When the movie "Wall Street" was released in December 1987, the notorious Black Monday stock market crash had happened two months earlier. Michael Douglas, who starred in the movie as ruthless corporate raider Gordon Gekko, went on to win an Oscar for best actor for his role in "Wall Street," which was directed and co-written by Oliver Stone. Now, in 2010, comes the arrival of the film’s sequel: "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" (directed by Stone), in the wake of the economic crisis that began in 2008, and was largely due to the catastrophic Wall Street/investment banking meltdown that led to the U.,S. government having to bail out several major banking companies. Douglas has reprised his role as Gekko, and this time he’s been released from prison, after spending eight years behind bars for securities fraud, money laundering and racketeering.
In the first "Wall Street" movie, Charlie Sheen played Gekko’s protégé Bud Fox, who eventually becomes corrupted by Gekko. In "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps," Gekko — newly released from prison, divorced and estranged from his only living child — has a new protégé under different circumstances: Jake Moore (played by Shia LaBeouf), an investment banker who secretly teams up with Gekko to get revenge on Bretton James (played by Josh Brolin), a partner in an investment banking firm who was largely responsible for Gekko’s downfall and Jake's former boss Luis Zabel (played by Frank Langella).
Jake also happens to be engaged to Gekko’s daughter, Winnie, (played by Carey Mulligan), who resists Jake’s attempts to have Gordon and Winnie reconcile. (While filming "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps," LaBeouf and Mulligan became a couple in real life.) "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" had its world premiere at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, where Douglas, Stone, LaBeouf, Mulligan, Brolin and Langella gathered for a press conference. This is what they said during the interview.
The original "Wall Street" movie predicted a lot of things that came true. Oliver and Michael, was there any trepidation about revisiting the story, given this economic nightmare that the original "Wall Street" predicted?
Stone: Frankly, 23 years is a long time. You can walk away and come back. I felt very positive, because so much happened and the greed factor had multiplied so much. The other factor was that the movie ["Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps"] starts with Gordon coming out of jail. He’s a busted man. He’s got no family waiting for him, and he has no real money. So it’s another approach. If he’d come out as "Gordon Gekko, the former Gordon Gekko," it would’ve been a long haul for us to go to the end of the movie … and frankly, I thought, tedious. So I thought we had a good approach — from the bottom of the barrel up — and that gave us the "gism" we needed.
Douglas: I truly felt that rather than repeat the archetype from the first one that he set up, it was a guy starting from the bottom of the barrel with one hand tied behind his back. He could not trade. He did not have any money. He was alienated from his only living blood relative: his daughter. He lost his son to a drug overdose while in jail. So it was a great arc to come over.
Oliver, "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" is not in competition at this year’s Cannes film festival. Was that your choice? And what do you think of competition in the world of cinema?
Stone: I think it’s a dangerous attraction and addiction. People go crazy because of it. I think Woody Allen once … made the point one time with the Oscars that it does drive people crazy. I know we all do like competition because it’s good, and we all do sort of compete by making movies, but we all learn from each other. We really do. We steal from everything. We steal from the bad movies, too.
Oliver, after the first "Wall Street" movie, you said you were surprised at how many people told you they wanted to work on Wall Street because of the movie. Did that type of effect on people enter your mind when you were making the "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps"?
Stone: Completely different. This is a story about family. This is a story about people who are balancing their love of power and money with their need for love. And I think that’s what it really comes down to for everybody. Every single one of the five [main] actors portray each other at some point — even Carey [Mulligan, as Winnie Gekko], who [is] called the moral center.
So you have to go to each character. You have to ask each one [about] the ambiguity of their character and what they feel. But certainly, Michael represents a man looking for money and power to get back in, but what does he really want? And that is a question we go right down to the end [of the movie] with. I don’t want to give away the ending, but I think it’s a good question. That’s what it’s about. Whereas in the original ["Wall Street"] movie, Charlie Sheen [as Bud Fox] started with a lack of integrity, and he found it later in the movie through his father and through other people. Here [in "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps"], Shia and Carey represent sort of a moral center at the beginning of the movie. And, of course, they’re going to be tested.
