This is perfectly understandable if you are already confused.

This story is an interview with the directors of Diamond Hands: The Legacy of WallStreetBets, which is set to premiere at the South by Southwest film festival this weekend. But there are two other documentaries on the same subject that have been released recently (Wall Street Video Games on HBO Max and GameStop: The Rise of Gamers in theaters). MGM is also developing a film version. diamond hands, however, is a particularly compelling entry into the burgeoning subgenre of “GameStop short-term entertainment projects.”

diamond hands manages to clarify the complex world of options trading and visually illustrate (through the use of memes and other media) the Wild West playground of Wall Street Bets – a notoriously rowdy subreddit devoted to stock market speculation aggressively – and tell the story of a group of retail investors who pressured major hedge funds by rocketing GameStop’s price to the moon…until it crashed (mostly).

Below, directors Zack Canepari and Drea Cooper discuss the MSNBC Films and NBC News Studios film, which premieres at the festival on March 13 and then premieres on MSNBC on April 10 (where it will, apparently, break of the F-bomb record cable news network).

What was your first reaction to this story when it broke?

Drea Cooper: I couldn’t believe that three weeks after January 6th this was happening. I was like, “It’s like we’re living in a simulation, and this is the next button someone pressed on the other big board somewhere in the matrix.” I think “David versus Goliath” was what every title used to describe the story, and I remember thinking it was more complicated than that. It also felt like another populism thing in the same vein as the Donald subreddit, but it pushes in a different direction, a direction of wealth and power transfer.

There are some big challenges with this as a documentary. The first, of course, is that it is a complex subject. I understand now, after watching, what a short press is. But how did you approach having to explain the ins and outs of what happened?

Zack Canpari: It was the biggest challenge. Once you unbox it, there are so many layers. So I think for us, at least in the edit, it was really about exploring which pieces of the puzzle were the most important, right? What do all these financial terms mean? We’ve realized there’s a fine line between too much information and not enough information, and we’re constantly trying to calibrate that. And I think for us it was about focusing on the Wall Street Bets subreddit and a cultural philosophy of Gen Z/Gen Z financial angst that spawned this risky behavior, a YOLO mentality – “I got my stimulus check; maybe I could roll the dice on that and do something with it. It opened the door for more complex things that came up, and we were constantly trying to fit that into the story of our characters.

A second obvious challenge – and it’s something I really liked about the film – was how you tried to capture the very specific vibe and personality of Wall Street Bets in a cinematic way without just show off a flurry of memes.

Canepari: From the start, we wanted that to be said in the voice of this subreddit. Memes and emojis were the starting point, but memes aren’t very cinematic and emojis are very static. So we worked hard in the editing to create a tone for what it must have felt like for these characters to be inside the internet. There’s that feeling everyone has when they go down a rabbit hole and they’ve lost track of time. That was a big part of what we try to do.

And then there’s the other obvious challenge: there were all these competing projects announced at the same time. How did that make it harder?

Canepari: Our creative producer, Erica Fink of NBC News, had been researching Wall Street betting for nearly a year before GameStop’s short squeeze. She said: “Something really interesting is happening with the retail user during the pandemic; I follow this subreddit, and I meet them, and I create relationships. So once we got on board, she already had deep relationships with over 10 characters, almost all of whom appeared in the film. So that helped.

Cooper: It’s a new world we’re entering into the documentary space, where headlines get a lot more attention and get immediate funding opportunities. This is going to continue to happen in the non-fiction space. But there is something to be said for having different points of view on a historical and cultural event. Let’s see how different people interpret the story and present it

I couldn’t help but notice that you didn’t reflect the more toxic side of WSB. I’m sure you know there’s a lot of slurs that are part of their slang – or at least were when it was happening – and their defense against it is, “We’re just making fun of ourselves; we are not literally mocking the groups to which these words have historically applied. But I was curious about the editorial decision not to go.

Cooper: We tried in the first 15 minutes of the movie where [investor “Alicia” says] that it was kind of like a bros club, and she kind of describes the language and the attitude. There is another [investor] saying, “I was saying things I probably would never say in real life.” So we tried to touch it. There were earlier versions where we were much more explicit about what exactly was being said.

But let’s just be honest: It happens during MSNBC’s prime time. There were certain limitations. To their credit, this film pushes all of those explicit boundaries for them in its current iteration. I don’t think they’ve ever had so many F-bombs in a movie. So I give them credit for giving us some room to express natural language. We could try spending 5-7 minutes unpacking this “toxic” way of acting, or just saying that Wall Street Bets don’t care, and they talk shit, and leave it at that and not borrow the dark road of, for example, how they refer to each other as “autistic”. It was in there, but NBC was saying, “Guys, this is really offensive to the general public these days.” So we had to either over-explain it or take it out. It was tricky. We were trying to convey enough to the audience that this is an “anything goes” environment without totally dragging them through the mud.

What did all this mean, after all? And does it matter?

Canepari: We talked about it; we are still debating this issue. I don’t think we know. It’s a bit of a time capsule movie. It’s a pandemic story. This wouldn’t have happened without some very specific elements coming together. It might play out again, in a different way, when retail investors hit Wall Street, but they might be using a different tool or adopting an entirely different format. I hope 20 years from now the film will still be a way of understanding what was happening in 2021. I also think it showed that our whole system is vulnerable to populist movements, and they can take many different forms. And I also think what really happened was this generational angst between baby boomers and millennials/Gen Z that we really found super consistent between our characters. I think the tension will continue to show as we delve deeper into things like climate change and wealth inequality.

Cooper: I think the biggest takeaway from our subject group is this idea of ​​generational angst. You can no longer draw a straight line from “do well trying to get to college” to “get a good job, earn money” to
“take a house and retire” – this narrative no longer exists. Some argue that the narrative was falling off its pedestal even in the late 90s. The cost of living is skyrocketing and buying a house is incredibly expensive. …Now the retail investor is becoming much more mainstream. [The number of investors] grow daily.

The part of the story that is not complete is the idea that these hedge funds and some big power players were completely manipulating the system to short a stock by more than 100% – more than the stocks that were even available – and no one has a clear answer as to why this is even possible. Obviously, the system is broken. So something has to be done. There’s a lot of behind-the-curtain bullshit that our movie didn’t get a chance to get into. But there’s work to be done to try to level the playing field, so that we don’t end up in these bad situations with crazy cuts that could have ultimately brought down the financial system. I mean, literally.