New York native Julio DePietro quit his job at the hedge fund Citadel because he wanted to make a movie about Wall Street. And not some Disneyfied, pansy version of Wall Street, like Oliver Stone’s: “My movie isn’t a glamorized Hollywood version with Shia LaBeouf racing a motorcycle through the streets of Manhattan or flying around in a helicopter,” he tells Bloomberg today, of the ensuing film, The Good Guy, which opens this weekend in New York and Los Angeles. But depicting the real Wall Street, and eliciting realistic simulations of the vast cornucopia of complicated emotions experienced by douchebag twentysomething bankers in New York City from a young cast of twentysomething actors, wasn’t easy. In the end, some of them were forced to go Method.
According to Bloomberg, one scene:
features a twisted version of musical chairs, where the last player to buzz in with a joystick when the music stops gets an electric shock. DePietro said he heard the game was so popular on Wall Street that it once shut down the trading floor at Lehman Brothers for an afternoon. To make it more realistic, the four actors playing the game asked for an actual shock during their close-ups. “The performances look real because they are,” DePietro said. “They’re in real pain.”
No word on whether the actors were also willing to get wasted and pass out in pools of their own vomit in order to “understand the characters’ motivation.” It’s too bad, though, that this was written and filmed before recent revelations about SAC Capital. We imagine a scene with whiteboard markers could have done for the guy from Friday Night Lights what screwing a pie did for Jason Biggs.
Citadel’s DePietro Uses Hedge-Fund Skills to Direct First Movie [Bloomberg]
Related: The Good Guy’s Alexis Bledel on Boys’ Clubs and Sisterhood in the City [Vulture]