Oliver, is it fair to say, based on the first "Wall Street" movie, that you see capitalism as destructive?
Stone: I don’t know how to answer that question, because I’m confused — as are many people in the world right now — whether capitalism in its present form can work. It seems not. It seems excessive and unregulated. I would love to see serious reform. It’s going on in the United States. There are tremendous issues worldwide. It goes to Greece, England, Spain, Portugal and so on. I don’t know where it’s going to go. We got drunk.
In 1987, I thought it was going to correct itself. I really did. I thought the system will correct itself, but it didn’t. It got worse. The labor wages of the American worker flattened out in 1973, but the productivity of the United States went way up. So there’s a tremendous gap between who made money and who didn’t make money. And that gap is reflected in the CEO salaries of the companies. Stockholders and CEOs made money, but working people did not. There’s a tremendous inequality and injustice in that, and that needs to b corrected.
Michael, how does it feel to be Michael Douglas?
Douglas: Well, who we are and how feel depends every day on what is going on. Right now, I’m personally very happily married with two young children. It’s given me a tremendous thrill. Career-wise, I’m very proud of "Money Never Sleeps." I had a wonderful time making this picture with a tremendous cast. I also have a small, independent movie that I’m very proud of called "Solitary Man" that’s coming out. So both my professional and private life is good.
Saying that, everyone looks at the world, as you know I work with the United Nations, it [the world situation] is pretty disappointing. And we wonder going to head. The area that I work on — the elimination of nuclear weapons — there seems to be some great movement going ahead, but as you do look at the greed as the oil spills are going on, volcanic ash, the earth seems to be speaking back.
To any of the actors on the panel who play the investment bankers, how do you balance portraying someone who can be ruthless in business with portraying their humanity?
Langella: I don’t think people change. I think the game changes, in terms of my character [Louis Zabel]. The game has changed. If he were in the position that Josh [Brolin as Bretton James] is in, in the movie, or Shia [LaBeouf as Jack Moore], he would do the same thing they did. He’s just an old lion whose time has passed.
He’s fighting to stay alive. If he had some of the control that the younger men had, he’d do the same thing. He [Louis Zabel] is described sometimes as more moral than the others, but he’s not. He’s just fading away, and that makes him more sympathetic, but I don’t think he’s any less of a killer than the new crowd coming up.
Brolin: Bretton James, I mean, look: You’re a human being, first and foremost. I think the fact that he is so ambitious, like Charlie Sheen [as Bud Fox] in the beginning, who finds his morality in that version of that movie. Whereas this guy, Bretton James, is dealing with no ceiling because of no regulations or any of that. The theme of the first movie is: "Greed is good." And the theme of this film is: "More." There’s no end to the possibilities of accumulation.
And I think, having traded on a very small level, I understand what it is to get caught up in that moment of greed where you go, "I understand that the kids are upstairs and they need to eat, but if I have 15 more minutes, I’ll make that much more money, and then they’ll be able to eat more." Honestly, they’re not eating. That’s the reality of the situation. So to tap into that greed an allow yourself to lose your identity and reconfigure your identity within that is morally and completely bereft. And that was an interesting thing to be able to play with in this movie.
LaBeouf: Jake’s situation is interesting, because he’s battling with who he wants to be with personally, where he wants to be professionally. They go hand in hand, almost. He’s a man who’s picked out of obscurity by a man named Louis Zabel, put through Fordham [University] by this man, hired right out of business school. This man was my [Jake Moore’s] father figure, because my father drank himself to death. And this is a man who defined himself by his profession.
