Interview: J.C. Chandor (“All is Lost”)

Rob Feld with a WGA.org interview with All Is Lost writer-director J.C. Chandor:

Obviously, the great challenge of this story is the fact that Our Man has nobody to communicate with through the entire movie.

From a writing perspective, in previous versions of this film, people built little bridges, little crutches for communicating traditional narrative elements when essentially it’s one character, or a person and a half; someone kind of there. You go back to inanimate objects — a volleyball, 127 Hours where you have the video camera to talk to. Or heavy use of voice-over, the Spencer Tracy version of The Old Man and the Sea. That conundrum led to what I thought was in the end potentially fascinating.

It’s all about the passage of time obviously, because you are on the slow decline, physically and emotionally, with this character. Hopefully within that there are bursts of hope and life, but how do you tell that story where you are passing time but not taking four hours to do it? Finding that balance, transitioning between days, hours and minutes, was the challenge. Most of it is in the original version of the script, but that became the struggle over four or five months of writing.

Margin Call is a dialogue and ideas driven script whereas All is Lost was a 32-page script detailing physicality, with almost no lines spoken. What did you take from one project into the next?

What I learned from writing Margin Call was using inherent weaknesses in a project as their strength. In Margin Call it was primarily budgetary. At the time I thought I would have under $1 million, but I wanted to do an actor-driven piece, wrapped in this huge global phenomenon. Shooting a film in the world of international financial capital is not a cheap endeavor, so I decided to pick just one floor to be on instead of a string of cities, and I backed myself into what ended up being the strength of that script. By fencing myself in as a writer, and more importantly fencing the characters in, you got to learn exactly why the entire world ended up where it was, because they all fell into those traps.

In All is Lost, I had to push that to its craziest end, but in a survival film, the inherent weakness is that you have this one guy, all alone and isolated. I doubled down on that to see if the strength that came out of it would be an audience’s ability to bring its own narrative to the story, if I never got hyper specific about who he was. It’s hard to say when I got the confidence to think that I could pull that off, but I know a huge part of it was at Sundance with Margin Call, when I started to think about Redford for the role. I felt like he was an actor who could pull it off.

For the rest of the interview, go here.

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