Copyright Sony Pictures Classics 2016 “Equity” is a razor-sharp financial thriller about people who are themselves razor sharp. Their battlefields are boardrooms and trading floors but the stakes are high and the rules are just a starting point. There has been some understandable buzz about the background of the film, the first major national release to be entirely made by and about women. But this is in no way a stunt. It is a way to explore the way that the movie’s characters experience the ultra-testosteronic world of Wall Street, and, as we watch them, to explore our own assumptions and biases as well.
Anna Gunn (“Breaking Bad”) plays Naomi Bishop, an ambitious, even ruthless investment banker who knows she has to be twice as smart and work twice as hard in the ultra-competitive world of high finance. Her job is to persuade highly successful privately held firms to let her take them public by being listed on the stock exchange, which means huge fees for her company. That involves a lot of tricky arithmetic to come up with a valuation on the stock they will be selling that is high enough to entice the owners of the private company to agree to the deal, but low enough that the stock will gain in value as soon as the deal goes through. It also involves a lot of tricky diplomacy, stroking and soothing the egos of the clients, who are being courted by every firm on Wall Street.
Naomi appears on a panel before a group of young woman and is very frank about her priorities. When she is asked, “What’s that thing that makes you want to get up in the morning?” she says, “I like money.” She also says that she thinks the time has finally come when it is permissible to say so. On that, she could be wrong, especially from a woman.
Naomi wants and believes she deserves a promotion. But she has just made the first mistake of her career, mismanaging an important deal. It may be that a it would not be as serious a setback for a male in her position. Or it could be that her anxiety about the mistake has clouded her judgment about the best time to push for the promotion. But she needs a win badly. She has an equally ambitious deputy named Erin (producer and co-story writer Sarah Megan Thomas), who is pregnant. This triggers in Naomi, who is unmarried and childless, all of the conflicts we can imagine, though the screenplay is too smart to spell it out too explicitly. Can Erin make the kind of commitment the job needs and, just as important, how can she persuade the client that she will? Both Naomi and Erin know they have to come across to their colleagues, bosses, and clients as confident but not arrogant, dedicated but not reckless.
There is another ambitious woman, Samantha (producer and co-story writer Alysia Reiner), a classmate of Naomi’s, now a prosecutor who is looking for her own big win. At big financial companies, there is a “Chinese Wall” division between the investment bankers like Naomi and people who buy and sell stock, like hedge fund managers. It is illegal and absolutely forbidden for them to exchange “insider” information about deals and there are many rules and structures to make sure that they do not. Could that be why one of those hedge fund managers is romancing Naomi?
The story is taut and engrossing, fraught with moral hazard that would be just as compelling outside of high finance, in a factory or a university, but benefits from the high stakes and provocative details — and from a fresh perspective that adds dramatic heft and makes it clear how much we can learn from letting women tell their own stories.
Parents should know that this film includes very strong language, some sexual references, drinking, smoking, and criminal behavior.
Family discussion: What gets you out of bed in the morning? Would you want to work with Naomi? How would the character’s situation be different if she was a man?
Interview: Rachel Boynton of Oil Business Documentary “Big Men”
Posted on March 30, 2014 at 7:39 am
Documentarian Rachel Boynton (Our Brand Is Crisis) spent seven years filming “Big Men,” a documentary about what happens when the American oil business meets a previously unknown oil reserve in Ghana. Is it possible for American business, with its obligations to generate returns for shareholders, to develop operations in a poor country without leading to corruption and abuse? Boynton takes an even-handed approach, showing us the story — and the conflicts — as they develop.
The film’s central story follows a small group of American explorers at Dallas-based oil company Kosmos Energy. Between 2007 and 2011, with unprecedented, independent access, Big Men’s two-person crew filmed inside the oil company as Kosmos and its partners discovered and developed the first commercial oil field in Ghana’s history.
Simultaneously the crew filmed in the swamps of Nigeria’s Niger Delta, following the exploits of a militant gang to reveal another side of the economy of oil: people trying to profit in any way possible, because they’ve given up on waiting for the money to trickle down.
So what happens when a group of hungry people discover a massive and exquisitely rare pot of gold in one of the poorest places on earth?
Scott Foundas wrote in “Variety”
“Like a number of recent hot-button docus, from ‘Crude’ to ‘Inside Job,’ Rachel Boynton’s extraordinary ‘Big Men’ should come tagged with a warning: The side effects of global capitalism may include dizziness, nausea and seething outrage. Using razor-sharp journalistic skill to untangle the knotty saga of an American petroleum company’s entrance into the West African republic of Ghana, Boynton’s film also poses a series of troubling philosophical questions: Is unchecked greed an intrinsic part of the human character? Is ‘the greater good’ ever more than a convenient euphemism where big business and big government are concerned? Wide fest exposure and ancillary sales seem assured for this Tribeca world premiere, which also richly deserves a theatrical pickup.”
