‘The Big Short’ Film Tells Complex Tale With Its Characters
Author Michael Lewis uses the colorful characters of ”The Big Short” to make what could be a book just about numbers engaging.
Jaap Buitendijk / © 2015 PARAMOUNT PICTURES.
Michael Lewis has a talent for making numbers and statistics compelling storytelling.
He is the best-selling author of non-fiction books like “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt,” “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” “The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game” and “Liar’s Poker: Rising through the Wreckage on Wall Street.”
Many of the titles listed above have made it to the silver screen, and most recently, filmmaker Adam McKay adapted Lewis’ “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.”
The book and the film follow the colorful characters who bet against Wall Street in the mid-2000s. They saw the buildup of the housing and credit bubble, but none of the big guns on Wall Street believed their predictions of a horrible market crash. The men, played by in the movie by Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Steve Carell and Christian Bale, got rich while the United States went into the worst recession since the Great Depression.
In an interview with Lois Reitzes, Lewis said that the story of these men, outsiders at the time of the crash, is what makes a plot of numbers fascinating for readers.
“The characters are front and center, and the reader or the viewer of the movie get wrapped up in the character, and then suddenly they want to know because the character needs to know,” Lewis explained. “You sort of have to incentivize to the reader or the audience to want to know about this stuff.”
“The Big Short” opens at Atlanta theaters this Wednesday.
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