Biography

When he was 19 years old, he was involved in a car accident with four college friends: the driver was killed, and Chandor was suddenly seized by what he calls "a sense of urgency". Then he dropped out of college and enrolled in a film programme at New York University in order to "live enough life" for both himself and that young man who was killed in the accident.

Prior to Margin Call (2011), Chandor worked on commercials and documentaries for some 15 years.

By 2006, he had written what he hoped would be his debut feature. An Icelandic investor had agreed to finance the project, which seemed too good to be true until the Icelandic financial crisis bit and the money suddenly vanished. Chandor was a week away from filming and had already spent $200,000.

His film Margin Call was in seventh place on the 2010 "Black List" of promising unmade screenplays, just above American Hustle and Argo.

A 1996 graduate of Ohio's The College of Wooster.

At its core, if the film [Margin Call (2011)] is anything, it's a tragedy. It's structured as a thriller - a ticking time-bomb movie - but an hour into the film you know the bomb can't be defused and the crux of the story becomes who are they going to drop it on?

[explaining his role in a real estate deal prior to the market crash in 2008, when the godfather of one of his partners told them to sell out and move on] It felt like a defeat at the time, but a year later, as the wheels started to come off [the real estate market], it felt like a real gift. And I began to think, what was he seeing that caused him to intervene so strongly in his godson's life? And what is it like to walk around with that knowledge?

[on his education] I was a classic Wooster [college] case. I had decent but not great grades in high school, because I was highly motivated in some subjects, like the arts, drama, English, and history, but in math and science I was a screw-up. Wooster saw something in me and I really flourished there. I got into theatre, took photography and painting classes."

[on Margin Call (2011)] I knew the movie I wanted to make; we weren't experimenting or anything. It's a procedural film. One thing is absolutely required to build one thing on another. The film kind of runs like that. There were really intense times. It's a life's worth of work. You have to go up to Jeremy Irons and be like, 'Totally off the mark here, dude. This is not where we needed you to be.' It was an amazing experience in my life. Once you kind of go there with them, and you know what you're talking about, they are professionals, and they respect that, and it began these relationships that I'll remember for the rest of my life.

[on Margin Call (2011)] I also came into it with this insane confidence that I'd been waiting 15 years for this opportunity. This is making a little bit light of the situation, but essentially, I walked on to that set saying, 'Who gives a crap if this is Kevin Spacey? He is an amazing lump of clay who is probably going to give me a greater performance than anyone else I could have cast in that role, but I'm here to make the movie I know I want to make. Probably, had I gotten this opportunity 10 years earlier, I wouldn't have been able to do that. I was a pretty immature guy at 26. But I knew the movie I wanted to make, and I was given the gift of these actors, and they were all there for the right reason. They weren't making a ton of money. It was a movie they wanted to make.