Boynton talked to me about making the film and the challenges of telling a complicated story.
As is said by several different people over the course of the movie, we all are human beings with the same impulses. So why is it that there are such different outcomes?
Well, in Ghana we don’t know what the outcome is going to be, right? That was sort of one of the conundrums of the film. I knew that watching the film anyone would want to know, are the people in Ghana are going to benefit from this? And I was never going to be able to stick around for twenty years to find out. I needed a way to contemplate that question, if not to find an answer at least to give them another question.
You show a representative from Norway who provides a counterexample, a very credible, fair system in which all of the citizens of the country share in the benefits from the oil extraction. And then you show Nigeria as another option, where corruption has been a terrible problem. What makes the difference?
Norway is a pretty homogeneous society, you know, a lot of unity there. There are 250 different languages spoken in Nigeria, not to mention the dialect. So you’re in one town and you go five km down the road and they don’t speak the same language. And it’s literally like the tower of Babel, very difficult for people to communicate with each other let alone come to some kind of consensus as a nation. And I think that kind of diversity is both of something of beauty and strength and at the same time something that is incredibly difficult to overcome when you’re trying to come to some sort of national unifying consensus. Or if you are trying to have leaders, this notion of everyone looking out for themselves is something that unifies everyone in the movie. And there’s a line in the film from someone who works for the Ghanaian national Petroleum company on the board and he says that he doesn’t believe that self interest is an intrinsic part of human nature, that what unites us needs to be greater than what divides us. And I love that sentiment, I love the idea but it’s much more difficult to achieve than it is to say and it’s much harder to achieve in a place as diverse as Nigeria.
How did you become interested in this story?
I made Our Brand Is Crisis and it was very well received on the festival circuit. It did well for itself and I was very pleased and excited about how it was done. It was my first film as a director and I felt kind of empowered coming out of that film to do something more ambitious. I was at a point in my life where I wanted to do something really epic and big and difficult. And at the time oil was all over the news. I’d turn on CNN and literally every five minutes there would be a segment about the price of oil and fears over a hundred dollars a barrel. It was just on everyone’s lips and I thought, “This is interesting. Everyone’s talking about oil and yet I’m not seeing anything about this most important resource from inside the industry. Wouldn’t it be interesting to get in that industry?” I could do that and then I started fishing around. Where would I go first? What I was gonna do?
And as I was doing some research I discovered that the Gulf of Guinea off the Coast of West Africa was this region that the Bush Administration and all of the oil majors were paying enormous attention to as this new frontier for oil exploration. They were all talking about how there was a lot of underexplored territory there. And that new technology was allowing them to look for oil there. So I said, “Oh well, that’s kind of interesting, that could be an interesting place to go look at,” and then at the same time I was really thinking about this militancy popping up in Nigeria and all these stories about militants attacking pipelines and kidnapping oil workers started appearing in the news. And I said there has to be a movie there, that’s conflict, drama, and that equals movie, right? So I bought a plane ticket to Lagos and I went to Nigeria and that’s how I started.
My original idea was that I was going to get access to an American oil company operating in Nigeria and the whole thing was going to be set there. And I spent basically a year and a half traveling back and forth between Nigeria and America like a crazy person, sort of trying to find the movie, trying to get access to people, trying to get to know people so that I could guarantee our security, trying to get the right permissions to put together a movie, right? But I didn’t start by knowing exactly what the movie was.
So in 2007 I had written several emails to guys at Kosmos Energy. They had this reputation as being guys who could find oil where no one else could and they had all worked together at a company called Triton Energy in the early 90s to discover oil off the coast of Equatorial Guinea. So a lot of people were interested in what they were going to do next. They managed to raise a ton of money from Blackstone before they had drawn their first well as a company. And so I knew who they were and I filmed at this thing called the Offshore Technology Conference and I happen to find someone from Kosmos on a panel there talking about Nigerian oil. I asked him out to lunch, and I pitched him on the idea of making a film. When I first filmed with them at the Offshore Technology Conference, that was in April, May of 2007, just after that they drilled their first well as a company in June, July 2007. And with that well they discovered the Jubilee field and I basically said, “You know there’s a potentially great film here and it would be great to do something about you guys,” and he said, “Why don’t you come and pitch the guys who started the company?” So I went to Dallas and I did a PowerPoint presentation. And it was a really lame PowerPoint presentation but they said yes to me and that’s how I got access to the company.
