Aaron Sorkin on Staging a Star-Studded Poker Room

When the DVD version of ‘Molly’s Game’ comes out we’ll likely get all the inside info and movie extras, including the inner workings of debut director Aaron’s Sorkins as he gets to grips with the incredible story of Molly Bloom and her underground high-stakes  poker games which saw Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio and others win and lose millions.

Until then, we’ll have to make do with Q&A sessions and interviews with the famous screenwriter who states he “didn’t write this with the intention of directing” but nonetheless ended up cajoling the best performances he could out of the likes of Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba and other A-list Hollywood stars.

Big budget?

A $30million budget and 18 months end-to-end for the big screen adaptation of Bloom’s book, ‘Molly’s Game: From Hollywood’s Elite to Wall Street’s Billionaire Boys Club, My High-Stakes Adventure in the World of Underground Poker’, might sound like a lot, but according to Sorkin it didn’t even allow for face-to-face rehearsals of his main characters.

“There were no days of rehearsal,” he told the Hollywood Reporter recently, explaining, “What I did about a month before shooting started is I began virtual rehearsal with Jessica and Idris over Skype or email”, revealing, ‘on the first day, they did it like they had done it 100 times before.”

Names no names

Bloom’s book was a huge hit because it involved many of the biggest names in the acting world and beyond – without actually spelling out that Tobey (Maguire), Leo (DiCaprio), Matt (Damon) and Ben (Affleck) all attended the underground high-stakes games she held in Beverley Hills and Manhattan.

With descriptions like ‘Rick, the videographer, director, and co-star of an infamous sex tape, was crass and dirty, but he was still hot in a caveman kind of way,’ it didn’t take a genius to figure out who was who in her memoirs, but Sorkin has followed her ‘no names/no faces’ policy.

“One of the first things I said to Molly at our first meeting was that I'm not going to dish on any of these guys. I wouldn't have wanted to under any circumstances, but in a movie where the hero is the hero because she doesn't dish on anybody, you can't either as the filmmaker.”

Creating Player X

A shame in some ways, as no doubt many, many people would love to see doubles of the big stars walk into the poker den to meet and greet Bloom the ‘Poker Princess’ with wads of cash, but probably the safest option.

Sorkin says:

“There was a time where I thought, 'OK, we'll never really see their faces. We'll just see hands and chips and cards, or they'll always be in shadow…' then I landed on Player X, this one player who wouldn't have a name and who would do everything plot-wise that I needed that character to do.”

Bloom or Bust?

With the movie due to be released this winter, it’s still not clear if Bloom herself will be able to attend the Toronto premiere, Sorkin telling the Hollywood Reporter:

“She's not allowed to go to Canada [because of her felony conviction associated with the poker games]. We have hired a lawyer in Toronto to work with their equivalent of the state department and immigration to get her a 48-hour pass…”

But even then Sorkin says Bloom won’t know if she’s getting into the country until she actually hits the border!