J.C. Chandor spent fifteen years in commercials and documentaries before Margin Call. He talks about writing and directing the financial crisis thriller.
J.C. Chandor, writer and director of financial crisis thriller, Margin Call, has spent the past fifteen years honing his craft in commercial and documentary work. Besides directing commercials for some of the biggest brands in the world and a directing and producing a six part concert film series for AOL/Warner Bros. that featured Sting, Elton John, and The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Chandor has sharpened his craft on various short films including Despacito (2004) starring Will Arnett. Margin Call follows one particular investment firm over the course of twenty four hours just as we are on the verge of financial collapse. Timely as it is riveting, Chandor has assembled an all star cast that includes Kevin Spacey, Zachary Quinto, Jeremy Irons, Paul Bettany, Demi Moore, and Stanley Tucci to tell the personal and riveting story of the country’s financial downfall.
Nash Choudhury: This project could not be timelier with the Occupy Wall Street protest going on. Especially since the people they are enraged at are your protagonists in the movie. That’s what I really liked about it because it’s very easy to vilify the bankers and financial guys who got us to the state we’re in now. Where do you find the humanity there? Was it through the research and talking with these guys or did you always plan to put a human face to the whole crisis?
J.C. Chandor: I wrote the script over three years ago so any connection between the two events is pure coincidence. But we fought very hard when raising the money for our film to maintain the integrity of the script. Finding the humanity in these characters was fairly simple for me because when you really looked at this world closely it is made up of people just doing their jobs and trying to protect what they feel is rightfully theirs. I’m not sure I totally agree with that point of view but the characters in the film while very upset about their predicament strongly believe they are acting within their rights.
NC: The film deals with a lot of complex financial ideas that probably the majority of audiences will have a hard time following. How do you get across these big difficult ideas without putting the whole movie at risk of being too esoteric for a wide audience?
J.C. Chandor: This was a very fine line I walked while writing, shooting, and editing the film. I wanted the film to be authentic enough for people within the industry while also being basic enough for the common audience to understand. The main way I accomplished this was by trying to make the film mainly about the characters reactions to their predicament instead of what the details of the predicament actually were. All you really need to know as an audience member is that this problem could bankrupt the company. It’s really that simple, once you know that you realize that they are fighting for their lives and the rest of the action plays out under the cloud of that fact.
NC: This is a very dialogue heavy movie with a lot of scenes of guys in suits sitting around conference tables. How do you make that interesting and exciting cinematically? Is it in the script, actor’s performances, the editing, directing the scene on set? Where does that energy in those scenes come from do you think?
J.C. Chandor: Hopefully this answer doesn’t seem like a cop-out but it comes from all of those factors coming together all at once. That is the amazing and very challenging thing about a feature film, you have to keep the audience’s attention for over 90 minutes and if all those facets don’t come together in a meaningful way you start losing people. You can have the most action packed movie ever made but if there isn’t a real story there no one cares. Throughout our movie I was always trying to keep moving forward and onward even though the characters are essentially trapped on this one floor of a building.
NC: Obviously, the film deals with very difficult and hard to understand financial ideas that did contribute to the fall of the economy and most regular people I would say still don’t quite understand all of it. As a filmmaker tackling such issues, how much research did you do and how? Would you say you’re kind of an expert or at least significantly more knowledgeable on what happened to the economy?
J.C. Chandor: I am by no means an expert on this topic but I did research many facets of the industry. I visited many different trading floors and had been following this business closely in the press for many years. My father also worked for an investment bank [not as a trader] for his whole career so many of the people I grew up around and was friends with later in my adult life worked in this industry so I was very aware of who these characters were. To put it simply, I understood each of these individuals voice and that is the hardest part when writing a script.
NC: There’s a beat in the film that I found quite striking, both in the idea of it and also because there was a similar beat in Curtis Hanson’s Too Big to Fail, where Zachary Quinto’s character laments how the people around them have no idea what’s about to happen. Billy Crudup’s Timothy Geithner makes the same exact statement in Hanson’s film. Why do you think that is a sentiment shared by two separate financial crisis based films? How important would you say that line is to the central ideas in the film?
J.C. Chandor: Interestingly I think it is far more significant that in my film he is the only character in the whole movie who actually does make that observation. Meaning, I would have hoped that many of the people in that world at that time might have had that observation. But in my film most of the characters are by their nature very inward looking self centered people so they are more concerned with their own plight than the potential effect this event may have on anyone else. Nash Choudhury is a 25 year old graduate from Binghamton University with a BA in Creative Writing. He is currently a freelance writer with a passion for movies.
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