The feature film Margin Call is interesting for a number of reasons. It was written over four days by writer-director J.C. Chandor, who before that had made a number of shorts films and documentaries. It was shot in 17 days, and apparently the screenplay immediately began to attract ‘name’ actors as it began circulating LA.
Craig Matheison has the details:
SOMETIMES a young filmmaker only has to look to his family and upbringing for
compelling material. For his outstanding debut feature, Margin Call, American
writer-director J. C. Chandor tellingly explores the Wall Street life that his father
spent 35 years amidst working for the investment bank Merrill Lynch.
”It feels like an honest representation of that world,” says the 37-year-old Chandor,
who has only recently returned with his young family to their home in Rhode Island
after spending the awards season in Los Angeles following his Academy Awards
nomination for best original screenplay.
He wrote the moral thriller in just four days in 2009, but with its allusive dialogue,
twisted institutional allegiance and breached ethics, Margin Call does for Tom
Wolfe’s Masters of the Universe what David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross did for
shady salesmen: it creates a self-contained milieu where the characters are
compelled to reveal their true nature.
Set in 2008, on the eve of the Global Financial Crisis, the independent feature is
sequestered for 24 hours inside a Wall Street investment bank that has realised the
toxic mortgage-backed assets it holds threaten the fictitious firm’s existence. The
solution, as advocated by the charmingly amoral chief executive (Jeremy Irons), is to
dump everything the next morning and damn the consequences.
It’s never a naive question of whether the sale will happen, but rather how those
involved will handle the deception.
”These people are never not going to sell this stuff. What you’re learning is what
these people will do under that pressure,” Chandor explains.
Jeremy Irons plays the amoral chief executive in Margin Call.
”I hope that through the way these characters deal with this identical situation within
their particular lives allows you to learn about them.”
Chandor had spent 15 years making documentaries and shorts, but the Margin Call
screenplay attracted actors as soon as it began circulating. Names would come and go
– early on Ben Kingsley was going to portray the CEO – but once Kevin Spacey signed
on as a troubled trading floor boss, which allowed foreign pre-sales via the Cannes
Film Festival in 2010, an exemplary ensemble cast fell into place: Irons, Paul Bettany
as a hotshot trader, Demi Moore and Simon Baker as rival senior executives, and
Zachary Quinto as the young analyst who discovers the problem.
”You can’t fool people with bad acting and it’s very hard to cover it up with
something else,” says Chandor. ”I got unbelievably lucky and then did a good job of
making the actors look their best.”
The ambiguous shades of grey within Margin Call that made the actors willing to
work for little on a tight 17-day shooting schedule has also subsequently generated
criticism. Chandor has been attacked, with references to his background, for not
overtly condemning the kind of profit-driven financial engineering that provoked the
American financial system’s meltdown.
”I can see how, given what happened, people might want to see some of these
characters strung up, but I wanted the film to ring true,” he says. ”We could have got
financing for this film a year earlier if Zachary’s character had blown the whistle to
the government and Spacey’s character was marched out of the building in
handcuffs. But it didn’t happen that way in real life, and it rarely does.”
What has surprised Chandor is that Margin Call has the global financial crisis much
to itself in terms of subject matter. He assumed that such a momentous event would
inspire other artists, but instead the status quo has persisted.
”We’re working this crisis out right now, but this isn’t the ’70s when everyone would
have flocked to a film about it,” he concedes. ”All we’ve had was this weird $80
million Wall Streets equel. No one else has covered this, but there are still 15 cop
movies being made each year.”
The one person who did learn a lesson about the perils of being over-leveraged was
Chandor. Even as the cast swelled, he held Margin Call’s $3.2 million budget in
check. It guaranteed creative control and ensured all the investors got their money
back. ”I knew that if you earned for your financiers, you’d get to do this again,” he
says, and so in May he begins shooting the seaborne adventure All is Lost with
Robert Redford.
Craig Mathieson – March 15, 2012