'Dumb Money' is a fast, frenetic, fact-based account of a GameStop short squeeze that rocked Wall Street in 2020 and even prompted a congressional hearing. The all-star cast includes Paul Dano, Seth Rogen and America Ferrera.
Variety Lounge presented by Zurich Film Festival
Variety Lounge presented by Zurich Film Festival
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00:00 Pete Davidson is such an unpredictable kind of comic force in the film.
00:03 Do you give a performer like that a lot of room to riff or is he kind of bringing a lot
00:09 of himself to it?
00:10 Pete obviously his background in comedy, he's very instinctive.
00:14 His improvisational skills are amazing.
00:16 But what's impressive as well with that is that they're in character.
00:21 Understanding the family dynamic and the hierarchy, the jokes are coming from that place, you
00:26 know, where he's like, you know, nobody wants your baby.
00:29 You know, at the dinner table.
00:30 It's because of how he feels marginalized.
00:32 There's weight under that and there's emotional baggage to it that I think makes the comedy
00:37 land that much harder in a way because the audience is invested in their characters.
00:42 Yo what up everybody.
00:51 Roaring Kitty here.
00:52 I'm gonna pick a stock and talk about why I think it's interesting and that stock is
00:57 GameStop.
00:58 I love this guy.
01:00 I understand there's a bit of a family backstory to how Dumb Money came about and how you inspired
01:06 to make it.
01:07 Yeah, it was during COVID.
01:09 And you know, very trying time for everyone.
01:11 At that time, one of our sons was living with us, he was 24 miles and he started investing
01:17 on Wall Street Bets.
01:18 And he has a trajectory that is very similar to some of our characters in the film.
01:22 He'd come running down and keep me abreast of what was going on.
01:25 He'd be like, "Hey, Elon Musk just tweeted GameStunk and it's up 8%" and really the blow
01:30 by blow of it.
01:31 But then it got into this very intense two week period.
01:34 He got out, timed it really well.
01:36 The next day there was the freeze that Robinhood did on the buy option.
01:39 It created the stock and just the outrage and frustration that was happening online,
01:44 that real sense that the system was rigged against them.
01:46 I lived that emotional journey in the house.
01:49 I was thinking as I was watching it that if you kind of traveled back in time and showed
01:53 dumb money to someone from 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, they would be mystified by so
01:59 much of what's on screen.
02:01 Did you kind of intend for the film to be a kind of cinematic time capsule that you
02:05 watched and say, "Yes, that was 2020"?
02:07 Part of why this happened was this moment that we were living through.
02:11 COVID was such an extreme situation that we've never experienced before.
02:16 The loss of loved ones, the loss of jobs, small businesses shutting down, the real lack
02:21 of government aid, the isolation, it was so acute.
02:25 And there was a lot of frustration going on.
02:28 It all came together and GameStop happened to be the way for people to express that.
02:33 It happened to be a stock in this particular moment that was a way for everybody to go
02:40 after that 1% or even the 0.01% in this case and show that frustration and anger and hit
02:46 them where it hurts, which is in their wallet.
02:48 What do you want people who watch the films to kind of come away from it thinking and
02:52 feeling or even doing?
02:54 This sense of community, the sense of empowerment as a group, it can affect change, I think
03:02 is hopeful coming out of the film.
03:04 There's a line at the end of the film where one of the reporters says, "Wall Street
03:08 day traders were considered a fringe movement and now they have the power to move markets
03:13 and people on Wall Street is noticing."
03:15 So there was a dynamic shift that happened that is interesting and it's empowering.
03:19 Babe, how much did we make today?
03:22 Five million.
03:23 How much did we lose today?
03:25 A billion.
03:26 And yesterday?
03:27 Four million.
03:28 And yesterday?
03:29 A billion.
03:30 Now, I understand Rebecca and Lauren, this is the first feature script they've had made
03:36 and they're former Wall Street Journal reporters as well.
03:40 Did they come to you with the script ready-made or did you kind of work on it together?
03:43 When this script came in and they sent it to me, it was all happening so quickly.
03:48 The Ben Meserick book was very immediate.
03:52 They were writing immediately after that.
03:54 When I got Kimbo board, the congressional hearings had only happened a couple of months
03:59 earlier so it wasn't in the script.
04:01 And when you looked at the Roaring Kitty testimony, it really felt like it was a natural arc to
04:07 the story.
04:08 So immediately they put that in the third act.
04:11 They pulled that together very quickly because we only had about three months before we were
04:15 shooting and six weeks on the ground prep.
04:17 There's so much real footage in this film.
04:19 The memes, the financial news anchors, the actual mass media, the White House, the congressional
04:27 hearings, it's all real footage.
04:29 So we had a team of people in post that was pulling all of this footage together.
04:33 And it was almost a movie within a movie and it was a real discovery.
04:37 Paul gives a very grounded emotional center to this quite chaotic story.
04:41 What about him made you sure that he was Roaring Kitty?
04:45 The homework that he would do, listening to the cadence, the work for months leading up
04:50 to this, getting the mannerisms, he's portraying a real figure.
04:54 The actual Keith Gill who did these posts that everybody really got behind, there's
04:58 a real accessibility to him, a real innocence, a real joy about what he's talking about,
05:03 and a real sense of no agenda.
05:06 I think online, they can smell BS very quickly and he just didn't have it.
05:10 So we were looking for those qualities.
05:13 The film for Paul was Swiss Army Man.
05:16 The joy and the enthusiasm that he has in that film, I immediately thought, oh, these
05:20 are the attributes we need because we've got to get the audience to get behind his performance
05:24 like in reality they got behind Keith Gill.
05:27 If he's in, I'm in.
05:28 If he's in, I'm in.
05:29 GameStop, those shares non-stopping.
05:30 It's only going to go up.
05:31 When they hit, I'm going to buy you a mansion.
05:32 Let's drink to that.
05:33 My brother is a fucking nerd.
05:38 Then you've got this extraordinary kind of all-star ensemble all around him.
05:41 Did you always plan for the film to be that kind of actor showcase or was the case of
05:46 one actor coming on board and then it just escalates?
05:48 It was, honestly, it wasn't the plan.
05:50 I think it's always really interesting to be able to cast against type.
05:54 Something that was in that script with Rebecca and Lauren was to really have like shades
05:58 of grey.
05:59 We didn't want it to be black and white and try to paint people as villains and heroes
06:03 necessarily.
06:04 It's like we wanted to show them as fully formed human beings.
06:08 There's such short pieces we have in this film without different characters.
06:11 It feels like every role in the film has its own little moment.
06:14 There are no kind of wasted characters there.
06:17 That was something I was always striving for because every character only has four or five
06:20 scenes that they have to really engage the audience with.
06:24 It meant those scenes had to work on a number of levels.
06:27 There's definitely a through line that I wasn't aware of necessarily, which is that outsider,
06:31 that underdog.
06:32 It's an ordinary person put in extraordinary circumstances and how they're going to handle
06:36 that.
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