The film has a pointed contrast between between what the Wall Street guy said about reputation and how important reputation is and other participants, who in their own ways talk about how they are perceived. Even the masked gang who destroy the oil drilling equipment talk about being in the film because they want to be famous.
Yes, everyone talks about reputation.
Everyone is very, I guess I’d say, media-savvy. How do you as a filmmaker get past the way the people you are filming try to spin you?
I’ve made two movies now about people who don’t exactly wear their heart. I would say the people in my last film were much more conscious than the people in this film because that’s what they did for a living. These guys, when I did my little PowerPoint presentation, one of the things that was at the top of our PowerPoint presentation was something like, “movies are good for your reputation” and we all know that. It’s about wanting to be big and so of course one of the reasons why they are talking to me is that they want to be big and being big is two things; It’s having a lot of money and it’s having a big reputation, a good positive big reputation. And certainly being in a film is linked to that… Of course.
I don’t feel like I had the wool pulled over my eyes as a filmmaker.
I think anyone talking… Me talking to you okay; listen, I’m not going to tell you my deep dark secrets that I don’t want anyone to know. I’m not going to tell you that because I don’t know you and you are going to publish the interview. There’s certain things that one just doesn’t do and I think that’s kind of human. And I think certainly, one of the things I believe is a filmmaker is that you have to be respectful of people’s limits. And, you have to understand that people are only going to go so far in what they are willing to reveal and you have to accept that about them and embrace that about them and work with what you have. And frequently I would say, nine times out of ten, people will give you more than they think they will because they feel comfortable and they feel not judged and when people are not being judged they are more willing to be open. And openness is what makes someone in a film interesting, in a documentary right? The capacity to get someone being open.
That interview with Jim in the film I think is a phenomenal interview. It’s just that one of the best interviews I’ve ever done in my life. An amazing interview! Because we just had each other. At the time we did that interview, we trusted each other. I didn’t film him and then show it to people the next day. He felt he could trust me. And he could trust me. I was trustworthy and so he trusted me. As a filmmaker, I am not interested really in “gotcha” filmmaking, like trying to do something behind someone’s back. I really don’t think I am naïve. And I don’t think the movie feels naïve. I saw this documentary about Nigeria once and the filmmaker says in the documentary; “I decided I just was going to come in and film whatever I saw.” And thought to myself, “what the heck are you talking about?! How can you possibly do that?! It’s Nigeria! Everyone’s lying to you! How in the world could you possibly be coming in and showing what you see?”
So, one of the reasons the film is so layered and incredibly dense and there is so much going on in this movie, is because the truth is incredibly complicated. And one of the ways of getting at that is to contrast and comparison. It’s not just through showing what one person says.
That opening of the wasp on the huge and deteriorating oil equipment is so striking. Tell me why you chose that as a way into the story?
Well, Jonathan Furmanski and I talked about about insects. I was very interested in insects, I kept asking him to film insects. He knew I wanted him to film insects. That said, he found that image. Like, I was busy, I can’t remember what I was doing and he was getting shots; just beautiful shots at the well and things around the well. And he saw this little wasp’s nest being built underneath the oil, the ancient oil well and he got this great image. It’s my little “hats off to Darwin’” scenario I guess, a little bit. I’m very interested in the connections between things and I’m interested in this notion of self interest, and of building things and tearing things apart. And the wasps, for me it was really more about the feeling of the thing, the tone that it sets, that sort of smell of potential threat, the buzz in the background and the thing that strikes that’s got this thing around the end of it that’s going to watch out for itself, don’t step on it, building its nest under this well. For me, it was really about that tone because that’s the tone of the film.
J.C. Chandor wrote and directed “Margin Call,” a sharply-scripted thriller about one night at a never-named Wall Street firm. The top executives discover that they are at risk of catastrophic failure and have to decide before the markets open in the morning whether they or their clients will take the losses. The movie stars Jeremy Irons, Keven Spacey, co-producer Zachary Quinto, Stanley Tucci, and Demi Moore. It is specific enough to make some very pointed commentary on the financial meltdown but universal enough that its themes of betrayal and externalized costs could be set in any industry or indeed in any organization.
How did you come to write about the financial meltdown?
I had written several different things in several different capacities but had never done anything even sort of remotely topical let alone completely topical. This was being written for myself to direct so it was from a very personal place, not a Hollywood script to go out and sell. A lot of what has become the strength of the project and drew people to it came from an odd place, from production restraints I placed on myself to keep the budget realistic.
