Interview: JC Chandor, film director

ONE of 2011’s most acclaimed films was glaringly overlooked in last month’s Golden Globe nominations. Hailed by US critics as the most lucid film to date about the reasons for the financial crash in 2008, Margin Call is a smart, gripping drama offering fine acting from a classy, top-of-their-game ensemble, including Kevin Spacey, Stanley Tucci, and Demi Moore, and a nuanced screenplay and clear direction by JC Chandor.

Chandor is philosophical about the lack of recognition. “The Golden Globes like a bit more flash than we’re offering,” he says. He wasn’t disappointed, though. It’s already been “a wild ride”, he says, with reactions “way out of the range” of their expectations.

Indeed, there were early concerns that the American public might cold shoulder Margin Call the same way they did movies about the Iraq war. But Margin Call not only found an audience after its Sundance bow in 2011, it has become part of the conversation about why the United States – and the rest of us – are where we are now, and what should be done about it.

Chandor, who has Scottish ties through his grandparents, always had faith that he could make investment banking entertaining. His film was never going to be a “drudging re-analysis of exactly where we have been”, he says, but rather “a small step into allowing people to understand a little bit of the decision-making behind what helped get us here”, couched as compelling drama.

Even so, he acknowledges, the film could have been “something that people didn’t want to talk about, because it’s just so in their face. But there’s been a real meaningful engagement, both in the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent.”

Margin Call’s genesis actually began before the crash, in 2006, when the godfather - “a very prominent investment banker” - of an associate with whom Chandor was involved in a real estate venture in New York, admonished them to sell the building they’d bought. “At the time the market was still skyrocketing up, but we did sell the building and were able to get out with our shirts,” he says.

A year and a half later, “when the financial world really started to tremble and shake, and literally go off the rails, I started thinking back to what that person must have known and what it felt like to believe so strongly that the jig was up.”

This became the foundation of Margin Call, the tale of a tense 24 hours in the life of a Lehman Brothers-like investment bank that suddenly discovers the leveraged mortgages on its books are worthless, and must decide whether or not to dump the toxic stock before the rest of the market cottons on, knowing that to do so will create a catastrophic domino effect.

Chandor focuses on the moral dilemmas of individual bankers, risk analysts and traders, and the reasoning behind their actions. Unlike Oliver Stone’s Wall Street films, there are no obvious heroes or villains, just flawed human beings caught by the situation.

Chandor doesn’t let them or the banking system off the hook, however. His father worked for Merrill Lynch for 35 years, and he knows the banking world too well, having grown up around it in London and New York, to think it was ever altruistic. “That’s obviously ridiculous. Banking thrives on wanting to make a return on your investment.” Like the Occupy movement, though, he isn’t attacking Capitalism per se. “I’m a believer that profit when controlled and manipulated and regulated can be a wonderful motivational tool for tremendous progress in the world,” he says. “But I’m certainly stating that a corporate entity left to its own devices is always at risk of running amok. And I think what the film tries to zero in on, in a very specific way, is that the banking sector, by its very nature, is involved in people’s lives in a way that, frankly, almost every other corporation is not.”

Capitalism’s “tragic flaw”, he argues, is that “the more money you have, fundamentally the more easy it is to make money”. Taxation and regulation are meant to monitor and steer it. but “what my film is trying to say is that the pendulum has swung too far in one direction.”

Margin Call is about the moment when people realise that instead of investing in industry and socially beneficial enterprises for the past 10 to 15 years, all they have been doing is gambling on making money from money. “They always felt that at least it wasn’t doing harm in the world,” says the filmmaker. “So while it wasn’t exactly what they signed up for, and it felt like the industry’s going off track, it wasn’t like they’re selling crack on the streets.” Now the chickens have come home to roost, and denial’s no longer possible.

The bank’s option to dump its toxic stock onto the market and cause widespread misery may appear unethical, but it is not illegal. And here is the rub, suggests Chandor. “Following the rules of capitalism, if you believe something is worth $3 and the world thinks it’s worth $6, you have the right to take the risk and sell it for $6. If it ends up being worth $8 tomorrow, you end up looking like an idiot. And if it ends up being worth $3, you end up looking smart.”

For some, the frustration of Margin Call will be that while its characters’ behaviour often seems unscrupulous, shortsighted or selfish, there are no clear-cut bad guys – and the character who comes closest to fitting the role of villain isn’t really one in the truest sense of the word. No-one in the film actually breaks any laws. And no-one needs to, because the rules of the system are already weighted in their favour (as it was in reality).

“The Obama administration would have loved to have hung a few people out to dry as poster boys,” claims Chandor. “But it is almost impossible to track this down because these are institutions selling to other institutions. So the people on the buyers’ side of it were supposed to be aware.”

The protests on the streets of New York, London, Madrid and other major cities illustrate a widespread feeling that the banking system needs to be examined, and perhaps overhauled. Chandor doesn’t believe the end of capitalism is nigh, but he does think some kind of major correction is occurring.

“There’s obviously something amiss and if you try to stick your head in the sand and just keep going forward, which is what I was feeling was happening when I wrote this film, then I don’t think we’ll be fine. We actually do need to sit back and take a look at this. Which I think we are now doing.”

• Margin Call is in cinemas from 13 January.