American Cinematographer - October 2011 - 22

Will (Paul Bettany, right) consults with Sam (Kevin Spacey) as a crisis looms at their firm in Margin Call.

Capturing a Financial Freefall By Patricia Thomson

“The longer I work in films, the more I find I need less lighting,” says New York-based cinematographer Frank DeMarco. A pianist since age 6, he offers a musical analogy: “I remember listening to jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter when he was in Weather Report. He was a virtuoso; he’d be playing a thousand notes a second. I saw him again about 15 years later at the Blue Note, and he was an older, mellow guy, and everyone in his young, hot group was playing a million notes a minute. Wayne was just playing one note, but everybody was listening to him, because he was doing something interesting with that note. It’s similar with lighting: once you find the one light or the minimum number of lights that work, you make it work, really bend it. That’s what people are going to see and feel.” DeMarco had ample occasion to bend a few notes on Margin Call, an ensemble drama written and directed by J.C. Chandor, whose characters — a group of Wall Street analysts — are the first to foresee the 2008 financial meltdown. The cinematographer had 10 days of prep for the 17-day shoot, which took place mainly in a high-rise office building in Manhattan. After principal photogra22 October 2011

phy wrapped, the producers approved an 18th day to shoot real trading floors downtown and some nighttime helicopter shots of the hero high-rise. The story, which takes place over 36 hours, is a pressure-cooker workplace drama. When one analyst, Eric (Stanley Tucci), gets sacked, he passes a jump drive to an entry-level colleague, Peter (Zachary Quinto), warning him to “be careful” as the elevator door closes. Peter extrapolates the drive’s financial formula to its logical conclusion and sees imminent disaster for the firm. He alerts his boss, who in turn calls his boss, and so on up the chain. The movie examines the response of each character to the firm’s likely meltdown as they race to resolve the situation before “The Street” finds out. “It’s not panic if you’re the first one out the door,” says CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons), as he greenlights a fire sale of worthless stocks. Most of the movie was shot on the 42nd floor of 1 Penn Plaza. As luck would have it, the floor’s previous occupant was a hedge fund. “That was a gift,” says Chandor. “Everything we might need was there: boardrooms, a 200-person trading floor, corner offices, hallways.” Even the trading-room desks had been left in place. Another boon was the involveAmerican Cinematographer

ment of Bloomberg Trading Systems, which not only loaned and wired up 150 trading stations, but also created a loop of screen shots showing financial graphs that any Wall Street trader would recognize as authentic. “That really helped bring things to life,” says Chandor. Those monitors were both motifs and practical sources. “From the minute I wrote the first couple of scenes, I decided those screens should be a recurring visual theme,” says the director. Always looming over analysts’ heads and active even during the dead of night, “they’re representative of the outside market pressure and the paranoia in these crisis situations,” he says. “The screens let you know that the market never sleeps.” Another motif is Manhattan, a living, pulsating presence outside the office windows. “We had beautiful floorto-ceiling windows, and the breathtaking view of Manhattan is definitely one of the characters,” says DeMarco. “It’s always there, looming and glowing in the background.” To ensure that the windows wouldn’t blow out during day scenes, DeMarco had his crew cover the windows with 4'x8' sheets of ND.3, ND.6 and ND.9. Upon doing so, they discovered a problem: though the windows looked identical, each had a slightly different

Margin Call photos courtesy of Roadside Attractions and the filmmakers.

American Cinematographer - October 2011

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