I’m a total real estate junkie and took time off to set up a partnership to renovate an old building and it happened to be on the other side of the real estate bubble. The godfather of one of my partners was a very prominent investment banker, a ground-breaker, an intellectual, invented the concept of a real estate hedge fund, a whole new model. He intervened in his godson’s life and about halfway through our project came to him and said, “Those offers you’ve been getting to buy the project half-completed — take them. I’ve been leaving millions of dollars in deposits on the table because it is time to get out.” We took his advice, mostly because we were having trouble with one of the other partners but also because we had the feeling things were not going well in the markets. We just broke even and felt like a defeat at the time but a year and a half later I felt I had a new lease on life.
As things really started bubbling to the surface I thought back to that man and what it was like to be walking around — you never know for sure, but he felt pretty strongly things were bad enough that he had to take a financial hit to avoid a worse one and warn us. I thought it was an interesting issue to look at it from the inside, and do a small character-driven story about investment bankers as they see what they thought their lives were about changing in a deep way and what their responsibility was, all those things that were a little bit unsaid in the film but that the actors and I knew were all there. I have only so much time, so much energy, this skill set, and this is what I’ve used it for.
It has the setting of a drama but it feels like a thriller.
To be there on that day was an interesting limited view into a wide problem. It’s a ticking time bomb structure, which is a thriller by its very nature. The one total deviation is that 45 minutes into the movie you know the bomb can’t be defused. The drama is who will they hand the bomb to?
Do you see them as villains?
What most people would choose to do in this scenario is what these characters do — to look out for themselves. To look at it in the macro viewpoint, they made the decision when they walked into the door coming out of Harvard or wherever they were to use their time and skills and very intense intelligence and education and have the big majority of those people get siphoned off into this world. People who have already made that choice when they walk in the door it is unrealistic to expect them five, ten, fifteen years later to make a different choice about who to take care of.
Your father worked on Wall Street, at Merrill Lynch. Did he guide you at all on the script?
For superstitious reasons I didn’t show the script to anyone in my family. I’ve had a lot of false starts if you know what I mean! I didn’t really tell my family I was doing this until we were really at the point of no return. But what I learned from my father and from friends over the years is the toll that it takes on the people who stay behind and keep their jobs when others are let go. It’s one of the only businesses that even in their best years still culls 5-10 percent of the workforce every year purely for motivation. The people who last are the ones who play the game correctly. For certain characters like Spacey’s it’s not about greed; it’s about survival. For others like Simon Baker’s and Demi Moore’s it is about ego and the way you define yourself.
I originally wrote the scene when it wasn’t the big dramatic day, yet. It was supposed to be more run of the mill, but as things developed in real life by the time we shot it, it became too subtle.
The way it was revised though, gets Stanley Tucci’s character out of the building, and that is important for the plot.
The fun thing about Stanley’s character, Eric Dale, is that I have a hard time naming characters and I usually use names from people in my life. Eric Dale just worked and it is amusing for him because every character says the name through the film as he becomes the symbol of the paranoia that the information will get out.
I won’t give it away, but I wanted to tell you how much I liked your ending — you took something of a risk and it paid off.
The ending and the music are the things most people feel comfortable having an opinion about. For me, the movie started with the ending and then you figure out how you get there. Kevin Spacey would say something different but for me the most important thing is what’s behind him, the house. It became very important to understand that in his mind, he did need the money. No matter what you make, the way people rationalize their connection with money is almost identical. As Paul Bettany says in the film, “You learn to spend what’s in your pocket.”
Investors can make bets by promising to buy stock at a higher or lower price than the current day’s valuation. If all goes well, they never actually have to buy the stock. They can keep buying and selling the bets with borrowed money without ever having to buy the underlying securities. But if it does not go well, the investor gets what is known as a margin call and has to come up with the cash.
The financial meltdown of 2008 was like a margin call for America, and we will be paying off that debt for a long time. This movie, as tightly wound as a thriller, takes us through a fictionalized version of the night when it all tipped over from going well to not going well at an enormous Wall Street company, and it was time to pay the piper and a lot of others as well.
“You guys ever been through this before?” asks Will (Paul Bettany), as some serious looking people in suits start tapping people on the shoulder and saying, “I’m afraid we have to speak with you” to the people in cubicles “Best to ignore it, keep your head down, go back to work. Don’t watch.”
“The majority of this floor is being let go today,” says the serious woman in a suit. She speaks of “certain precautions that may seem punitive.” She glances down at the paperwork when she speaks of “your — 19 — years” with the (never-named) company. And then we see people carrying cardboard boxes of belongings out the front door of a shiny skyscraper, their eyes blinking in the unaccustomed sunlight.
