Dumb Money Director Witnessed An Intense Experience With The Meme Stock Saga

During the pandemic, a few key events were truly collective experiences as there was little else to do but observe what was happening. One of the biggest examples was the GameStop stock situation, which sent Wall Street into a frenzy and received global news coverage for weeks on end. The whole thing has now been documented in the upcoming film "Dumb Money," which hails from director Craig Gillespie ("Pam & Tommy"). It turns out, Gillespie had an intense, first-hand experience with the whole "meme stock" saga.

The filmmaker recently spoke with People about the film, which is currently in limited release before expanding wide over the next couple of weeks. During the conversation, Gillespie explained that one of his sons actually got involved in the whole GameStop stock situation after a YouTuber named Roaring Kitty and a Reddit page called WallStreetBets got a bunch of average Joes to drive the company's stock through the roof. Here's what Gillespie had to say about it:

"I don't think I would've quite understood the intensity of it if I had not been living it. We were in Covid lockdown. I've got two sons, but one of them was living with us; he was 24 at the time, and he was checking out the stock exchange, looking at different things, and on WallStreetBets, pretty early on, three months in advance at this build that was happening. So he was talking about it at the dinner table, popping down and saying things."

By happenstance, Gillespie's son happened to be in on this whole thing, relaying it to his family essentially in real time. This gave the filmmaker a front-row seat to experience the event that would become the subject of his next movie.

GameStop was a struggling company when these retail investors began pushing the stock price up. Wall Street firms were betting against GameStop at the time, and the unexpected meteoric rise in the stock price put these firms in a precarious situation, costing some of them billions of dollars. It was an event the likes of which the stock market had never experienced before. (The events were also chronicled in the documentary "GameStop: Rise of the Players.")

"It started to get very intense in that two-week period and just constant updates," Gillespie explained. "He'd come running down and be like, 'Elon Musk just tweeted GameStop, and the stock popped by 5%, and Mark Cuban's commenting on it now.' He was starting to feel the sense of the movement happening, and it escalated from 400,000 people in WallStreetBets to 8 million in eight weeks." As things progressed, so did the gravity of the situation. His son faced the dilemma that all of these investors did: Hold the shares in the hopes the stock would continue to climb, or sell and cash out.

"As it got into that incredibly intense situation, there were always parts of the film that I relate to where we're sitting at the dinner table and I'm like, 'What are you going to do? Are you going to sell? What are you doing? When are you going to sell?' All of it's somewhat foreign to us and trying to understand the options of it and what was going on and him holding and the intensity of that last 24 hours, checking every three minutes, when to get out, what's going on pre-market, what's going on aftermarket."

The situation didn't work out for everyone. Some people saw their Robinhood investment accounts climb to thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, only to come crashing down to Earth when the ride was over. Fortunately for Gillespie's son, he got out at just the right time before Robinhood halted trading for GameStop stock on its platform, which was the beginning of the end of the whole fiasco.

"He timed it perfectly, got out — huge relief. The next day, Robinhood froze the buy option, the stock got created and then [came] the outrage and the anger and the frustration at feeling like a system that is inherently rigged against them. I got to feel all of that and see that and the memes, all through him, and just that incredible frustration. So it was this amazingly emotional journey."

"Dumb Money" (read our official review here) focuses on Keith Gill, aka Roaring Kitty (Paul Dano), who sinks his life savings into GameStop stock and posts about it on YouTube. When his social posts start blowing up, so does his life and the lives of everyone following him. As his stock tip evolves into a movement, these retailer investors begin to make tons of money. That is, until the billionaires fight back, and both sides find their worlds turned upside down.

The stacked cast also includes Pete Davidson, Vincent D'Onofrio, America Ferrera, Nick Offerman, Anthony Ramos, Sebastian Stan, Shailene Woodley, and Seth Rogen. The script was written by Gillespie, Lauren Schuker Blum, and Rebecca Angelo, and is based on the book "The Antisocial Network" by Ben Mezrich.

"Dumb Money" is in theaters now.