After leaving his mark in the commercial and music video industry, Craig Gillespie started to craft one of the most eclectic and interesting filmographies in Hollywood: The quirky dramedy Lars and the Real Girl (2007), genre pieces like Fright Night (2011) and Cruella (2021), and real-life-based dramas Million Dollar Arm (2014), The Finest Hours (2016), and I, Tonya (2017).

In his latest film, DUMB MONEY, the Australian-American filmmaker tackles another incredibly story ripped from the headlines: The meme-stock short-squeeze phenomenon of 2021, when non-professional investors inspired by Keith Gill, known online as “Roaring Kitty,” shocked Wall Street by skyrocketing the value of GameStop’s stocks.

The phenomenal ensemble cast includes Paul Dano, Pete Davidson, Vincent D’Onofrio, America Ferrera, Nick Offerman, Anthony Ramos, Sebastian Stan, Shailene Woodley and Seth Rogen.

Desde Hollywood had the chance to speak with the talented director about the making of a movie that is funny, relevant, revealing, and -yes- smart.

Congratulations for your amazing filmography and this film in particular. It had a great reception at Toronto. How was your TIFF experience?

it’s been amazing. I love going to Toronto. I am so privileged to be able to go three times now. The audience is always so receptive, but it’s also incredibly nerve-wracking to sit there and share it for the first time. And those audiences are so large in Toronto. I think there’s like a thousand people in our theatres. So that’s a bit of an out-of-body experience. And it’s hard to stay objective, but it seems like it’s going well.

Through your own research, what was the one thing or a handful of elements that made you say “Wow, that is way stranger than fiction!”?

Interestingly, I got to live this experience because my son was living with us during COVID. So I was seeing it as it was unfolding and the intensity with which it was happening and that community that was rallying online that like bloomed from 400,000 to 8 million people in eight weeks.
It was just so intense to see what happened with Robin Hood, Wall Street and Reddit. It’s just that anger and frustration. I was very aware of once we got into the script and the mechanics of like, all right, so exactly what did happen? Why did they freeze it and who’s talking to who? That’s where that was very enlightening.

How significant it is in these very divisive times to see different people coming together, and how important it was for you to portray that story in a way that could resonate across the political spectrum?

That was honestly the hope for this. It’s like my feeling as this was happening and it was all transpiring was the sense of outrage and frustration at this system that inherently feels rigged against the average person. And coupled with this enormous disparity of wealth that is now going on in our culture, this happened to be the mouthpiece. This happened to be the way that everybody got to rally eight million people and be heard. I mean, it’s happening now in all kinds of ways. It’s happening with the strikes in Hollywood, in trucking and FedEx… It’s just everywhere. So the hope was with the film to communicate that you can be heard. You can come together as a community and have one strong voice and wherever that direction is going, it’s just hopes that it builds on that.

Why do you think that Keith was able to captivate so many people and become the de facto leader of this movement?

I think the internet, for all of its faults… There was this sincerity and integrity with him. You could see that there was no hidden agenda. He was just truly there for the joy of it to try and help people to try and have a dialogue and connect with people. I think that that really resonated so we really tried to do our diligence in capturing that. Paul is such a remarkable actor that I knew that he could bring that spirit to it. But he’s also such a wonderful gatekeeper for respecting Keith Gill and us really doing our homework. It’s like we’re going through all of those podcasts, his testimony at Congress and really gleaning all of our information about him and what he wanted or shared with Paul.

America Ferrera and Anthony Ramos, they’re having a great year. What do you think they were able to bring to their characters?

With America, I hadn’t had the opportunity to work with her. I admired her work from afar for a long time. And there’s a tone that I like to work in, obviously, which is this dance between comedy and drama, between humor. Which I feel is more reflective of life. We all use humor in our everyday life with our family and our friends, no matter whether it’s an intense situation or fun. It’s a way to deflect or connect. She has that dance. It’s in her DNA and that was critical for me. But also, she’s very much the mouthpiece of this generation that’s so frustrated and angry about what is happening and feeling marginalized. So I needed that performance from somebody that could give it that gravitas and that intensity.

She’s amazing at that she can do it with such a light touch and be really accessible. I was thrilled to be able to get her. Anthony playing the everyman was just a wonderful experience… having the opportunity to work with him and dance with him. We’d been connected on another project that didn’t take off, so we’d been looking for something to do together. Fortunately, he managed to carve out some time for this, which was really exciting. He met his parents for the first time on the set. And then we discussed “should we say this in Spanish or to be English?” and they were like “Well, often in the household, it would be a mix of English and Spanish happening all the time”, and the actress playing the mother said “I would go to English when it gets very serious with him.” That wasn’t stuff that was scripted, but they would just make the scene that much more richer.

What was the criteria when it came to incorporate real-life clips from the news, TV in general, and the internet?

It was amazing. We had an amazing abundance of wealth in terms of the real life memes that were going on in particular. I was privy to that through my son as well. It helps show you the enormity of the amount of people that are involved in the outrage or the frustration or where they are just emotionally. These clips did such a beautiful job with that. Some of these longer clips we’ve pulled off the internet, like the Planet of the Apes montage. We actually had a team of people that were pulling everything they could find online. And it was also the news anchors and the TV talk show hosts. When we got to a point in the movie that we had to talk about that moment, we would go to that archive and start pulling from it and looking for what works best.

Are you hopeful that cinema can help make transformational positive steps?

Yeah, absolutely. It was a very conscious effort to have a lot of humor along the way, but ultimately we landed in a very emotional spot. It was very conscious choice to try and get this sense of outrage and frustration, and have it land by the end of the film. So the hope is that this keeps the conversation going. There are regulations that need to be scrutinized that are still debatable right now.

DUMB MONEY opens in select theaters on September 22, and nationwide on the 29th.

Dumb Money is the definitive David vs. Goliath story, based on the crazy true story of everyday people who flipped the script on Wall Street and got rich by turning GameStop (yes, the mall video game store) into the company. most popular in the world.