Inside Job: Film Brings Us Face to Face with the People Who Nearly Destroyed Our Economy

Inside Job, the infuriating and compelling new documentary from Charles Ferguson, tells the story of the global financial crisis of 2008, which led to millions of people around the world losing their homes and jobs.

Critics have been raving about the film's insight and incisiveness. Kenneth Turan from the Los Angeles Times wrote, "After watching Charles Ferguson's powerhouse documentary about the global economic crisis, you will more than understand what went down -- you will be thunderstruck and boiling with rage."

Ferguson makes the case that the meltdown wasn't just an unfortunate accident -- it was totally avoidable. Through interviews with financial experts such as International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, French Minister of Finance Christine Lagarde, and former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, and detailed explanations of credit default swaps and derivatives, Ferguson paints a picture of an unethical industry driven by greed, rampant deregulation and an indifferent government. Ferguson, who also made No End In Sight, about the Iraq war, has a PhD in political science, and worked as a government consultant and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He is clearly outraged about what happened. "You can't be serious," he tells a former governor of the Federal Reserve who claims they tried to find out who was responsible.

Ferguson sat down with AlterNet in San Francisco to talk about how he felt compelled to make this movie after recognizing the level of criminality to which the financial industry had sunk.

Emily Wilson: How did you decide how much detail you were going to explain to the audience, and how?

Charles Ferguson: We wanted to make the film accessible and the ideas accessible. I did my best to keep jargon out of the film. And where it was necessary to explain something that was somewhat technical -- for example, we felt it was important to explain credit default swaps and the securitization chain because they were so critical to what happened -- we did our best to make those things accessible. Hence the graphics and using a mixture of different ways to explain things, so that if someone wasn't attuned to narration but was attuned to graphics, or wasn't attuned to graphics but would be more attuned to hearing somebody say it, we tried to explain things in an overlapping way, with a little bit of deliberate redundancy.

EW: Your background is in political science, writing, and math. Why did you become a filmmaker?

CF: I've always loved film. Ever since I was a kid I've loved movies and always had a secret dream fantasy of being able to make them. Part of the reason I love movies is they show things other media can't. To take this film, if you were to read a transcript of my interview with Glenn Hubbard [chief economic adviser during the Bush administration and current Dean of the Columbia Business School] or Frederic Mishkin [a member of Board of Governors at the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2008, and professor at Columbia Business School], you would certainly understand I was going after something and you'd probably understand they were being evasive, but to see them conveys it in a much clearer way. It conveys something the printed word just can't.

EW: Why do you think some of those people, such as Frederic Mishkin and some of Bush's top people, agreed to give you an interview?

CF: I think they're not used to being challenged. I think they granted the interview request assuming I was going to be like the other people that interview them -- very deferential, very nice, very easy. I think it came as quite a surprise to them when I challenged them. And also that I knew as much as I did.

EW: Did they know that you knew as much as you did?

CF: They clearly did not realize that in advance, but I think they should have. I did not conceal my background, so they knew who I was. Some of them asked to see a copy of my CV. Some of them asked to see my previous film. A couple of them had seen my previous film. David McCormack, for example, who was Under Secretary of the Treasury, had seen my film. He actually has a military background. He was at West Point and was in the first Gulf War as a battalion commander. So there was no concealment in mind about who I was. I think these guys are just used to people being really nice to them because they're powerful.