With the top award from the Producers Guild, "The Big Short" is now frontrunner for the best picture Oscar. We chat with producers Jeremy Kleiner and Dede Gardner; a Motion Picture Academy admits that the organization has been too slow to change; the band Foals has gone from playing house parties to arenas.
'The Big Short' producers on making the financial crisis a 'cinematic experience'
In “The Big Short,” director Adam McKay tackles a seemingly impossible task: make the 2008 financial crisis entertaining.
Terms like "credit default swap" and "collateralized debt obligation" could easily put any audience to sleep. But thanks to some deft performances and at least a few tricks from editor Hank Corwin, “The Big Short” manages to make America’s financial ruin engaging.
So engaging, in fact, that the film won the top award from the Producers Guild of America last weekend. Nineteen of the past 26 best picture winners from the Oscars had first won the PGA’s top honor, so “The Big Short” must now be considered the frontrunner for the Academy Awards.
The Frame’s John Horn recently spoke with two of the film’s producers, Jeremy Kleiner and Dede Gardner.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
What were the challenges in taking the book by Michael Lewis to the screen?
Dede Gardner: I think we as a community have been conditioned to not bother understanding those terms inside the lexicon of banking and finance and Wall Street. That's part of the objection that Michael [Lewis] makes and that the characters make. Which is to say, well, you may not know what that means, but it's still your right to ask.
But that's the whole point of the story. The things that people describe so glibly they don't really understand. You have a scene where Ryan Gosling, playing Jared Vennett, is trying to sell the idea that he understands why the housing market is about to collapse using the cube-stacking game Jenga. Did that become kind of the driving force, to look for visual ideas to tell the story of these financial instruments?
Gardner: I think that was the beginning of this idea for opening a portal for untraditional explication. How far can you push it? How far outside the bounds of traditional storytelling could we go to explain, define, make comprehensible terminology that heretofore had sort of sat on a shelf?
Jeremy Kleiner: And then Adam McKay, of course, brought this entirely other idea of almost making the film a character. Everything from the cameos to the editing style — Hank Corwin worked a lot on trying to give the film a visual identity that makes it a cinematic experience.
Adam McKay's body of work includes the "Anchorman" movies — he comes out of comedies. When did he enter the process and why was he a good match for the material?
Gardner: Well, we'd been fans of Adam's forever. I think anyone who has seen his work with some consistency can detect a pretty ferocious mind at work — someone who clearly cares deeply about major issues. He's just chosen, up until now, to express those frustrations inside a comedic space.
When he called, we said to ourselves, We're so stupid! That's how you do this!
Meaning what?
Gardner: Meaning if you invest in someone who has the confidence that absurdity can be as impactful as seriousness, then you can probably ride that. Or you can sure try. We had stayed inside of a slightly more serious, traditional space. The minute you hear Adam McKay's name, and you think about his work, and you think about how brave I believe him to be as a filmmaker and artist, everything sort of blows open. You think, Oh, we've been so limited in how we've approached this. We have to blow it up.
Is that where you seize upon the idea of having people like Margot Robbie and Anthony Bourdain and Selena Gomez explain very esoteric ideas like credit default swaps? Is that something that Adam brings? Or was that already percolating?
Gardner: That was Adam. Ryan Gosling's character as the narrator, breaking up the fourth wall, that was Adam.
Kleiner: Cameos, voice-over — he took the underlying structure but he created the surface of these attributes that liberated us from a feeling of, as Dede mentioned, the oh-so-serious nature of it which, ironically, through the other channel allows us to access those elements of the story.
There's a scene toward the end of the film where the character played by Brad Pitt, Ben Rickert, talks about the real, human cost of the financial collapse — how people will lose their homes, their savings, and some of them are actually going to die. When you're talking about the movie and figuring out where you want it to land comedically, how do you find the right tone? What was the navigation on that?
Gardner: The structure of the film is a very deliberate reflection of what happened, and how it felt. And it's a noose tightening. It's closer and it's closer. But everyone's looking around. It gets tighter and tighter. And then you just feel sucker-punched. And I think that was a very deliberate choice on Adam and Hank's [Corwin] part, to make the film experientially a reflection of the event.
What kinds of conversations do you hope "The Big Short" elicits among people who have seen it?
Gardner: I think primarily we're interested in people recognizing the danger of forfeiting their right to inquiry. That if you give up the right to ask questions of supposed industries or communities or systems that claim expertise, you're really only forfeiting your own power. And I'm completely guilty of it myself. You get on the phone with your mortgage broker and you say, What? What is that? They say, Ah, don't worry about it. And I go, Okay! But that's not right. It's my livelihood. It's my children's. It's preposterous, actually, and frankly embarrassing. But it's true. If we did anything, it's that people walk out and say, You know what, I'm going to go back and ask those questions. I have the right to do that. That we might be able to slow down some profiteering.
Kleiner: I think Dede's right. Mark Baum says it in the film — Steve Carrell's character. We've been conditioned to think certain ways about certain things. The politics of the world, the political parties — here and in Europe, and outside of Europe — have been shaped by those events. You know austerity and those questions are connected to this.
