As Vulture explains, “The biggest change was Steve Eisman’s character: In the book, Lewis reveals that Eisman lost a young child, which gives his character a necessary pathos, but Eisman didn’t want it in the film, so McKay replaced it with something else.” That “something else” is Mark Baum’s loss of his brother, who recently killed himself at least in part, we gather, due to the extreme pressures of the finance world. Of those other characters, one of the most notable is Mark Baum (Steve Carell), a character based on Steve Eisman.
A number of the other characters, while still based on real-life people, had components of their personalities modified for the film, but Burry is true Burry. Why Burry’s name was kept in the film and the others changed hasn’t been officially stated, but it’s likely due to the authenticity of the portrayal and permission from Burry. Still, one could argue his true attention was always on the stock market - Burry once fell asleep standing up during a surgical procedure, collapsing into the unconscious patient’s oxygen tent. Also like Bale’s character, Burry was a medical doctor before dedicating all his attention to Wall Street. By high school, he had a full-blown investment portfolio. Like Bale’s character, Burry is introverted and lost an eye as a child, suffers from Asperger’s, and his interest in the stock market started as early as second grade. In fact, when Christian Bale met with Burry, he asked for some of Burry’s clothes, enabling him to wear true-to-form Michael Burry attire for the picture. Much like Bale’s depiction, the real Michael Burry was known for walking around his office shoeless, listening to speed metal, and wearing crummy T-shirts for weeks at a time. Michael Burry (Christian Bale) is the sole character in the film whose name wasn’t changed from its real-life counterpart.
#Ryan gosling the big short movie#
Despite citing a nonfiction work of economic examination as its source and basing its characters on real-life people, the movie changed most of the names of its subjects while maintaining the accurate spirits of its characters. Drawn from Michael Lewis’ best-selling book of the same name, the film is a punchy, humorous and sobering assault on the corporate Wall Street greed that led to the downfall of the housing market almost a decade ago. The Big Short(2015) is based on a book but isn’t completely nonfiction.