Bretton James essentially attacks [Louis Zabel] in a room at the Fed, ruining the definition of himself, ruining the firm, causing [Louis Zabel] to commit suicide. Jake becomes very vengeful. Who better to ask for advice for revenge than Gordon Gekko? He’s speaking at my school, and I go to see him, against the will of my fiancée, Winnie, who wants nothing to do with this man, because he was about himself the whole time. And she also blames him about the loss of her [brother]. Jake’s in an interesting position, because it’s a balancing act, what Josh talked about. He’s in a high-stakes world, and he’s a very young man. So there.
Carey, you had the opposite challenge: how not to appear too much like a saint. Can you comment on that challenge?
Mulligan: I think she’s rebelled so far from what her father did. I think she has incredibly strong ideals, to the point where she dismisses $100 million — which is silly, really. She’s with a Wall Street trader, which is a dichotomy in itself, but she believes he’s the best version of a Wall Street trader, that he’s doing it for the right reasons. There are good and bad people in every profession, and this is something that he’s talented at and skilled. And if he can use that talent and that skill to make the world better, then it’s not a bad thing. She’s not flawless. She’s incredibly stubborn. She’s not forgiving. She can’t forgive. There’s not sainthood there. Her father is in there somewhere.
Oliver, when did you start thinking about doing a "Wall Street" sequel? And how did the economic crash in 2008 affect anything you wanted to put in the movie?
Stone: Actually, Michael Douglas and [producer] Ed Pressman approached me in 2006. I didn’t want to celebrate that culture of wealth. It was ongoing, and it just seemed to be getting worse and worse. There was no reason to make the movie.
After the crash, all bets were off, because, really, it was a major heart attack. It was a triple bypass. I think they put a stent in, but I’m not sure if they’ve solved it. So this is serious. It puts the world in a new perspective. Its time had come back. Gordon Gekko and Michael and Ed were right. They came back to me in 2008 with a second script that was much better, and it became the basis of this movie. [He says to Douglas] Thank you for believing in me to get it back there. It had to be done. Its time had come.
Oliver, is it true that you wanted to make a movie about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (the current president of Iran) and he refused? And what do you think about relations between Iran and the United States?
Stone: Briefly, it was a comedy of errors, because we had approached him, and they said no, and then they said yes, but I was doing another movie at the time: "W.," about George [W.] Bush. I felt strongly at one point that if we, America, had succeeded in Iraq, [then] George Bush would have been encouraged to go to Iran, and I thought there was a war coming.
So they were interested again, they were uninterested, and then they got interested again. It was ridiculous, so we forget about it, and I went on to do some Latin American presidents and so forth [in the documentary film "South of the Border"]. My life moved on, too. It’s an ugly situation. I don’t know who’s lying and who’s telling the truth, but I do know there’s been a lot of false intelligence.
Michael, how is it being an older actor in Hollywood? How do you choose your roles these days?
Douglas: Well, the parts get limited as you get older. There’s certainly less studio-type parts, unless you’re going to be a villain. And there are much more interesting independent parts that exist. It’s very tough now with the financing. It’s very, very tough to finance independent movies these days.
To any of the actors, do you believe in Wall Street? Have you ever invested in any Wall Street transactions?
Douglas: Sure, absolutely.
LaBeouf: Out of necessity. I had made five action films. I’m the "Transformers" kid. I felt very intimidated. I mean, look who’s up here. It’s a very intimidating squad. It’s the kill squad. I felt I was playing with the All-Star team. I was coming from a place in my life that was pretty dark. I didn’t have a whole lot confidence personally. And I felt the only way I could have confidence, which is the only job requirement of these men, was to be as astute as I possibly could.
These men embraced me because they embraced Oliver. And so I learned a lot very quickly. My brother is actually a trader, and we were sending each other P&L reports for a good minute there. And then it’s not about "actor." "He’s Josh Brolin, and I’m me." That can be intimidating, but when it’s about numbers, it becomes very eye-to-eye. It’s about how much money you’re making that week. So that made it easier for me … It made it surmountable.
