives at Lionsgate, they were shocked to find out nearly all of the movie was filmed in Indiana.

”They also don’t think about the diversity of the environments that Indiana has to offer,” Spicer said.

They said that’s what they enjoy the most, proving people who have never been to Indiana wrong about what this state has to offer.

The red carpet at the Hilbert Circle Theatre will start at 6 p.m. on Sunday with nearly all of the cast and crew in Indy. You can still buy tickets to the premiere and the afterparty at Newfields .

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