The Pope in the Pool

I just watched The Big Short last night. It’s a good film with some incredible acting and editing. It’s unique in how it blends drama and documentary—a feat that required breaking many of “the rules.” Despite that, it had a consistent style, which made it work.

But let’s be honest, a film about credit default swaps has a lot of explaining to do. For that they used Blake Snyder’s trick—mentioned in my last post—called the Pope in the Pool.

If you haven’t read it yet, I’m going to recommend again that you read Save the Cat. But to briefly sum up, when a script has to cover exposition (those boring plot points that you need to explain to the audience even though the characters already know what’s going on) you can distract your audience with something visually interesting.

In Snyder’s case, the Pope is swimming in his pool while receiving a security briefing. You’re so mesmerized seeing the Pope in a bathing suit swimming in the Vatican pool, you barely even notice the bone dry dialogue. (Hence, Pope in the Pool.)

The Big Short has three clear—dare I say gratuitous—examples. The first is the scene with Margot Robbie (a nice nod to The Wolf of Wall Street), then there’s Anthony Bourdain, and finally Selena Gomez with Dr. Richard Thaler.

The latter two examples work very well. Anthony Bourdain making soup out of his unsold fish was a visual example of how banks were repackaging securities to make CDOs. The line of betting at the blackjack table with Selena Gomez created a visual example of how investors would bet on CDOs to create synthetic CDOs.

Margot Robbie’s scene doesn’t work quite as well because there’s no visual correlation between what she’s doing (drinking champagne in a tub) and what she’s explaining (sub-prime loans). Had she been paying for the champagne, it may have worked better.

In many ways, the whole movie is an example of “Pope in the Pool.” It was dramatizing some dull, heady banking practices. It’s a shame this movie couldn’t have existed before the financial crash because people may have better understood the crisis they were creating. (This is one of the reasons people love science fiction. It prophesies what could happen if we don’t change our ways.) In any event, it’s a great example of how something boring and difficult to understand can connect to audiences in a meaningful way through effective filmmaking and visual storytelling.