The Director of ‘Margin Call’ Reveals the Event That Inspired the Film

During that time, Chandor, a veteran documentary filmmaker and commercial director, was trying to make a living as a real estate developer, he told the crowd at the Angelika Film Center on Friday.

had formed a partnership with a few others with plans to renovate an old industrial building in tribeca.

Eventually, the group began receiving bids for the building.

At that point, a “very senior” investment banker, whom Chandor referred to as a “godfather,” stepped in and warned them to “take offers on the building.”

they listened and sold the building.

“a year and a half later, the financial world literally comes to an end. and i started thinking about what it was like. what did he know? what was he literally seeing that made him say something?” Chandor told Movieline in an interview.

chandor’s movie “margin call” is a low budget independent film with big stars like kevin spacey, stanley tucci, penn badgley and demi moore.

The plot centers on a fictional investment bank going through a Lehman-like crisis in which the company attempts to shed its massive exposure to impaired mortgage-backed securities in order to save the company.

We saw the movie on Friday night and Chandor did a Q&A with the audience afterwards, where he revealed some interesting facts about the movie.

• the margin call does not occur on a specific date. that’s on purpose because chandor wanted the movie to be set in any time and not just in 2008.

• One of the reasons the dialogue shows accurate investment banking jargon is because Chandor grew up surrounded by finance professionals. his father worked for merrill lynch.

• CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons) is a combination of former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain and former Lehman Brother CEO Dick Fuld.

• The investment bank in the movie is not Lehman Brothers. “It’s not Lehman and this bank in the movie is still in business,” Chandor said.

  The movie was written on purpose to be shot in one location. The location was in Penn Plaza in the office of an old hedge fund and they also used Citi’s trading floor.