This is nothing new, as Will’s comment informs us. It is a routine, if brutal pruning of the staff. This is a cutthroat business and periodically some throats get cut. And periodically Will has to speak to those left behind: “These were good people and they were good at their jobs, but you are better. We will not think of them again.” Back to work watching all those screens with all those numbers.
But one of the departed has left something behind. There is evident irony in the name of the division that has been gutted. It is the Risk Management group. And the 19-year veteran who has been shown the door has been working on a new analysis of the firm’s position. He turns his thumb drive over to the young colleague who has been kept on, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), a literal rocket scientist with “a PhD in propulsion,” who plugs a few holes in the formula that reveal that the firm is in their terms, “projected losses are greater than the current value of the company.” In other words, on the verge of collapse. That is when it gets interesting. Sullivan has proven that there are going to be some devastating losses. The question is who will pay for them.
The rest of the long night will be devoted to answering that question. It is like a long game of musical chairs, except that these people get to decide when to stop the music so they can get to the chairs before everyone else.
The guy at the top is John Tuld (Jeremy Irons). Given a choice between reputation and money, he has no hesitation in choosing money. He tells the head of sales, Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey) to sell the ticking time bomb securities by assuring their clients that they are solid investments, even though Rogers points out that no one will ever trust them again. “You’re selling something you know has no value.” “We’re selling to willing buyers at fair market value so that we can survive.”
Rogers is not the only one who raises concerns, moral and financial. But writer-director J.C. Chandor lets us see when and how each of them topple, and what makes them topple, which turns out to be money. Dale repeatedly says there is nothing that can get him to go back inside the building and yet there he is, back in the building. Rogers says he will not sell these risky securities to clients because “you don’t sell anything to anybody unless they’ll come back to you for more.” But he does.
This could just as easily be set in the scuzzy world of the real-estate salesmen of “Glengarry Glen Ross” or the “leave the gun, take the cannoli” world of “The Godfather.” Chandor keeps enough of the real story to keep things vivid and meaningful but does not get mired in jargon. Crisp performances by everyone keep things taut until a surprising detour at the end. For the first time we leave the world of glass and concrete for an intensely personal moment of loss and grief. “Our talents have been used for the greater good,” one character says, reminding us that the very selection process that takes people who are capable of more tangible contributions are unable to resist the big money that pays them a many-times multiple for financial engineering over mechanical engineering. And reminding us, too, that if we let people who care only about money make the decisions they will make decisions that are only about money for them.
Rated PG-13 for some drug and sex-related material
Profanity:
Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:
Reference to drug use with some images
Violence/ Scariness:
True story of betrayal and corruption
Diversity Issues:
None
Date Released to Theaters:
October 22, 2010
Date Released to DVD:
March 8, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:
B0041KKYBA
Americans are generous in need and forgiving of mistakes. But we are outraged by injustice. This indispensable film shows us the who, what, when, where, and how of the financial crisis, finally placing it in the context it requires — a failure of decency, fairness, accountability, and honor. Even for those who want to put a pillow over their head when they hear terms like “credit default swap” and those whose eyes glaze over at the thought of watching a hearing on C SPAN will find this movie, the 2011 Oscar-winner for best documentary, a mesmerizing saga of corruption and greed, the biggest heist story of all time, and sadly, all too true.
Charles Ferguson (“No End in Sight”) is now at the front rank not just of documentarians but of film-makers, investigative journalists, and participants in the public policy debates. He begins with the story of what happened in Iceland, which went from one of the world’s most stable economies to bankruptcy almost overnight following deregulation. Its GDP was $13 billion; its debt was $100 billion. Still, at first this seems like an odd choice, but it quickly becomes clear that Iceland illustrates the same mistakes, oversights, bungles, and corruption that led to our own financial catastrophe. And by the final chapter of the film, it comes up again in a stunning interview. A flustered academic has to explain why a paper he once wrote about the financial stability of Iceland (without disclosing his financial arrangement with the people behind the deregulation) is now listed on his c.v. as being about Iceland’s instability. His explanation? It must be a typo.
This chilling absence of any sense of honor or shame or responsibility pervades the film. This is the story of “massive private gains and public loss.” Ferguson points out that this is just the most recent in a series of financial crises, each one causing more damage while the industry made more money. He describes the “great big global Ponzi scheme.” And he names names and shows us the faces of the people involved. He makes leverage, securitization, and yes, credit default swaps as fascinating as the Empire’s plans for the Death Star. And he points out that in the 21st century, it is financial instruments that are the real weapons of mass destruction.
) spent seven years filming “
