The event that inspired Chandor’s script actually occurred in early 2007. The veteran commercial and short-film director, now 37, was involved in a project to rehab a building in New York. A financial industry insider, the godfather of one of Chandor’s partners, offered some urgent advice. “He told us: ‘The world is going to change. I strongly suggest that you get the heck out of this deal.’ ”
They did, and that friendly counsel became the spark for Chandor’s first feature. “I thought back to that guy, and what it was like for him to be walking around for a year or two, making very significant bets that the market was going to turn,” the director says. “I thought it was very interesting from a character-development standpoint . . . to have that gut feeling that the end was nigh.”
Chandor began the project with his longtime friend Joe Jenckes, a D.C. native, as the producer. Later, they were joined by Before the Door, a production company headed by actor Zachary Quinto. He’s probably best known for playing Spock in 2009’s “Star Trek,” though recently he has been in the news for coming out as gay. Quinto took the movie’s central role: a young analyst, trained in rocket science, who discovers that the company’s bad investment in one form of security outweighs all its other holdings combined.
“We started pulling the funding together for this movie about a year and half, two years ago, in the aftermath of the collapse of 2008,” Quinto says. “It was impossible not to see the ramifications of what had happened, everywhere we looked. It informed everything that we were doing.”
The movie’s final budget was only about $3.5 million, but the cast is gilt-edged. Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, Paul Bettany, Simon Baker and Demi Moore play the executives who spend one anxious night trying to reverse the firm’s largely unspecified bad bet. (There is one reference to mortgage-backed securities.)
Chandor had an advantage when he started writing lines for these performers. His father had worked for Merrill Lynch for decades, so the director, who now lives in Rhode Island, grew up around Wall Streeters. “It made it much easier to write the film,” he said. “I knew the voices. I knew what those people spoke about, and what they cared about, pretty well.”
Nell Minow, a critic of both movies and corporations, was impressed by Chandor’s dialogue. “What they said and the way they interacted with each other I thought was very authentic,” says Minow, who writes the “Movie Mom” feature for Beliefnet.com. She is also a co-author of a textbook on corporate governance and serves on the board of GMI, an independent research film specializing in corporate governance.
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