In terms of my investments, I invested in the beginning. I don’t want to get into numbers, because I don’t want to get in trouble, but I did very well, not necessarily because of my intellect, but because I entered the market at an incredible time. When we started making this movie, the market was on a direct climb and it didn’t really didn’t let up until we had the Flash Crash [on May 6, 2010]. I was just lucky in terms of the timing. We had a lot of people who actually sat with George Soros. He’s one of the sages of finance. He’s very welcomed in this world because of the success of the first ["Wall Street"] film. I don’t think the players on the first film had the same opportunities. So we were blessed in that regard.
Stone: Except by the big banks. The big banks were very arrogant and said no. They wouldn’t even let us in. But oddly enough, the Royal Bank of Canada did cooperate with us. And the Royal Bank of Canada gave us their floor to shoot on. They were the one bank. Canada is one of the few countries that escaped this debacle, because the banks played straight and by a different set of rules. It was interesting: The Royal Bank of Canada let us in, whereas the Goldman [Sachs] of the world just shut their doors.
LaBeouf: We got in anyway. I snuck in.
Stone: Yeah, you go in. I snuck in places where they wouldn’t let us in.
Stone: One night we had a very interesting dinner with about 15 young people, about 20 Citibank people — and that place [Citibank] took a real hit — and they were talking about how they had just come out of business school and had two years on the floor. And they were in that moment of crises — I guess it was like a Pearl Harbor of some kind — and they turned to their leaders, the older people, and their leaders were freaked out and were saying, "What’s going on?" And they said, "We don’t know." In that moment, they were baptized. I think Shia got a lot of confidence from that, because he listened to that. These kids were new to the biggest crash next to the Depression of Wall Street. And they learned, as they say in Vietnam, [by] training on the ground.
Michael, you support many charities. What’s on the top of your list right now?
Douglas: I support disarmament. I’m a UN Messenger of Peace. Each of us has our area. It’s a very important and crucial time. We had our start agreements going on between Russia and the U.S. in the reduction of weapons — not as much as we’d like. There was a nuclear bombs review that President Obama had, and there’s been a Non-Proliferation Treaty that’s been under view in the United Nations, followed by the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty.
So you really have an opportunity after 64 years of a dramatic reduction in weapons. You’ve got organizations talking about zero and schedules coming out. So this is something that I’m really excited about. I’m working with our senators in trying to ratify first the start agreement and trying to speak to some other countries to come on board the Non-Proliferation Treaty. India and Pakistan are having meetings, actually, next week. So it could be an exciting time. There seems to be a coalition. A lot of momentum is building from both the left and the right.
In "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps," Jake thinks the next big financial bubble is in investing in environmental technology. Do you believe that too?
Stone: I think it’s very interesting Shia didn’t cover that. Shia [as Jake Moore] has a morality in the beginning. He is trying to build an alternate clean-energy company, based on some research that we did. It may be one of the ways, it may be one of the techniques, but certainly, this is a huge demand right now. This would be a productive use of Wall Street for social ends. It would be raising money for these companies, for start-ups, to get this thing going.
And we don’t have an aggressive policy like China, which is government-dominated, government-inspired. Our [U.S.] government is so slow out of the docks. It’s get there, a little bit closer, but this is what Wall Street can do. I hate to say it, but 40 percent of American corporate profits went to financial companies. If you look at Goldman [Sachs], 70 percent of their profits were claimed from them trading for themselves, not for their clients. They weren’t raising money for these energy companies. They weren’t contributing to the overall health of our economy. They were trying to make money for themselves based on a new set of rules that allowed them to make a lot of money. That’s horrible! That’s not what it’s for.
The banks originally aren’t what they are now, but the banks, the brokerage houses, they were agentary functions. That is what my father did. He was an agent for other people. That was the right thing, and now it became the agents are in control. It’s crazy. The whole system has reached a disproportion. And even Alan Greenspan has admitted that it was an irrational exuberance and a moral hazard and so forth and so on.
