Volts podcast: "Don't Look Up" director Adam McKay on the challenges of making movies about climate change

In this episode, writer and director Adam McKay reflects on the
critical and audience reaction to his movie Don’t Look Up. We
also talk about making an emotional connection to climate change,
some of the other climate-related projects he’s working on (or at
least thinking about), and why he ended the movie the way he did.


Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Adam McKay, January
12, 2022


(PDF version)


David Roberts:


The film Don’t Look Up, available on Netflix as of late last
month, has become something of a phenomenon. It has drawn wildly
varying, often quite personal and intense, critical responses.
Its critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes is just 55 percent.


But climate scientists loved it. I loved it. And the public loved
it. Its audience score is 78 percent. In the week of December 27,
it broke a Netflix record, with more than 152 million hours of
streaming. As of this week, it the second biggest movie ever on
the streaming service (just behind Red Notice, just ahead of Bird
Box).


Audiences have ignored critics and embraced the film, which is
not something you’d necessarily predict for a thinly veiled
climate change allegory about the difficulty of grappling with
bad news in today’s information environment, especially one with
such a (spoiler alert) bleak ending.


It’s not the first successful curveball thrown by its writer and
director, Adam McKay. McKay first made a name for himself as head
writer on Saturday Night Live. In the early 2000s, he formed a
production company with partner Will Ferrell and wrote and
directed a string of beloved comedies, from 2004’s Anchorman
through 2010’s The Other Guys.


But in 2015, he took a turn, writing and directing an adaptation
of Michael Lewis’s book The Big Short, about the 2008 subprime
mortgage crisis. It, too, was an unexpected hit, scoring McKay an
Academy Award for adapted screenplay. His 2018 film Vice, about
Dick Cheney, scored Oscar nominations for picture, director, and
original screenplay.


He has demonstrated that, despite what the chattering class often
seems to believe, audiences are hungry to confront real issues.
All along, he has wanted to find a way to make a movie about
climate change. With Don’t Look Up, he finally figured out how.


I’m delighted to get a chance to talk to him, to hear about what
he makes of the movie’s critical reception, what his other ideas
for climate movies are, and how he navigates the politics of
speaking out on serious issues from inside Hollywood.


Welcome, Adam McKay, to Volts.


Adam McKay:  


Thank you, Mr. Roberts, for having me. I've been an admirer of
your work for a long time, an avid reader of your writing, and it
is a pleasure to be here.


David Roberts:   


Thanks, I'm an avid watcher of your movies. So we have a mutual
fan club here.


[Don’t Look Up] has been out on Netflix for a couple of weeks, so
we've had enough time now for you to gather some feedback. Let's
start with the fact that this movie has gotten more streams than
anything in Netflix history. Did I read that right? 


Adam McKay:  


It's a bit crazy. I was shocked by the response from audiences.
Netflix uses viewing hours now as their metric — they used to use
accounts that signed on, but viewing hours is a more accurate
number — and we had the most amount of viewing hours in any
single week of any release Netflix has ever put out. 


I understand we're about to pass Bird Box as the number two
all-time movie [on Netflix], and we've got a chance to be number
one, who knows. 


David Roberts:


Who's number one?


Adam McKay:


It's a movie called Red Notice that just came out. It stars The
Rock, Ryan Reynolds, and Gal Gadot. If you had told me that our
ridiculous-slash-dark climate satire would be contending with
Ryan Reynolds, The Rock, and Gal Gadot in an action film, I would
have said, “you're nuts.” So it's pretty fantastic. 


More importantly, the moment-to-moment online responses have been
incredible — just seeing people excited by it, laughing, a lot of
people moved by the ending of the movie, talking about crying,
having emotional moments with it. So that's the thing that's been
really exciting is seeing this worldwide response to this movie,
and a lot of people having the response of, “oh my god, I'm not
crazy.” Really cool.


David Roberts:   


Or at least, “we're crazy together.”


