Chandor sat down with Movieline today to go over his long, long road to feature filmmaking, how and where to write a first draft in four days, and feeling comfortable leveling with legends on the set.
So this is your first feature, but you're not a rookie by any means, right?
No, I have been a commercial director and a documentary producer and anything else anyone could hire me to do for 15 years. Since before college. I've been trying to do this for 15 years. It's been a personal dream come true in a major, major way, and to have it all come together the way it did is kind of more than you can imagine. I had a film almost five and a half years ago fall apart like five days before principal photography that I had been working on for like seven years.
Oh my God.
The financier walked. It was just a horrible experience. I didn't ever leave the documentary projects, but I left the commercial world and left the independent world. My daughter was about five months old at the time, and I'd put my family at financial risk because I'd basically taken off six months of any kind of commercial work to try to produce that. I went out to see if there was something else in the world I could do, and this writing is kind of what drew me back. I just had the idea bouncing around.
When did this idea come to you?
It was in late '06/beginning of '07. I began to see a bunch of things happen. I'd gotten into real estate; I love old industrial buildings, and so some partners and I had bought a little building in Tribeca with a little bit of our money and a lot of other money. And that was at a time when everyone was trying to get rich with real estate. We got in over our heads on this big renovation project, and the architect on the project -- who was one of our partners, and a friend of mine -- his godfather is a very senior banker at a very senior investment bank before starting his own thing. He came to us in '06/'07 -- in the middle of our renovation, when we were getting offers to buy the building. New York real estate was still [strong], and we were saying, "No way! This is our project." And he came to us and basically said, "Take them."
At first we didn't quite know what his motives were, but then he told us about how he was walking away from deals where he was leaving millions of dollars of deposits on the table. And one of our partners who had given us money turned out to be a total pain in the butt. So considering that -- combined with what we were told -- we sold the building. A year and a half later, the financial world literally comes to an end. And I started thinking back to what it was like. What did he know? What was he literally seeing that made him say something? My partner was an architect, and this was a lifetime dream of his. He affected his godson's life in this very severe way: "Abandon your project. Get out." I thought, "What does it feel like to walk around with that information, and when do you decide to actually start acting on it? Who do you act on it with? What if you're wrong?"
Then the investment banks failed, and my father had worked in that world for 35 years. So I knew a lot about those characters -- not from a technical standpoint, but from an emotional standpoint. Why they make the decisions they do. Why do some people take the jobs they do? Why do people quit when they quit? Why do people get fired when they get fired? All of those things, I did have a very deep, deep understanding of, just from my own life. So I knew the vice of the characters, and I tried to combine the two.
And going back to your other question, I have a long, long history of production. I wrote this to direct it. I thought, "How do you tell this incredibly complicated story for under a million bucks?" That's where I started, and that's where I came up with the idea of trapping them on one floor of a building. I knew I could shoot that very quickly and would probably have a better chance of getting prominent actors. All these knowledge bases came together, and this script came out of me in like four days.
Four days?
Yeah. I went back, obviously, but there was an 81-page draft that I wrote between job interviews. I was in Boulder, Colorado, for a job, and the Monday interview went well, and they asked me to stay until Friday, when the CEO was coming back. I thought, "I could sit here for four days and get drunk or hike in the mountains or do whatever the hell else anyone does in Boulder, Colorardo, or actually do this thing that's been in my head for a year and a half."
It says "Based on a true story" on the poster. Obviously the crash is pretty real, and you know people like these characters. But is there a specific "true story" you're telling here?
To specify it that way is a marketing situation -- though it's certainly inspired by a true story of what's going on. But I tried to strip away all identifying factors. There are no dates. There are very few times; the time of the day is laid out, but we don't really know. I always found it sort of interesting that, by the actual content in the movie, this could have taken place in 2006, or 2004, even. People were calling the end for many years. Part of what I find so interesting is that what got a lot of these CEOs in trouble from a risk-taking standpoint is that they saw their [counterparts] at other companies get laid off for not taking enough risk -- for calling in 2005, "It's time to pump the brakes, boys." And there were still two more years of making billion-dollar profits. There was this fear of being the first person off the train, so to speak, which in the end led the train over the fucking cliff.
But for me, this firm is still in business. This is not a Lehman Brothers situation. This action helped avert bankruptcy, and that's really interesting to me -- that these people are still out there doing their thing.