But there is a morality here. I don’t think Shia got into it, but when he [as Jake Moore] runs up against Michael [Douglas as Gordon Gekko] and Carey [Mulligan as Winnie Gekko], there’s a whole different dimension. He wants the daughter to come together with the father. But at the same time, he seems to want something else, too. He wants money and he wants revenge. And he uses Michael and Michael uses him to get back to Carey.
Carey is not the moral center. She may be at the end, emotionally, but I do believe that Michael sees Carey as her having screwed him. At that very first scene, she was not there at the prison. She made a deal. She was supposed to give him the money, and that’s the way he understood it with her. So he feels justified in what he does in his behavior. And I think each character has their reasons.
Oliver, can you talk about casting some great veteran actors in "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps"? Also, the movie was originally supposed to be released in May 2010, but the release was postponed to September 2010. What do you say to people who think that the timing of the movie’s release would’ve been better in May?
Stone: The danger is if you chase the news, you’re never going to be satisfied. We would’ve come out normally the week Goldman [Sachs] was indicted for short selling. So what? The news is going to be there forever. It’s going to be going on for the next year.
The fourth quarter, historically, in Wall Street is more volatile. So we will be coming out in the storm, I think [in] September. I think it’s much better. I think Cannes is a much better introduction point for us. I like it. And we get more time to work on the film. We get three more weeks.
As for Sylvia Miles, she was in the original ["Wall Street"], and she’s still walking around, as you know. And she’s still got that sassy intelligence. She told me that they would all crack up on "garage sale." I don’t know about that line. Eli Wallach was a treat for all of us to work with, too. Eli, he’s Eli. He came up with his own signature whistle there from one of his Western movies, which I loved, and we incorporated it.
Douglas: I think it is a marketing dilemma. One should not think that if Wall Street is in the news that it necessarily helps our movie. Surely, there has to be a separation [between the movie and the news]. This movie has a lot of other things going on about it, other than simply Wall Street. I think, for the marketers, that is going to be the dilemma: "How do you make the audience think that they haven’t already seen the movie on television, watching the news every night?"
Mr. Douglas, as a successful movie producer, how have you seen the economic crisis affect Hollywood?
Douglas: I don’t know if it’s been directly affected by the Wall Street crisis, but over a period of time, economics have made a disparity between studio movies (most of which are [budgeted at] $70 million or more, that have advertising or marketing budgets of $30 million or $40 million) and your independent pictures, which are down under $12 million or $15 million.
And the dilemma with those is that most of the time, they sell the movie to foreign territories to get the budget to make the movie, and then they cannot get an American distributor because they don’t have enough money to market the film. So I’ve never quite understood why a foreign country will take an English-speaking American film, and have enough money to show it in theaters, whereas it cannot be done in the States. So it’s a bad situation right now, a huge disparity. I think it’s cleaned out maybe a lot of mediocre independent films, but it’s not a good sign for the future.
Oliver, do you have any plans to do a movie in Egypt?
Stone: I have no plans to shoot in Egypt. It’s difficult. The infrastructure there is difficult. I’m very involved right now with three documentaries that I’m trying to finish, including "The Secret History of the United States," which is 10 hours long. It’s probably the most ambitious project of my life. And I have a "South of the Border" documentary, about the changes in South America and all through the region in eight countries … I did a third interview with [Fidel] Castro, right before we shot "Wall Street: [Money Never Sleeps]." It’s called "Castro in Winter." It’s a man in his twilight years, his twilight life. He’s 84 years old and is in wonderful mental condition, ailing physically, but still strong. It’s a wonderful interview. So I have those three things taking up a lot of time.
To any of the actors, have any of your movie roles changed your outlook on life?
Brolin: I played George W. Bush, and I’m still confused.
Langella: I played Richard Nixon, and I’m not [confused].
