This is a place to express my love for MARGIN CALL. If you like to join, you are welcome.
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Margin Call producer Neal Dodson shares a sometimes difficult truth for filmmakers to hear: making a movie that doesn’t make money can be bad for the business.
Susan Blackwell plays an absolutely pivotal role in debut director J.C. Chandor’s riveting financial drama Margin Call. Having worked as an actress in the theatre and on television and film, Blackwell is a chilling delight in the opening scenes she shares with Stanley Tucci. Playing Lauren Bratberg, a woman sent into the offices of an investment bank to facilitate redundancies, it is her cold canning of Stanley Tucci’s character that sets the story in motion.
Her work in theatre on and off Broadway reveals Blackwell to be a talented and incredibly funny actress, writer and singer. She also has her own series Side by Side by Susan Blackwell in which she amusingly interviews Broadway actors in often odd places and with even odder questions. Blackwell is known to lick some of her interviewees’ faces and even interviews some in their beds.
All this makes Susan Blackwell an extremely fun and charming person to interview herself. She is quick to laugh and very personable; willing to talk about her bond with actor and producer Zachary Quinto as much as about the real life experiences that have helped her to play a woman responsible for making people redundant.
SUSAN Blackwell talks to us about firing Stanley Tucci in the opening scene of financial thriller Margin Call and what appealed to her about appearing in a film about the origins of the 2008 financial meltdown.
She also discusses how she felt prepared for the role given her ‘day job’ of working in HR, why she’s hoping to come to the West End sometime soon and why she feels grateful to have survived Hurricane Sandy relatively unscathed and will be helping those who were less fortunate around her.
Q. So, how was firing Stanley Tucci in that chilling opening scene of Margin Call?
Susan Blackwell: Firing Stanley Tucci was thrilling. It’s not every day you get a chance to fire ‘the Tucc’. I did not call him that, though [laughs]. It was really exciting.
Q. How was filming the scene? How did you prepare for the role?
Susan Blackwell: I have sort of a strange background in that I’m kind of uniquely prepared to fire Tucci. In addition to being a trained actor who has appeared in other films [Margot At The Wedding, PS I Love You], on and off-Broadway and on TV (Law & Order, etc), and who has a pretty healthy, active career, I also – during that time – have always maintained my corporate job. So I have managed people, I’ve hired people and I’ve fired people. I currently work here in the New York area at an executive search firm and we deal specifically with the HR field.
So, I know that world very well and I know what it means to terminate people. So, when I went to the audition, I said to Zachary Quinto, who is also one of [the film’s] producers, ‘do you want this to be a light version of a termination like Up In The Air, or do you want it to be real’? And he said: “Real.” And I said ‘OK’. And then I set about terminating the poor person who was reading opposite me in a very realistic way.
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Q. Have you ever met or come across the type of high-level company man that Jeremy Irons portrays in Margin Call?
Susan Blackwell: Only in passing [laughs]… I’m laughing because I remember the ties and the suits – it is the way that Jeremy Irons characterises it in film. It’s almost like meeting a head of state… it’s all smiles, handshakes… I don’t know if they’re… they is certainly a charm and charisma to someone who works at that level. But I’m not sure if the higher up you go, the less you know. I don’t know if that is genuinely true of the people I’ve had contact with in those positions. But it’s certainly an interesting way of characterising it in the film.
Q. Did you have much interaction with Kevin Spacey given your shared passion for theatre?
Susan Blackwell: Not prior to the film and not really during it. We literally bump into each other as I’m heading back into the firm to fire more people 24 hours after I’ve gotten rid of Tucci. We literally smack into each other and that is the extent of my interaction with Spacey.
Margin Call is on Netflix instant now and if you’re into really great writing (and movies that were tragically overlooked during last prestige season) you should get on it IMMEDIATELY.
You’re a pretty avid moviegoer. What have you seen lately that you liked?
There are certain movies that I don’t think get the attention they deserve. I think the best movie I saw last year was Margin Call. Excellent, amazing acting, and it just goes to show what you can do with not much money.
Margin Call is a popular movie at the library. I first saw it on amazon in 2011 - I rented it for 3.99 and loved it. ( I have eclectic taste in films beyond the usual blockbuster mainstream stuff) In fact I think I blogged about it here before.
Anyway- it’s a fictionalized story of the Wall Street financial crisis of 2008.
Written and directed by J C Chandor - and by the way, this was his first feature film after 15 years of doing commercials and documentaries.- for just 3 million dollars, it’s made, to date, almost 20 million. Being in indie film, this is considered a hit.
The cool part, is that they filmed it at night in a under month’s time and since the budget was just over 3 million, nobody in the film was making what they usually earn for a film. And a few of these people deserve every penny of their usual salary.
They obviously did it because they liked the script.
In fact I when I found out the DVD had an audio commentary by the director I requested a copy from the library and I have been waiting for over a month now for a copy to become available. And they usually have a few dozen copies of any one movie available all the time.
Which means that the Cuyahoga County Library- one of the top ten of all libraries in the country - had a bunch of people waiting in line to borrow this film. Now, granted, libraries of late have become much more popular for the selection of free movies than for the books. But still…. this film is just a talking heads movie about finance. Tom Cruise, Adam Sandler and Bruce Willis are nowhere to be found in this movie.
Its just a story of a bunch of Wall Street types who discover a problem late at night and they try to figure a way to stay in business from it despite the fact that once they go home 35 hours later, the financial world will be in deep, deep trouble for years afterward.
No car chases. No special effects. No talking robots.
And yet there’s a big waiting line for this film at the library.
Gee. Maybe there’s hope for the human race after all.
It goes from Dilles Bottom, Ohio to Moundsville West Virginia.
It spans nine-hundred-and-twelve feet over the Ohio river (steel through arch design.)
Twelve-thousand-one-hundred people a day use the thing.
It cut out thirty-five miles each way of extra driving to get from Wheeling to New Martinsville. That’s a combined eight-hundred-and-forty-seven-thousand miles of driving a day and twenty-five-million-four-hundred-and-ten-thousand miles a month and three-hundred-and-four-million-nine-hundred-and-twenty-thousand miles a year saved.
I completed that project in 1986, more than twenty-two years ago. Over the life of that one bridge that’s six-billion-seven-hundred-and-eight-million-two-hundred-and-forty thousand miles that haven’t had to be driven, at, uh, let’s say, well, fifty miles an hour? That’s one-hundred-thirty-four-million-one-hundred-sixty-four-thousand-eight-hundred hours, or five-hundred-fifty-nine-thousand-and-twenty days.
So that one little bridge has saved the people of those two communities a combined 1531 years of their lives not wasted in the car.
One thousand, five hundred, thirty-one years.
These people have no idea what’s about to happen