When you have a cast like this on your first feature, how much of your job becomes just giving them the script and getting out of the way? How hands-on are you with guys like Kevin Spacey or Jeremy Irons?
The interesting thing is that I had a tremendous leg-up in the command of the material. Some of them needed to be brought up to speed. So when you think of a lot of the ego battles that often happen in an actor-director relationship, I sort of had a bit of a leg-up immediately because I wrote it. That's a major element. As a writer-director, the actors do give you a level of respect right off the bat knowing that this is my film, essentially. It's not like I'm bringing it from some other source.
But you'd have to be an idiot, in my position, to not watch them do three or four takes and see what happens. Obviously, you see what Kevin Spacey's going to do for you! [Laughs] I guess the juicy part of the answer to the question is that at times it wasn't going where I [wanted]. I knew the movie I wanted to make; we weren't experimenting or anything. It's a procedural film. One thing is absolutely required to build one thing on another. The film kind of runs like that. There were really intense times. It's a life's worth of work. You have to go up to Jeremy Irons and be like, "Totally off the mark here, dude. This is not where we needed you to be." It was an amazing experience in my life. Once you kind of go there with them, and you know what you're talking about, they are professionals, and they respect that, and it began these relationships that I'll remember for the rest of my life.
And of course Irons's role as the CEO is the only unambiguously bad guy in the movie. The tone is supposed to be pitched, right?
What we always wanted to relate is that this is what he's hired to do. The interesting thing in that board-room scene with him and Spacey -- well, all of the scenes, really -- Spacey is wrong, and Irons is right. That doesn't mean he was right two and a half years ago, when he was saying, "Let's step on the gas! Keep going!" He was obviously wrong. But at this particular moment, Kevin Spacey's character is totally off the mark. Don't tell poor Kevin that, because we wanted him to believe his character is right. But in the end, if they had kept these on their books, it would have put the company out of business. And these aren't grandmothers in Wichita they're selling this stuff to. It's other educated buyers. These are institutions trading with each other -- which I did on purpose.
Certainly there were other cases where things are more questionable morally. But this is on that borderline, where what you're doing is putting other businesses out of business. Not to say that's any better. But Irons's character, by the rules of capitalism, is entirely within the right. He has a piece of information before anybody else does that could threaten his company, and he chooses to take action on it. On paper he's the most evil guy there. But he's making the decision that you, as a shareholder, have hired him to make. That's why he's there.
Yet you could still tell how much he relished nailing that guy to the wall.
Right. And I also came into it with this insane confidence that I'd been waiting 15 years for this opportunity. This is making a little bit light of the situation, but essentially, I walked on to that set saying, "Who gives a crap if this is Kevin Spacey? He is an amazing lump of clay who is probably going to give me a greater performance than anyone else I could have cast in that role, but I'm here to make the movie I know I want to make." Probably, had I gotten this opportunity 10 years earlier, I wouldn't have been able to do that. I was a pretty immature guy at 26. But I knew the movie I wanted to make, and I was given the gift of these actors, and they were all there for the right reason. They weren't making a ton of money. It was a movie they wanted to make.
I don't think I'll ever have an experience like that again, obviously. Some of those board-room scenes, where you have all of those people in one room... It was more when I'd walk out, back to the video village, and I'd be like, "Did I just walk out of that board room with all of those actors that are saying my words?" [Laughs] After all the time I'd been waiting, it was a pretty intense dream come true.
So what is the next experience you're hoping to have? What's in development for you?
I don't know. [Shouting across room] Neal, has the money come in yet?
Margin Call co-producer Neal Dodson: We're working on it!
Chandor: I wrote something, and it is cast, and we are hopefully going into production in the next month or two here.
But there are no details?
[Dodson shakes his head.]
Chandor: Not yet. We need the money to hit a bank account.
Dodson: But feel free to say, "Someone should write these guys a blank check!"
Chandor: [Laughs] It's a very challenging, very different, crazy, not topical, very little dialogue, fun piece. It's very different from a directing standpoint. But I had this amazing opportunity; I've been waiting all this time, and this film's been very well received. We made our investors' money back, plus a hefty return. So all joking aside about not having the money, there are people now interested in us -- coming to us -- to make a movie, potentially. We're trying to find the right fit. It's a very challenging process to finance, but could be really fun to make.
Margin Call opens Friday in limited release. Read Stephanie Zacharek's review from the 2011 Berlin Film Festival here.
[Top photo: Getty Images]