Capitalism Is Deadly: Oscar Isaac and JC Chandor on 'A Most Violent Year'

Writer-director JC Chandor likes to make movies about how people react in stressful situations — especially when that stress revolves around money.

The New Jersey commercials director-turned-filmmaker broke out in 2011 with his first film, Margin Call, which presented an up-close look at very flawed financial executives coping with the imminent stock market implosion of 2008. The movie — which starred Kevin Spacey and Zachary Quinto, and earned Chandor an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay — documented the end of an economic golden era that arguably began in the early ’80s, which is when Chandor’s new film, A Most Violent Year, is set.

Year, which hits theaters on Dec. 31, stars Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain as a young and ambitious couple climbing their way through the mobbed-up heating-oil industry (the movie was recently named Best Picture by the National Board of Review). Isaac plays Abel Morales, a soft-spoken but determined immigrant whom Chandor calls “the epitome of American capitalism,” who is hard to read and even harder to rattle, even though his competitors try.

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The movie features Issac’s first starring role since last year’s Golden Globe-nominated turn in Inside Llewyn Davis — though he wasn’t the director’s first choice for the role, having come aboard after Oscar winner Javier Bardem dropped out over creative differences. “It was kind of a weird situation where I made a mistake of talking extensively with an actor [before finishing the script],” said Chandor, who was quick to note that he’s still friends with Bardem. “We kept in touch over a five- or six-month period, and it’s one of those cases where he had built up a different movie in his head.”

Bardem, he said, had envisioned a more “black and white” morality story, based on his own politics. “Abel is such an American guy,” he said, ” and Javier grew up as an actor in a socialist arts program, so it’s not at all what this country does.”

Chastain recommended that Chandor speak to Isaac, with whom she attended Juilliard more than a decade ago. The actor, who broke out last year with the Coen Brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis, got the role after three meetings with Chandor, culminating in a decisive conversation during a walk around Williamsburg.

“I don’t remember saying much, actually. I think it was mostly him talking,” Isaac told Yahoo Movies, laughing about the director’s famous verbosity. “He walked me around and showed me where he was imagining everything [in the film] to be. Maybe the fact that I didn’t’ talk too much — I just listened, and that’s something Abel would do.”

Isaac describes the character as extremely calculating, and ready to pounce at the most opportune times — which was Chandor’s intent.

“Abel is a very optimistic individual,” Chandor says. “[In the film], they’re putting a deposit down on a piece of property, when everyone else is literally running out of the burning building that is New York. Everyone is leaving the city, and they were coming in and planting a flag and taking 10 years of savings to buy a piece of property, which is the way it’s supposed to work. That’s when capitalism is working at its best.”

Abel also prides himself on staying as uncorrupted as possible — or at least maintaining that self-delusion by allowing associates do his dirty work. ”At the one end of the spectrum, he does have some righteous ideas of how to do business, of doing it the right way, of taking the path that’s most right,” Isaac explained. “He doesn’t want to escalate the violence. On the other end, he does share a lot of these sociopathic characteristics that very successful businessmen have, which is [that] everything is a commodity, including human beings. If you’re not helpful for attaining his goals, you become expendable.”

Chandor tests his audiences as much as his characters: All Is Lost, the film that he wrote and directed last year, is largely silent except for the crashing of the mighty ocean swells on the wrecked boat that star Robert Redford desperately tries to steer toward land. A Most Violent Year, meanwhile, is sort of a slow-burn gangster flick, the violence often more psychological than physical. While guns are ultimately inescapable, Chandor held back as long as the story could allow, playing with the inherent anticipation that accompanies the film’s title.

“A gun, when used in the way it is in most movies, is not an object of any real threat or menace anymore,” he said. “They’re held as if they’re toys, they shoot millions of bullets — more bullets than even held in a clip — and for the most part, they’ve lost any sort of symbolic threat, because the exercise of shooting a movie with gunplay in it has become so overwrought.”

Though their business is based in New York City, Abel and his wife, Anna, live on its outskirts, part of the upper-middle class diaspora of the late ’70s and early ’80s, whose members hoped to avoid the violence consuming the city. The couples’ place on the totem pole of capitalism allows them to escape the worst of the horrors, though their line of work brings some of it home anyway.

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Chandor, who used to visit Manhattan with his parents when he was a young kid, doesn’t look back too fondly on New York’s grittier years (“Everyone remembers those days a little more fondly than they actually deserve,” he says). And the New York that stars in A Most Violent Year feels light years away from the modern city; in fact, many of the Brooklyn neighborhoods where the film was shot had been scrubbed so clean, it required extensive effects work to re-apply the graffiti and grime of the early ’80s.

The city has become so expensive in the last three decades that even Chandor chooses to live miles away, in upstate New York. “It’s too expensive for me, and I’m a fairly well-to-do filmmaker guy.”

Chandor will vacate the city for his next film, a $100 million drama about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster of 2010 that combines all of his interests as a filmmaker: Oil, disasters, capitalism, and survival.

Based on the reporting by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Barstow, it will be by far Chandor’s biggest film to date — a massive $100 million production financed by Lionsgate. Starring Mark Wahlberg, the blockbuster-size movie will be “almost like a tragic poem about where we are right now in our relationship with oil,” Chandor says, “and how much human energy has to go into finding it and how badly we need it.”

BP, which was found to be largely responsible for the spill, “is not very happy” about the movie, Chandor says, but they have little ability to stop the production. The largest marine oil spill in history ravaged the Gulf of Mexico and the surrounding land, perhaps ruining it for generations to come, all in pursuit of an increasingly elusive resource.

The film will split time between the massive, thrilleresque escape from the sinking oil tanker and the corporate battle to evade responsibility. Ultimately, BP, Transocean, and Halliburton were found negligent and responsible for the disaster. As Chandor jokes, “You know you’re in trouble when Halliburton is the small company in the thing.”