On the other hand, there's the critical response, which has been
… all over the place. I don't know what I expected, but it's been
such a bizarre range. What do you make so far of the critical
response?


Adam McKay:  


I've never experienced anything like it. We test these movies, we
screen them for audiences, and the last three screenings we had
played great — people were laughing the whole way through, at the
end there was great discussion. 


Then I saw those critical responses … and in fairness to the
critics, I don't expect them to mirror a test audience. They look
at it with different eyes. So with all due respect, but some of
the reviews were so extreme and angry, and I was like, “whoa,
what's going on here?”


But once again, they're critics; they’ve got to do what they’ve
got to do. But it really took me back. I just didn't see it
coming. You make movies, you get hit with bad reviews, so we were
just like, “all right, I guess that's that.” 


Then when the movie came out, the responses were more like what
we had experienced. We were like, “oh, good, we're not crazy.”


So it was strange. I've never experienced that kind of disconnect
from the screening, watching the movie with people, to the
critical response. It definitely was the most surprising I've
seen. Once again, nothing but respect for critics. But yeah, it
was very surprising and unusual, no question about it.


David Roberts:   


I'm sure you're a self-aware, neurotic guy; you probably have
some self-criticisms about the movie. Did any of the criticisms
strike home? 


Adam McKay:  


When you make a comedy, right away you subtract 20 points. It's
just the way it goes with comedy. So I wasn't expecting us to be
lifted on the critics’ shoulders and ticker tape to come down,
because I've made plenty of comedies and that's just the way it
goes. Which was fine, because we made a direct choice to have
this be a comedy. 


I think the ones that surprised me — there weren't a lot, but
there were about a dozen that were really angry, and accused the
movie of being smug, and said, definitively, “this movie will not
relate to people.” “It's too smug, it's too liberal.” “It's not
liberal enough.” “It's playing to a small crowd.” Those were odd,
because we hadn't experienced that at all with this movie, in any
of the screenings we had done — that was never the slightest
response we ever had. 


With something like our previous movie, Vice, we knew that was
tricky. We knew that was not a fun story. So you know, I read
reviews, and some of them were like, “yeah, you're not wrong.”
But in this case, I was surprised by the timbre of the reviews,
the anger of some of them — once again: not all, some. I have to
say that over and over again. 


David Roberts:   


Some of them seemed like, “you think you're so smart. You're not
so smart.” A lot of critical reviews struck me as, “here are the
ways that I am smarter than this guy who tried to make this
movie.” It was a weird critical response.


Adam McKay:  


It was strange, but I think what it points to, now that I've had
some time to digest it, is a couple of basic things. Regardless
if someone didn't like the movie or liked the movie, there's no
question we're living in an incredibly strange time right now.
We're looking at a straight shot to American democracy
collapsing. The Democrats have face-planted and I don't see much
standing in the way of a takeover from the extreme right. 


So that's going on, while this absolutely catastrophic, giant
story of the collapse of the livable atmosphere, that is so
mammoth it’s hard for even some scientists to fully get their
head around, is happening at exactly the same time. It doesn't
surprise me that people would be …


David Roberts:   


Don't forget the global pandemic. Toss that in there too.


Adam McKay:  


Oh my god. And by the way, towering, epic income inequality mixed
right in.


So we have all this stuff going on, and the idea that people
would have passionate responses to “how do you tell these
stories?” makes sense. The idea that a lot of people would be on
different wavelengths of awareness, or no awareness, or somewhat
awareness on those stories we're talking about makes sense. 


By the way, once again, I respect that. I'm not saying that if
someone didn't like the movie, it means they don't believe in
climate change. Somehow, through the social media lens, it became
that I somehow had said that, whereas I never said that. People
were piling on — which by the way seems like something directly
out of the movie, of course. So I think it makes sense. 


The reason we made the movie is there are varying degrees of
relationships with the idea of the climate crisis, and that's one
of the problems we're confronting. So now that I have a little
distance from it, part of me is like, “why did I think our movie
would be any different?” 


