How to Make a Movie Based on Extremely Recent History

How to Make a Movie Based on Extremely Recent History,‘Dumb Money’ director Craig Gillespie takes us inside the race to be the first movie in theaters about the GameStop short squeeze. Starring Paul Dano, Pete Davidson, and America Ferrera.

How to Make a Movie Based on Extremely Recent History

They made a movie about the GameStop short squeeze already? Yes, they did: Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money hits theaters in late September, 32 months after a ragtag group of online investors attempted to get rich by targeting the Wall Street titans betting against the retail chain. (For comparison’s sake, the movie All the President’s Men came out more than three years after the events depicted in the film.) How do you make a major studio comedy so quickly — especially when that comedy has 12 major characters and over 250 scenes that take place across the country?Speaking to Vulture the week before Dumb Money’s TIFF premiere, Gillespie (whose previous credits include Lars and the Real Girl and I, Tonya) broke down the fevered pace of his latest film’s production. “We moved very quickly, but I actually love that,” he says. “If you have to go on instinct, it gives you less time to second-guess.”

1. Have an Intimate Knowledge of Your Subject

Gillespie didn’t just follow the GameStop story on the news. He had a first-hand view of the emotional turmoil Reddit investors went through because he was living with one. His 24-year-old son, who’d come to live with him during lockdown, had been involved since the early days. “It was one of those COVID things that happened, the alienation of everybody. He’d be up till three in the morning, getting up at 6 a.m. to look at the markets before they opened,” the director says. “We got to live through the whole blow-by-blow in real time: the exhilaration, the frustration, the anger, the outrage. I don’t think I would’ve been interested had I not been on that journey with him.”

The son got out at the right time; Gillespie, who’d mostly stuck to index funds, did not. He bought GME the day before Robinhood froze trading, and the price collapsed. “I’m one of the people who lost money on GameStop,” he says, laughing. (Though thanks to the film, he probably still netted out positive in the end.)

2. Assume Someone Else Is Working on the Same Thing

Photo: Claire Folger/Columbia Pictures

Dumb Money takes place in late 2020 and early 2021, which presents a unique dramaturgical hurdle — characters would have to spend a significant amount of their screen time wearing masks. “We had to come up with devices simply to see their faces,” Gillespie says. Food helped: They gave people beverages, so they’d have to lower their masks to take a sip; for America Ferrera’s nurse, they’d set a scene during her lunch break.

At other times, they leaned into it. Ramos’s character works in a GameStop, so his mask became a shorthand for the power dynamic between him and his boss, who rigorously enforces protocol. And in the scenes set in the hedge-fund palaces of Florida, masks symbolize the upstairs-downstairs pide. Seth Rogen’s hedge-fund CEO never wears one, while his army of domestic servants are always masked up. “Everything was calculated through that lens of wealth disparity,” Gillespie says.

You may recall that another major news event happened in January 2021. The movie only glancingly mentions the insurrection at the Capitol, but in the editing room, Gillespie did find a way to touch on the emotional scars left over from the trauma of 2020, an inescapable part of the context of the time. “It was such an intense moment for people they don’t need a lot to be reminded of what it was,” Gillespie says. Anchoring it is a speech from Dano about everything regular people lost over the pandemic. “It’s a testament to Paul’s performance that he can take you to this emotional place while he’s sitting there in a kitty-cat shirt with a Santa hat on.”