Programme Information

Breaking the bank

The Last Days Of Lehman Brothers

Day and time to be confirmed BBC TWO

• Programme copy

On 10 September 2008 a headline on a BBC News website business report underlined what Wall Street and most financial observers still believed: Lehman remains "too big to fail". Two days later, one of America's biggest banks went bust – the largest corporate failure in US history.

Right until the very last, few could have imagined that such a cornerstone of American capitalism would collapse so dramatically – least of all the bank's chief executive, Richard Fuld. Now, one year on, BBC Drama is preparing an account of the events of that dramatic weekend when US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and "The Fed" (the New York Federal Bank, which plays a leading role in American financial policy making) decided against supporting a rescue of Lehman, including a proposed acquisition by Britain's Barclays Bank.

"I have a friend who is an economist," explains Lisa Osborne, the producer of The Last Days Of Lehman Brothers, BBC Two's account of the Lehman collapse, "he explained that, since the Middle Ages, the thing about banking was that it depended on a balance between greed and fear. But in the 25 years since the Big Bang [the deregulation of the financial markets] it was all about greed, while fear went out of the window... the weekend that Lehman went bust was the weekend that fear came back."

The fall guy in this story was Lehman Brothers chief executive Richard Fuld, but the reasons why remain very much open to interpretation. "The beauty of drama in telling this story is that it's a universal human story as much as a reconstruction," Lisa says. "It's a highly-imagined version because we weren't behind those closed doors and don't know exactly what happened, but we've got the reports and we can imagine what must have been said to lead to that outcome."

The bankers were faced with a crisis that was virtually impossible to understand, not least because they were a generation who had never before experienced failure: "There's a scene," Lisa says, "where one of the bankers turns to another and says: 'Can you value a CDO [Collateralised Debt Obligation]?' and he answers: 'No, but I know a man who could...' and the other man says: 'No you don't, you know a man whose job it is to tell you that he could.' It underlines that when it came to fine detail the bankers didn't always know what was going on themselves.

Part of the appeal of The Last Days Of Lehman Brothers, Lisa believes, is its immediacy and on-going topicality. "We don't often in drama tell a story in a news context this quickly," she says. "It actually came from the BBC's factual department, who wanted to do a series of documentaries for the anniversary in September. When it was pitched to BBC Two controller Janice Hadlow, she felt that the human story of Lehman's fall might be better told in a drama.

"Within the performances and the script I'm not sure we make any judgements at all, but it's a tricky line to tread," says Lisa. "The story must be one of perspective, as some will see Hank Paulson as a hero, others as a villain. But, particularly for Fuld, who had spent 42 years working at the bank, it's a Greek tragedy, a classic tale of pride and failure."

James Cromwell plays US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson

James Cromwell makes no bones about it; he doesn't like former US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, the man he plays in The Last Days Of Lehman Brothers, BBC Two's drama about last year's collapse of the US banking giant. Paulson's politics are in direct opposition to just about everything that the star of series such as 24, West Wing and Six Feet Under believes in.

Oscar-nominated for his role as Farmer Hoggett in Babe and critically acclaimed for his role as Captain Dudley Smith in LA Confidential, the strikingly tall Cromwell possesses the kind of quiet but forceful charm that one imagines that a senior member of the US government would possess. Between shooting scenes on location in south London, he offers Programme Information's Tony Matthews his own powerfully passionate and personal take on the events of that September weekend in 2008 when Lehman was forced into bankruptcy.

James lets out a loud mocking laugh when told that a Wall Street Journal blogger reckons Paulson is something of a hero for his handling of the crisis. He's equally scathing when he hears that Time magazine's poll of "25 People To Blame For the Financial Crisis" rated Paulson in 18th, two places behind the American consumer: "There was a real push in America to blame the borrowers," he says. "It was so close to overt racism, but it wouldn't fly as things got worse and worse..."

He accepted the role of Paulson at relatively short notice. "I heard about it a week before I got the script," he says. "I decided on it really quick; it's a subject that won't get covered in America because we don't want our public to know the truth... I have my own theories about the financial crisis, which is endemic of a larger problem. With this script, which feels compelling, accurate and personalised, you realise that the guys at the top, the financial institutions themselves, had gotten so out of touch with reality that they no longer knew what the valuation of their assets was."

James sees Paulson as a svengali figure: "Wall Street is his street – it controls the United States government, his strategy was not only to save the financial system [but] to save the asses of the people that the President, the Vice-President and the Senate work for. I think Paulson will come back as Treasury Secretary again, he's Wall Street's boy, that's what he does."

What does he think Paulson might make of his portrayal in The Last Days Of Lehman Brothers? "I don't give a damn what he thinks of it, but it's an interesting dilemma. I had the same thing playing George Bush Senior in Oliver Stone's film, W. Oliver said to me: 'You can't dislike him so much, you're not going to be able to play him', but the more research I did the less I liked him.

So how does he play someone he dislikes with such vehemence – is it necessary to try to find some humanity within the character? "Relish," says James. "It's rather like Michael Douglas doing Gordon Gecko in Wall Street. What's fun about Gecko is that he really loves it, man. He loves to make people squirm, just because he can do it. All these guys are the top of the line, but when push comes to shove [Paulson] has the power to come in and make or save their asses. By withdrawing the carrot and saying: 'You take care of it', he gets to watch them revert to type and fulfil the agenda that he knows will ultimately lead to the result [that he wants]."

It's a story, James asserts, about power. "The money figures are unintelligible; I don't think anybody understands that kind of money. I did not understand the need to sacrifice Lehman, which I now see in a broader picture, but they had to go... they were very exposed. I think it was done to a purpose because of the personalities involved. I don't think they liked Richard Fuld – I don't think Paulson liked him – what they wanted was a sacrificial lamb (a misnomer) to take it in the neck, so they could go to Congress and say: 'We did our best, it's way out of our hands, give us the money, don't ask about regulations, we'll take care of it...'

