A MOST VIOLENT YEAR
Oscar Issac gets fighty.
‘The idea of the self-made man is a myth. Actually you do it on the backs of others.’
Oscar Isaac
We’re all used to seeing crime movies about violently ambitious men who will do whatever it takes to get to the top ( Scarface), or about gangsters who’ve built an empire and now want to legitimise their business ( The Godfather: Part II). J.C. Chandor’s third movie, A Most Violent Year, is beholden to their structure and iconography but is an altogether different proposition, giving us a guy who runs a lawful business and wants to stay lawful only to find it is all but impossible if he wants to survive.
“This is a guy who, besides a little bit of cooking his books, which everyone was doing at that time, is clean,” nods writer/director J.C. Chandor, a man who makes thoughtful, formal movies (financial-crisis drama Margin Call, Robert-Redford-marooned-on-a-boat adventure All Is Lost) but looks and talks like a jock. Stretched out at the Soho Hotel, London with his trainers planted on a table, he frequently punches a fist into a palm to emphasise a point while babbling fast and loud from under a baseball cap. “It’s a mobbed up business, but that does not mean that he is. He doesn’t believe violence is the best course of action.”
Chandor is talking about Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac), an immigrant who owns a heating-oil company in New York, 1981. He and his wife, Anna ( Jessica Chastain), have just sunk everything they own and more into buying a plot of land on the Hudson River – perfect to import and export oil, meaning their business can grow exponentially. One hitch: they have 30 days to find the outstanding balance or they’ll lose their land, their investment and everything they’ve ever worked for. It’s going to be a tense month given Abel encounters political chicanery, industry corruption and, yes, violence at every turn.
“What are the principles you are willing to sacrifice, and which ones are you not?” asks Isaac with a tight smile. “The United States is a hyper-capitalist setting. You have the amazing ability to be able to come to this country and make something out of nothing. But at the same time, the idea of the self-made man is a myth. Actually you do it on the backs of others.”
For A Most Violent Year, Chandor initially thought about husband and wife businesses, and about ambition. Then he started pondering violence. Offered “80 to 100” writing and directing jobs after Margin Call scored him an Oscar nomination, he noted how “80 per cent of them featured gratuitous, silly violence as a way of getting an audience to come.” But it wasn’t just the violence in movies. The Sandy Hook shooting occurred 10 minutes from his house, and suddenly his own kids’ school had an armed guard on the gate. So what if he snowballed all of his ideas to make a film concerning the culture of violence? And having grown up in New Jersey, looking longingly at Manhattan across the river, he knew exactly where his tale of business and blood had to be set.
“I started wondering, ‘What is the most violent year, statistically, on record in New York City?’” he says. “It turned out to be 1981, which is also, coincidentally, this transformative year for the city. There was a new President, a new Mayor, an explosion of music, and it was a really great year for fashion. But it was tricky because New York has changed a lot. You couldn’t make this movie at our budget level without VFX. I used VFX to enhance, and bring in storytelling elements. So it’s not a monster in the foreground, it’s graffiti on the subway, or, in wide shots of the city, erasing all the buildings that shouldn’t be there.”
Chastain, who describes her Brooklynborn character as “nouveau riche and very much a Daddy’s girl”, was cast as Anna. Javier Bardem, meanwhile, was Abel. Then Bardem dropped out over creative differences and Chastain lobbied Chandor regarding his replacement. “Immediately I was like ‘Oscar Isaac!’” she laughs. “I went to Julliard with him and knew he’d be perfect for the role. He’s so talented. He was amazing in Inside Llewyn Davis.”
Not that Chandor took an awful lot of convincing. He’s punching his palm again. “There’s the surface stuff, like his mom is from Guatemala, his dad is Cuban, he grew up in Miami and got himself into Julliard in an open audition – that is the American dream, right? – so I knew that he knew this character,” says Chandor. “And then I saw the work. He’s like a finely tuned instrument. He was doing muscle twitches underneath the surface of the skin that you barely see. He thinks it, you know it.”
A Most Violent Year, like Margin Call and All Is Lost before it, is garnering awards buzz. Should Oscar nominations materialise, everyone will be delighted – not so much for personal kudos as to promote the film.
“These types of films that aren’t straight genre or blockbusters need all the help they can get,” stresses Isaac. “It’s another means of getting people to see the movie.” Chandor agrees. “I’ve personally seen what that can do for a movie and career. With these types of films, it seems to be the only time you can release, and expect to make a significant box office. So yes, I hope to enter the awards fray.” Who said ambition was a bad thing?