Oliver, is it true that you were seriously considering doing a movie about the years that took place between the first and second "Wall Street" movies?
Stone: No. I was perhaps kidding when I said that, because Michael Douglas would have to be younger.
Will Gordon Gekko get a chance to redeem himself in "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps"? And does the movie have an overall message?
Douglas: I think Oliver and I were pretty stunned after the first one [1987’s "Wall Street"], how they perceived Gekko: an insider trader, a guy who destroyed companies, a guy who destroyed people. It was a very well-written villain. And people are attracted to villains. We just never anticipated that all these MBAs, these people in business school would just be ranting and raving that this was he person they wanted to be.
And yet, 22 years later, I’d imagine that a lot of those MBA students are heading up those investment banking companies now, because the greed has not stopped. It got legal. In a sense, it’s become legal. This time around, I think Oliver was right: Rather than start [Gordon Gekko] off in the same style and dress, it was really an opportunity to take him from the bottom and make it more of a question. The biggest issue I get about Gordon is, "Has he changed?" And we leave that sort of ambivalent. Is he a changed man? We don’t know until the end.
Michael, you talked about the question of whether nor not Gordon Gekko has changed. But what do you think hasn’t changed about him since the first "Wall Street" movie and since he spent time in prison?
Douglas: His hostility and anger against Josh’s character probably is deep-seated, as the man who put him there [in prison]. And his analysis of what’s happened, knowing that he can’t be involved; he’s going to be on the sidelines afterward. He’s thinking more in an analytical way. And the book that he writes, when it comes out, is pretty accurate [about] what goes down.
Oliver, was the Louis Zabel character based on your father, who was a Wall Street stockbroker in real life?
Stone: No, Frank’s character was based more on people from Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. And you’re right: Richard Fuld was a villain, in a way. I don’t think [Lois Zabel] was as bad as Richard Fuld was, but he did run the company into the ground. As he says to Shia at one point in the party, "There’s a lot more here than you know. There’s a lot more going on than you’re aware of."
My father was a different type of style. It was 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s. He was a real broker and an economist. He wrote economic letters for publication. He ended up working, ironically, for Sandy Weill. Sandy Weill was the mega-business entrepreneur who formed the basis of Citicorp by merging American Express at one point and insurance companies and banks … He [Sandy Weill] broke down the glass wall. He took brokerage houses and merged them into banks. He made one of the first financial supermarkets out of Citicorp. My father was working for him when he died.
But the world changed. My father was an honest man, I thought. I still think so. He believed in serving his clients. That’s gone. There are no clients. Except when you have a lot of money, no one wants to take you. I had an old school mate who became a big shot at Morgan Stanley. I remember in 1999, he was the head of Morgan Stanley. I won’t tell you his name, but I asked him if he could make some investments for me. He said, "There’s not enough there." It’s that kind of attitude that was arrogant that pervaded the entire Wall Street area.
Fatherhood is a big theme in "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps." Oliver and Michael, how did your fathers influence your careers and maybe your views of Wall Street?
Stone: Computers took over. My father was dealing with computers at the end of his life, and it was very complicated to him. He was not comfortable with that. He was used to the paper. There was also a big firewall between analysis and the sellers on the floor, the people traders.
In other words, the research departments really were research departments. And somewhere along the line, the research departments were subsumed by the production departments. Like [George W.] Bush did with Iraq, they shifted the intelligence to match what they wanted to hear. So the whole thing is frightening. My father would roll over in his grave, if that old cliché is true. What do you think, Frank?
Langella: That he’d roll over in his grave? Probably.
Douglas: I think I had the advantage of being second-generation, which allows you to watch your father conduct his life. His friends are stars. You get to see the insecurities and vulnerabilities of people. You see how you conduct yourself to the public. I watched him as an actor and as a producer work on material which I think was very beneficial for me. And one thing I specifically owe him is that he initially bought the rights to "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest," which ended up playing a crucial part in my career.
For more info: "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" website
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