"Paulson came to the New York Fed for a series of meetings with the players in Wall Street – the Masters Of The Universe as they were described. I think he knew, once he introduced the idea that there would be no public funding, that self-interest would come to the top, that they would abandon Lehman Brothers and that he could force the Bank of America into accepting the Merrill Lynch deal... I think he played it brilliantly. Watching Lehman Brothers fall is incredibly dynamic. Fuld, this aggressive, forceful, in-your-face kind of guy, is being forced to eat his hat and having to beg – there's a conversation with Paulson where he knows he's being sent to the slaughter, and he can't understand why they've picked on him... it is ostensibly personal, it's men serving their own self-interests, manipulating each other and being manipulated by somebody else."

Although James describes himself as essentially optimistic and hopeful that solutions are being put forward by people inspired by Barack Obama's presidency, he argues that the events of September 2008 have done little to address what he believes are deep lying problems in the capitalist system. "Of course it's going to happen again," he concludes. "It will never work the way it is... I never understood the whole basic theory of it, that you can turn human beings into wage slaves, pay them less and less to make more and more for fewer people and expect the system to go on..."

Won't he be called a communist? James laughs and offers a correction: "Socialist, I think." America doesn't seem to like socialists very much... "Socialists?" he ponders, "Oh no, we're the boogie men!"

Ben Daniels plays John Thain, chief executive officer of Merrill Lynch

Friday, 12 September 2008 was a day of reckoning for some of the world's most unimaginably powerful and wealthy men. After six months of turmoil in the financial markets, the heads of Wall Street's biggest investment banks were summoned to a meeting by US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.

Among them was John Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch, a man later derided by the media for lavishing $1.2m on a refurbishment of his office, but who was canny enough to spot what was happening, accepting a buy-out by Bank of America that saved his company and effectively left Lehman Brothers to take the drop.

Back in the Eighties, writer Tom Wolfe, in his novel The Bonfire Of The Vanities, had tagged Wall Street's elite the Masters Of The Universe. "Thain is one of those, I guess," says Ben Daniels, who plays him in BBC Two's The Last Days Of Lehman Brothers, an account of what happened the weekend that Lehman's Bank went to the wall. "Like most people I didn't really know a great deal about the financial crisis until I started looking into it. It was great watching film of Thain on YouTube trying to wriggle out of how many dollars he'd spent on a wastepaper basket and being confronted with reality. You soon realise what extraordinary lives these men have – they live in a completely different world."

The actor, who has appeared in BBC productions such as Conspiracy, Cutting It and The State Within, agrees that there is an element of schadenfreude in watching powerful men humbled. "To see them all panicking is, I suppose, deeply satisfying," he says. "It's kind of bizarre because, historically, these things seem to go in cycles and it amazes me that they all seemed so surprised that it actually happened in the first place."

Set over a weekend in September 2008 and inspired by real events, The Last Days Of Lehman Brothers concerns the desperate measures taken by the US Treasury and the banks to try to stave off global economic disaster. As the drama unfolds it becomes apparent that not only must they try to get money back into the system but a big name bank will also have to fall as a consequence – the so-called "moral hazard".

What becomes clear, Ben explains, is that Thain worked out very early on what was about to happen: "He realised that his best bet was to sell out to Bank of America. He'd only been at Merrill Lynch for nine months, and he was much less passionate, that much more detached and able to make a decision, than Richard Fuld, who'd been with Lehman Brothers for 42 years and had built the company pretty much from scratch. Thain, I think plays a very good game... or so he thinks at the time. But a few months later they fired him, so..."

Given the tight production schedule, how difficult is it for a British actor to acquire a workable understanding of American finance and politics? "Virtually impossible," Ben laughs. "I'd been on holiday in France and when I first arrived on set Michael Samuels, the director, told me: 'I'm less interested in what they're talking about, because it's so difficult for us to grasp, than what they're feeling and what they're going through.' It's that palpable fear and the cogs turning. Thain was a Mid-West hometown guy, but whoever you play as an actor will always come from a different world to you, whether it's your accent, job or class. I've played Americans several times before, we had a great dialect coach and there are Americans actors in it, which also helps.

"The drama is a really good way of telling the story and bang in the middle there's a great explanation of CDOs [Collateralised Debt Obligations], this thing that they were buying and selling, which comes just when you need it. It really helps you as a viewer (and certainly as a thick actor) to understand that these people are buying and selling huge, ridiculous amounts of debt and that it was spiralling out of control."

So would they all rather have gone down individually than collectively work together to save the situation? "Well they'd already saved one bank and all the money had gone into saving that," says Ben. "As Thain, I was next in line and the bank after that was Morgan Stanley, so the pot of money was kind of getting less and less. As soon as they realised what was going to happen they were all out for themselves really.

"There's a fantastic scene where we're doing the deal and start negotiating with figures... and they just say: 'Cut the crap, what will you accept?'," he laughs, "they sit there playing poker... Thain proposes that Lewis from Bank of America buys 10 per cent and Lewis says: 'No, I want it all'... The next day Thain says: 'Okay, you can have it all'. They were just thinking about immediate survival and trying to save face."

So why do these guys do what they do? They surely don't need any more money – is it just about power? "That's all it is," Ben reflects, "and the thrill of it, I guess. It's so extreme; it's kind of outside our realm of comprehension. They're all asked to pull together and help this bank out and, gradually, as it unfolds ultimately they'll go 'f*** you, there's no way we're gonna help another bank out'. Did they make the correct decision, or should they have saved Lehman and made the world a much more stable place? I don't know which school of thought is right. I don't think anybody does at this point, it's too early."