The 2008 financial crisis is an incredibly... It's a seismic event. We're still living in that. That's why we don't think of this as a period piece.
You're having a screening of the film at the Brookings Institute, an old, Washington think tank that has delved into the relationship between government and economic policy. Assuming that the film continues the conversation maybe in a legislative or economic policy way, what might come out of a screening for an organization like that?
Gardner: One of the things we've been most encouraged by is the bipartisan reaction. I think we had a tweet from Bernie Sanders and from Bill O'Reilly in the same morning.
But it's very much the sort of engine of Adam's intention. It's not a partisan issue. Everyone has a salary. Everyone has hopes and dreams for where they can invest their money. Everyone wants to do the best they can with it, and they don't want to be subjected to any sort of predatory lending. I guess if anything came out of Washington, that would be amazing.
"The Big Short" is currently in theaters and has been nominated for Best Picture at the 88th Academy Awards.
How the Motion Picture Academy plans to move past #OscarsSoWhite
The ongoing controversy surrounding the Oscars has prompted a response from the Motion Picture Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Ever since this year’s Oscar nominees were announced on Jan. 14, the Academy has been blasted because — for the second consecutive year — all 20 people in the best and supporting actor and actress categories are white. And two well-received films with largely African American casts, “Creed” and “Straight Outta Compton," were not among the Best Picture nominees.
The Academy on Jan. 22 announced its first steps toward achieving more diversity, saying it intends to double the number of non-white members by the year 2020. Still, critics abound, and some African-American actors say they will boycott the ceremony on February 28th.
We must stand in our power!
We must stand in our power.
Posted by Jada Pinkett Smith on Monday, January 18, 2016
Joining us to talk about the Academy’s changes is Phil Alden Robinson. He is Secretary of the Academy’s Board of Governors and chairs the membership committee. He also represents the Writers Branch on the board. He spoke with us about the Academy's plans to ensure that #OscarsSoWhite becomes a thing of the past.
Interview Highlights:
If Idris Elba, for example, had been nominated this year, or if "Creed" or "Straight Outta Compton" had been nominated for best picture, do you think these changes would have been made this year? What was the tipping point?
Certainly in the last two years the criticism that we have gotten was well-deserved, in my mind, not because of the nominations, but because our membership is so un-diverse. We're trying to be a relevant organization in the 21st century and, frankly, we were behind the times on this. We were too slow to act. I think these controversies were very helpful in focusing our attention on things that we should have been focused on before.
The Academy is an honorary society that reflects a body of work in Hollywood. So the Academy can do all it wants to do, make all the changes it wants to make, but if people of color and women aren't getting hired, what can the Academy do? What do you think the Academy's role is with the rest of the industry in this regard?
Well, first, let me just correct something. We don't represent achievement in Hollywood, we represent achievement in cinema, so we're casting a much wider net these days. We're looking much more at independent films and international filmmakers. We really don't want to be regarded as "the Hollywood system."
But you're absolutely right that the basic problem — and Spike Lee spoke very eloquently about this last week — is that the industry does not provide enough opportunity for minorities, both in hiring and in green-lighting. So, since we draw our membership from people who have succeeded and who have had significant careers in that system, what can we do?
We can cast a wider net than we're casting now — we've traditionally looked mostly towards Hollywood, big-studio films for our members. We are embarking on, really, an unprecedented recruitment drive for new members that's going to look outside — and inside — the Hollywood system. We've never really had a systematic, energetic way to recruit highly-qualified, wonderful members who represent more diversity. We have one now, and we're putting it in place right now, and it will affect this year's incoming class.
The Academy's goals of doubling the number of women and minorities by the year 2020 would mean that women would compose 48% of the membership of the Academy, while members of diverse groups, people of color, would be 14% of the total membership. Those are certainly admirable goals, but 14% is still low, and not really representative of the minority makeup of the country. Are these moves aggressive enough?
I don't think that we necessarily want to reflect the demographics of the country, because we don't represent the country — we represent the most talented, accomplished people in the motion picture business. And I think, as you said, the industry is far behind. We're going to do way better than we've done, and we're not going to stop when we get there — we're just going to keep doing it.
Foals: From playing house parties to selling out arenas
The U.K. band Foals is slowly becoming the next arena rock band here in the U.S.
The band has released four studio albums since it came on the scene in 2005. Foals has sold out world tours, headlined festivals and is now embarking on a tour of the U.S., including a date at the Coachella Music Festival later this year.
The Frame’s James Kim spoke with Foals frontman Yannis Philippakis about how he loves playing live.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS:
I think that I'd probably be in trouble in some way if I wasn't in the band. I just need to blow off steam and feel a connection. I definitely think that one of the big primary motives behind making music is wanting to feel a connection or a sense of belonging with other people. That's what I get when I play music live.
It's massively emotional because you get an immediate energy coming back on these songs that you may have worked on in private. It's a special feeling to feel that you're part of people's lives when you're not around.