The International

Eric Warren Singer wrote it out of interest in the banking scandals of the 1980s and 1990s, chasing a paranoid thriller feel. Clive Owen came aboard because the script reminded him of the 1970s paranoia pictures. Tom Tykwer joined a year later and moved it to the present. The German federal film fund gave 5.4 million dollars, then 7.9 million once it judged two thirds of the shoot would be German. The Guggenheim shootout is the film’s centre. The real entrance was filmed, but for the gunfire a life size replica 118 feet wide went up, too big for the stage, in a disused locomotive warehouse outside Berlin; it took 10 weeks, and the exhibition inside is by Julian Rosefeldt. The chandelier that tears loose from the ceiling is entirely computer generated. It opened the 59th Berlin International Film Festival and reached cinemas just after the 2008 financial crisis; France released it as L’Enquête. Salinger is left with a case that goes nowhere and the bank keeps trading, yet the film does not stop there: it closes on a Senate investigation Whitman is starting. A good fit if you treat nobody reaching a courtroom at the end as the subject, not a flaw. Not for anyone who wants to watch the IBBC collapse; the bank survives the film.