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Several years ago I did some camera work for the BBC on the floor of the Pacific Exchange. I had never seen anything like it; the moment-to-moment intensity of a trader's day was nearly unbearable, in a strange way more nerve-wracking even than work I had done with firefighters and with soldiers. The men and women on the trading floor were wound up ready to explode for hours at a time, hollering and pushing, sloshing around this unimaginable sea of invisible money. It struck me as the first situation I had ever seen which was riveting in continuous real time. It seemed I could watch it for hours and never lose interest. I was struck, in this world of virtual money, that the skills which mattered most were raw evolutionary, million-year-old strengths like a loud voice, great hand-eye coordination, physical size, and the ability to do enormous lightning-fast calculations in your head. Also, at the time almost no one was making documentaries about money, despite the triumphal march of capitalism across the globe. Then, finally, after years of doing complex narrated historical films, I had a lot of pent up desire to have a hand at something more loose and gangly. Why did you decide to shoot OPEN OUTCRY in real time? What other stylistic choices did you incorporate into the making of this film and why? I was naive enough to think I could do an hour-long movie about stock trading in one continuous shot-moving all over the trading floor, running up escalators to the corporate offices, running back down to the trading floor. That turned out to be a flop. There is a reason God made editors. First of all, unmediated raw experience, at least in this case, turns out to be very interesting for about ten minutes, and then we begin to fidget for a new perspective, for collapsed time, for some help in understanding the riff. Also, on the trading floor-imagine 1000 people on a tennis court-it turned out to be physically impossible to move around as much as we needed to. We did manage to do some pretty long shots; I think the longest is 14 minutes, and there are only ten shots in the whole one-hour film. We never leave the trading floor. A lot of viewers can't stand it; they feel like they're being held under water; maybe that's OK, because I set out to create an experience of capitalism, not a guide to capitalism. I was determined from the start to have the traders themselves explain what is going on. As we cut the film, and had test screenings, it became clear that audiences really wanted more explanation of how trading worked, who was selling what to whom. I think we have an explanation gene that prevents us from just simply experiencing new things the way cats or chickens do. Just watching guys shout numbers wasn't enough. So we did pick-up sound-only interviews to provide more guidance about the nuts and bolts of futures trading. How did you get the traders to cooperate? Was it difficult to earn their trust? We originally planned to do the film with options traders at the Pacific Exchange, and spent half a year doing presentations to various committees and boards. The executives and traders were very supportive, feeling, rightly I think, that what they do for a living is little understood by the rest of us. The executive committee approved the project, with restrictions about embargoing footage. Then two weeks before we were scheduled to begin shooting in 1999, a Justice Department undercover investigation of fraud in options trading blew up, and the exchange disinvited all media. That same afternoon I called the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, made a formal request and sent them all my previous films the next day, and they approved the project by the end of the week. With some additional funding from the Gerbode Foundation, Bonnie Cohen and I airlifted the whole operation to Chicago. The people at the Merc were great. Almost more than any other institution I've worked with, they really understood that documentary makers and journalists have a job to do, and they make it easy to do it. We had full access to anywhere on the trading floor, and had an escort from the exchange with us whenever we shot on the floor. We were on our own when we did the interviews. The Merc never asked us to stop filming, never asked to screen footage, and never asked to see a cut. The message I got from the Corporate Communications Department after we sent them a tape of the finished program was that they thought it was "smashing." Whether or not the good access was in some way guided by traders' uneasy sense that open outcry trading may soon vanish, I'll never know. I'm glad we documented it now, while people are still yelling at each other, because I think it will soon be done entirely by people staring at screens. Traders are rightly proud of what they do, and I think they wanted to see it documented in more than a news clip. Did you have any background or experience in the world of options trading? How did you educate yourself on this subculture? I knew probably less than the average citizen about how derivatives or equities markets work, which in a way made me a perfect person to do this film. My daughter had worked on the options trading floor during college, and came home with astonishing tales, but the actual mechanics and economics of it were a mystery when we started. I read about 15 books and started wading through The Wall Street Journal every day. I hung out on the floor of the PCX quite a bit, just trying to connect the apparent visual chaos with the precise order of "puts" and "calls." I called up Milton Friedman (Nobel Laureate in economics), and to my amazement he invited me over to his office for a long elementary discussion about how futures and options work. The arbitrage hand signals were pretty easy to learn, but the real core meaning of financial derivatives was rough. In the course of making the film I understood the basics of derivatives trading for about a month, and understood the fine points for a day or two. For me, its almost unbearably difficult; I'm just not wired for it, and I have to go through excruciating work to conjure up a real sense of what "options on Eurodollar futures" are. It makes me tired just suggesting it, and these people do it all day long. Now, a year later, my understanding is dim, sailing off into the distance, and any intuitive sense of cattle futures is now fuzzy. It is strange, because 25 years after doing The Day After Trinity, I can still explain pretty accurately how to make an atomic bomb, but currency futures are once again a mystery. How long did the film take to make? What were the logistics? We shot the film over 8 days in the spring of 2000, pretty much at the zenith of the Internet boom, just before the NASDAQ tanked, with a Sony DSR500 (native 16x9). John Haptas and Doug Dunderdale did heroic sound recording; as a matter of policy the Exchange would not allow any wireless equipment to be used, so those guys did the whole show with boom mics, in an deafening environment where it is often hard to hear someone talking only a few feet away. Bob Dalva cut the film in 11 days, Jay Boekelheide did the sound design and track work in five, we mixed in one day at Music Annex and finished the on-line and color correction at Veritel in two days. The whole thing cost $120,000 including travel. What do you hope people will learn about the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's trading floors and other open outcry systems? This film is more about getting a hint of the experience of being in the pit than it is about learning anything in a textbook sense. But I hope ordinary people who never thought about it before can learn at least the basics of what futures are, how they get traded, the unimaginable volume of money that gets shot around the globe every day and the degree to which all of us depend on these markets, whether we know it or not. I learned, as I hope the audience will learn, that this particular market, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, is an institution critical to keeping the economy as stable as it is. A lot of people make and lose a lot of money in the process, but that is in a way incidental to this market's function. I'm not sure that's true of other markets, the equities markets, for instance. I came away with huge respect for the traders and brokers who go down into those pits every day, who somehow find the energy and brains to be utterly rational in an utterly chaotic crush of noise and bodies. If a few people come away from the film with that understanding, then that's good. How does this film fit in to your body of work? Stylistically the film is a radical break from the orderly narrated projects I had done over the years, partly because those films were all about dead people, and partly because those films all had intricately constructed story lines. In the past I worked very hard to make real people behave like characters in novels or plays. OPEN OUTCRY has no story. But every film I've ever done is about some sort of excess, some sort of extreme, and in that sense OPEN OUTCRY is a chip off the old block. |
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