Why ‘Margin Call’ remains Wall Street’s favorite movie — and the best indictment of it

JC Chandor likes to joke that you could trade off the viewership data of Margin Call, the 2011 film that tells the story of an unnamed bank’s catastrophic 24 hours during the 2008 financial crisis.

“If you could find the fancy hotel rooms in London where bankers were starting to watch Margin Call again, you could probably have a pretty good futures trading operation, based on them starting to panic,” Chandor said in an interview from his office in Connecticut last week.

If you haven’t seen the tight, 107-minute film, whose astonishing cast includes Kevin Spacey, Demi Moore, Zachary Quinto, Stanley Tucci, and Paul Bettany — all overshadowed to a degree by a stunning performance from Jeremy Irons — well, you may be stuck with enthusiasts (like us) raving about it to you.

The story begins with an analyst’s discovery that the bank is dangerously exposed to mortgage-backed securities — the same toxic sludge that took down Lehman Brothers and crashed the global economy. It tracks a frantic search for the recently fired risk expert (Tucci) who might be able to save it, and peaks in a late-night meeting in which CEO John Tuld (Irons) explains the three ways to succeed in finance: “Be first, be smarter, or cheat.” Tuld is Lehman CEO Dick Fuld with a touch of Merrill Lynch’s John Thain — plus a British accent and a certain charm, even as he’s directing his team to find another bag-holder for “the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism.” (Chandor, citing legal strictures, insists all characters are fictional.)

The film has become a cult classic for its crisp dialogue, lucid fatalism, and fine detail. It bubbles back up in moments of market stress, and the past few weeks have provided a steady supply of oxygen. It hit TikTok during the 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, boosted by an explainer on the All In Pod. Close to a million people have watched it in unlicensed 30-second installments. There is, of course, an Irons meme generator.

And it is invariably how a certain breed of Wall Streeter — just young enough not to have had their careers tarnished by 2008, but to feel like they had missed out on a great war — answers when asked what their favorite movie is. (Nos. 2 and 3 are Michael Clayton, which stars George Clooney as a corporate fixer, and, for reasons passing understanding, Master and Commander, Russell Crowe’s Napoleon-era high seas drama.)

Margin Call captures the uncanny sense of a crime without a clear criminal, a system in which each individual follows rules that lead to catastrophe. It’s the more durable sibling to 2015’s The Big Short, a zippy underdog story that unambiguously roots for the small hedge funds on the other side of the bet that threatens Chandor’s fictional bank. The Big Short has Margot Robbie in a bathtub explaining subprime mortgages; Margin Call doesn’t really bother, but instead shows layers of increasingly senior executives admitting that they don’t understand them, either.

“It’s a ticking-time-bomb movie,” Chandor says. “But about 25 minutes into the movie, the fact is laid out for everyone to know that there is no way to defuse the bomb. There’s literally a moment where everyone’s just like, ‘This thing is gonna f*cking blow right? Yeah.’

“That’s the only question of the movie: ‘Do we jump on it ourselves? … Or do we f*cking save ourselves and throw this thing out the window into the town?’”

They choose the latter, and the movie’s final stretch tracks Spacey’s frantic, cynical selloff of worthless assets, a feat of buck-passing that he knows will torch his career and make his firm the most hated survivor on Wall Street.

We wanted to talk to Chandor because we were curious how he got Margin Call so right. There was nothing in his career making music videos and TV ads that suggested he could make a film like this. And while he’s since written and directed A Most Violent Year, the glowingly reviewed film starring Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain, Margin Call remains his signature work. (More recently, he helmed the less glowingly reviewed 2024’s Kraven the Hunter.)

It turns out that Chandor almost didn’t write the film. By the spring of 2009, he’d spent years not quite breaking into the film business. He had one script nearly get made: a small-scale story about a New Jersey family, until his investor, the son of an Icelandic bank CEO, bailed when the financial crisis hit.

So at age 34, he was finally looking for honest work. He was, to be precise, in Boulder, Colorado, interviewing for a job selling land rights for wind farms. He aced a first round of interviews Monday, and his would-be employer asked him to stay through Friday. With time to kill, he thought, “I’m either going to sit here and like, go hiking and get drunk and just have fun in Boulder for four days, or …. I can try one more time.” By the end of the week, he had an 82-page script. “It was the best thing I’d ever written, obviously,” he says, “because it was, word-for-word, Margin Call.”

He sealed his deal for the tiny, $2.7 million film in a meeting with Quinto, who was then best known for playing Spock in a Star Trek reboot and who had just launched his own production company. Chandor would later write a few extra scenes at the end to complete his characters’ arc.

We wanted to ask him the question that a generation of traders and bankers have wondered: How did he get the rhythms, details, and language of their world so right?

The answer is that Chandor was born to it, a “child of the finance industry” raised in Basking Ridge, NJ, a hub for traders commuting to Lower Manhattan. His father, also named Jeffrey, spent 40 years at Merrill Lynch before getting caught up in the power struggle between David Komansky and Stanley O’Neal, and taking a kind of “forced retirement” in 2007.

“I’d always visited him, and I certainly could have gone to work in that field. I have a head for, certainly, the sales side of that business,” Chandor said.

Chandor, who describes himself as “a very, very high-functioning ADHD dyslexic” and has a wildly veering conversational style, struggled in school and squeaked through the College of Wooster. But he knew the language of finance and based his characters on people he knew. Some were friends who’d gone to Wall Street — including one who later snuck him onto the trading floor at Citigroup to witness a round of crisis layoffs, which informed the movie’s opening scene. Spacey’s executive was drawn from his father.

Ben Kingsley was originally attached to play Tuld, the bank’s CEO. Tim Robbins, who was at that time a “super-Communist,” per Chandor, read the script but said it lacked a satisfying final scene. Chandor later wrote that scene, in which Irons coolly explains to a despairing Spacey that “it’s just money, it’s made up.” Robbins still said no, “which he regrets to this day,” Chandor said.

Irons took the part. The whole film was shot in 17 days, and Irons would be present for just two of them. He was planning to fly from London on the Fourth of July when he realized his US work visa had expired. While his agent frantically worked through then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to rouse a British consular employee over the holiday, Chandor lined up Daniel Davis, best known for playing the butler on The Nanny, as a backup. Irons made it, but the mini-crisis brought to the already hurried project a “foundational panic” that Chandor thinks infused the finished product.

The final act shows Spacey girding his traders for battle. Wall Street’s great party is over, and as with any great party, it’s best not to be a straggler. “This is what the beginning of a fire sale looks like,” he says, acknowledging that the garbage they are about to foist on their clients will all but ensure they never work again. Citigroup let cameras shoot its live trading floor — “they were desperate for any kind of PR they could get,” Chandor said — and the filmmakers backfilled the dialogue in post-production.

These days Chandor is hunkered down in his nondescript office in New Canaan, surrounded by hedge funders “who must think I run an import-export business or something.” He says he’s working on a new project that he calls an “attempt to speak to some of the questions of our current times.”