“From the earliest moment I read the script and started thinking about it I had this phrase in my head that it was going to be this fairytale of capitalism and, for better or worse, you were going to have some exaggerated elements and I wanted it to have this feeling of a parable,” says Stephen Gaghan, director of Gold.
The Oscar-winning filmmaker has charted the war on drugs in Traffic and delved into complexities of the oil industry and Middle-East politics in Syriana.
But with Gold, his first major film in 10 years, he took on the modern incarnation of the gold industry: high finance mixed with primal myth.
The film, written by Patrick Massett and John Zinman, was inspired by the Bre-X Minerals scandal in the 1990s when geologist Michael de Guzman and mining businessman John Ferdehof reported a massive gold strike in the jungle of Borneo, Indonesia.
A bullish Wall Street poured money into the company, sending its 50 cent stock soaring to a high of $286 and a total market value of $6 billion.
There was just one hitch: there was no gold. Investors had signed up to the biggest gold mining hoax in history, one featuring salted core samples, burnt records and a mysterious death.
For Gaghan, the story’s combination of larger-than-life adventurism and realistic corporate intrigue was a chance to dig into the mythology underpinning capitalism.
Already experienced in the sub-surface minerals business with Syriana, Gaghan says he knew the industry was filled with amazing characters and one instance of perfidy after another.
But it was the precious metal’s resonances with the history and legend of American capitalism that attracted him.
“The mining industry, the gold rush and the silver rush out in Nevada built the West, it’s what took everyone out to the West.”
If Gaghan’s previous movies were driven by a lack of knowledge, the audience working to form connections to reveal a larger hidden system, then his latest film turns that on its head. In Gold, it’s not what you know – something the film keeps ambiguous – but what you believe.
Departing from the multiple storylines that marked Syriana and Traffic, Gold is narrated solely by Matthew McConaughey’s struggling mining entrepreneur Kenny Wells – a wild character complete with pot belly, receding hairline and snaggle-tooth.
At the centre of the story is his relationship with geologist Mike Acosta (played by Edgar Ramirez), a mysterious adventurer who often feels like Wells’ unconscious projection.
“You’re seeing how Kenny imagined it in hindsight, you’re getting his reflection,” Gaghan explains. “You know how you tell a story about a friend you really like? We might exaggerate certain qualities about our friends because we love them, we make them seem a little better, we shave off their weaknesses, that’s what happened with Mike Acosta. He was shot out of the western mythology of the hero.”
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