Returning to their Roots
The new Runner Runner brings Rounders writers back to the business of gambling
By Tim Wassberg
Ever since they hit the scene with Rounders starring Matt Damon and Edward Norton, writing duo Brian Koppelman & David Levien have continued their journey into the mind of the gambler as well as the international scene. They returned to the genre writing the apex of the Ocean Trilogy with Ocean’s Thirteen starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt & Al Pacino. With their new film Runner Runner starring Ben Affleck & Justin Timberlake, they return to the business of gambling albeit from a different angle where online businesses rule the world, the players are just as cutthroat, the stakes are high and the money is plentiful.
Casino Player: Can you talk about the psychology of risk whether it be on the tables or beyond?
Brian Koppelman: I once asked [poker pro] Eric Seidel about the fact that there used to be this idea you would read in the old books that would say “I put the guy on a hand and once I’ve made that decision, that’s the hand he’s on.” I asked Eric about this a few years back: “So how does that work? You [just] put a guy on a hand?” He said “No. When you put a guy on a hand, that is the hand I put him on until the next cards come. I am constantly re-evaluating. I am constantly trying to figure out what new information I have that can give me a better sense of where that guy is in the hand and where I am in the hand.” I think that is a great way to look at a cat-and-mouse game of a certain type of movie wherein a character who believes he knows one thing takes certain actions. Other certain kinds of character [by contrast] will stay there on that [initial] track. Usually those [second] types of characters get killed in reel one. The original characters [who move in their decisions] will constantly take in new info and try to shift course based on what they learned and stay alive. Certainly, the effective gambler does that and the effective movie character does that. It’s a good parallel.
CP: How does that parallel aspect translate into gameplay in your minds when writing a movie such as Runner Runner?
David Levien: This movie is set against the world of an online [gambling] site that is set up in Costa Rica. There is very little game play. It is more about the business of it in the way that a movie like “The Firm” is set against a law firm controlled by the mob. It’s a backdrop. It’s sort of the prize because of how much money it brings in. There are [of course] certain references and settings made in the film like casinos. The movie itself takes place post Black Friday. But we started working on the script before that happened. Once that event occurred, we had to adjust slightly, just to represent that [new] world.
BK: We were definitely fascinated by this idea that these companies existed in these gray areas of the law but also in places that, even if they weren’t lawless places, were certainly places without heavy duty regulation on the gambling companies because of either incentives or payoffs. That just seemed like a fun place to set a pulpy thriller in.
CP: But a certain kind of personality definitely thrives in this space.
DL: What influenced the movie as much as any sort of legislation and gambling was the Wall Street crash which threw the economy into huge turmoil. It suddenly made of all of the young smart guys who thought that a hedge fund career was definitely the way they were going to go seem [not] too bright anymore. We felt that it was legit that [as a result of the crash] a lot of the big math brains [would be pulled] into the online space. Certainly a guy who is running an online casino and making himself a brand would have an outsized personality and be very verbal and aggressive. That is what Ben [Affleck] personified in his character Ivan. Richie (played by Justin Timberlake) by comparison is a guy who got caught up in Wall Street, blew out on his first go around and is now feeling that he has to catch up, get rich quick, make it big and get all the stuff that comes with it.
CP: From a dramatic point of view, how has the technology of gambling altered the mindset of those playing?
BK: When you are playing ten hands per hour [online] and multi-tabling, you are used to that information coming at you much more quickly. You process different. Your brain is trained differently and you can become a better, tougher player. People [as a result of playing this way] want endorphin hits much more frequently and are trained to find better ways to access them whether it be online or in video games. There is no question that the new kids that are coming into the gaming world are used to instant gratification, instant answers and have trained their brains to be razor sharp. That is fascinating to us and different than the world was even 15 years ago when Rounders came out.
CP: Using that progression, can you speak about the evolution in how you perceive the world of gaming to be as you both have progressed from Rounders to Ocean’s Thirteen to Runner Runner?
DL: Rounders to us was super exciting because we literally found this underground world. The illegal poker casinos in New York were downstairs in the basement a lot of the time. We felt like it was something nobody had seen before so we wanted to put that out there and show people what was going on. Sure we took some license and accentuated some things as far as the language and stuff like that. But that was just part of the fun. A movie like Ocean’s Thirteen is a caper film. We felt it was a chance to explore the idea of flipping some great casino scams that we had seen and had read about. Instead of [making it about] paying off the individuals who were pulling it off, we were offering a score [that] would enrich everybody. There seemed something diverting about that idea, like a reverse big score. Plus there was this amazing fictional world out there of the first movie [Ocean’s 11] set in Vegas where these guys were ten times smarter than everybody else and could pull everything off. That was a fun place to live. Then, when it came to doing Runner Runner, we just thought that with these businesses functioning in these places without regulation, raking in the kind of money they were making at the time, that this idea hadn’t been shown in a movie before. We just extrapolated from there into the kind of lifestyle one could have in the short term which [really] dovetailed with the wish fulfillment that these kind of young characters are looking for.
