You mentioned that Richard came up with a line earlier. Were there a lot of independent suggestions for the characters from the actors?
I’m not precious about my script, but I like laying everything down in rehearsal so we have an opportunity to refine it. Certain passages of the film I thought had a little poetry to them, like the restaurant scene when Miller’s trying to sell off his company, there’s kind of a David Mammet pattern I ripped off there. Tim Roth came in and he had a totally different idea of his character Detective Bryer than I did. Whereas I’d imagined this buttoned down, staid man, Tim came in ferocious like “Fuck that! This cocksucker thinks he’s getting away with this, a cold day in hell. I’ll throw the wife in jail. I’ll throw the daughter in jail with the black kid. Let’s see how she likes sharing a fucking cell with the black kid”. So I was like “Tim, wait, let’s reign it in a bit” and he’s like “I’m not reigning in a goddamn thing. Fuck them!” So, that was great because I think he actually brought this goofy manic madness to the character and made something original with it, and so I encouraged that.
It’s interesting that his character is a good cop but he’s not exactly innocent either and is prepared to go beyond the law at times.
Well, I think he’s frustrated. He’s in New York, has been doing this a while and the city has really gentrified over the last twenty or thirty years. There’s an evolution of this moneyed super class which has taken over everything, so it’s impossible for the working man to make an existence in New York now. I think the abuse of power is real, so he’s perhaps unscrupulous, but what we talked about a lot while making this movie was characters doing the wrong things for the right reasons. That was something which appealed to me to explore.
Arbitrage also features a talented young cast (Brit Marling, Nate Parker). Is it tougher to make casting selections with such a large amount of young talent out there?
What was nice about this cast was that we had three heavyweights; Gere, Sarandon and Roth and then three younger newer actors; Marling, Parker, Casta, who are all sort of starting out, though Nate has been around a little bit longer and is sort of the most pro of that group. He’s a phenomenal actor, I really think he could be like the next Denzel. But there was a nice energy with the older actors playing off the younger actors and seeing that dynamic happen. It really brought spontaneity to the set.
Other films about high finance, like Wall Street, are often fluffy and don’t confront the business aspect of things. Arbitrage concerns a trail of money leading up to a certain point, but doesn’t spell everything out. The viewer needs to have a bit of knowledge about the way things work. Do you think it’s more exciting to drop the viewer in the deep end a little bit?
I think people like coming into worlds that they don’t necessarily know a lot about but can learn something from and feel like they got some inside knowledge. I tried to be as real as possible with this movie. Like I said, my parents are traders, I know these types of people, and I know this world. I used to be in the business world myself so I worked very hard to make sure that this material was vetted by real minds. I had the heads of major investment banks and big lawyers reading this screenplay before we shot it. I think people can get into that. It might require them to keep up but also we didn’t bog it down with jargon and make it just a boring numbers movie. You’ve got the thriller aspect, the investigation and blood crime which I thought was really important too because I enjoy when a movie can blend genres a little bit. It’s a cinematic cocktail of “Murders and Mergers”.
Arbitrage premiered at Sundance and also featured at JDIFF. How important is the festival circuit as an outlet before the film is released?
It’s absolutely invaluable. The festivals provide a great springboard and it’s always nice to see people coming together for a shared interest in film. Film is the theatre of ideas. It’s the closest thing we’ve got left to people being able to think about larger topics than their average life. We’ve been now to Abu Dhabi, Zurich, Saint Sebastian, Dublin, London. For these different cultures to welcome us and embrace the film and this particular weird, heady vision of New York and the gilded age crashing down, it’s an honour to share that with different cultures and see how they have their own reaction to it.
Arbitrage is in cinemas now.