David Roberts:   


I could have told you what would happen. From my perspective, as
somebody who's been in this game for a long time: you have this
huge problem on your mind, you’re yelling and yelling, and no one
else is paying attention but other climate people. So you just
end up talking to other climate people. You end up arguing with
other climate people, and forming teams and factions within the
climate movement, because no one else is paying attention. I
think that's become part of the culture of the climate movement:
your number one priority is to shoot down this new climate
advocate who thinks he's smart. I don't fully get it.


Adam McKay:  


When you see Chuck Schumer or some politician talk about the
climate crisis, you can just tell from the way they're talking
about it: oh, they don't get it. They don't really feel it in
their bones. Someone hasn't communicated to them the depth and
the urgency of this. 


Even when something happens like those crazy fires in Colorado,
where there weren't even trees nearby, the wind blew the embers
into the neighborhoods, and the videos are so upsetting; or
Kentucky, where it looked like the devil had landed on earth with
that massive tornado; Alaska breaking a heat record by 20
degrees; and on and on and on. You see these stories, and then
you hear certain people in charge, or even in the media, talk
about it, and you're like, “you're not feeling that in your
bones.” 


But when you have a movie, you can't say that, because it sounds
like you're saying, “you don't get the movie, so you don't care
enough about the cause.” I'm like, “hey, I don't f*****g care
about the movie. Hate the movie. I don't give a s**t.” We're not
posturing like, “Oh, look how important we are.” We actually
think this is a giant thing! All these actors came together —
there are easier projects we could have done. You think when
we're saying this is a big deal we're positioning ourselves for
awards season? 


David Roberts:   


If you're pulling a money grab, maybe climate change is not your
go-to. 


Adam McKay:  


I think that's me splitting hairs, though, because the bigger
picture here is the crazy appetite of literally hundreds of
millions of people, having this very visceral response, and it's
fantastic. 


The other joy of the movie was seeing a lot of climate scientists
say, “oh my god, I feel seen.” Peter Kalmus wrote a great piece
where he's like, “oh, that's it. That's what I've been going
through.” George Monbiot wrote a beautiful piece about the
emotions he's been carrying.


So the overwhelming story here is, we're overjoyed with the
response. We're overjoyed with the release.


At the same time … I already had sympathy for people like
yourself, but now I think I get it in a much more personal way.


David Roberts:   


Also, sympathy for politicians trying to broach this. You get all
these weird, intense, super-specific responses, I'm sure any
politician who says these words publicly gets that same weird
range of blowback. So I have some sympathy for them, too … though
less.


Adam McKay:  


A little bit less. We did it in the movie. For years I've been
like, “why isn't a senator or congressman going to a podium and
crying or yelling?” George Monbiot did that, he cried on a show —
there's clips all over the place of climate people getting
emotional on shows. 


It's funny, because we wrote that in the movie, you’d think I
would know that, but the response taught me how deep it is. The
challenge of the communication of this is so titanic. How you
break through the people framing it as self-interest. “Well, of
course, Dave, you have a podcast you do, and you have your own
news source, Volts, so of course you think it's a big deal.” It's
like, no.


David Roberts:   


Let's go back in time a little bit. You've said in previous
interviews that it was an IPCC report that originally grabbed you
and shook you by the lapels and got you freaked out about this.
That was 2015 or 2016? 


Adam McKay:  


It's a longer road than that. The Al Gore documentary An
Inconvenient Truth was the first time where I was like, “oh, wait
a minute, that's no joke.” The famous moment where he shows the
graph skyrocketing definitely hit me. I started talking about it,
wondering what was going on. 


But, in those polling categories they use, where I went from the
“somewhat concerned” range to the “very, very concerned” range
was the IPCC report and several other reports that came out,
culminating in me eventually not being able to sleep and my wife
being like, “what's going on?” I'm like, ”this is bad. This is
really, really, really bad.” 


I went through a little period where people around me were like,
“hey, relax.” I was like, “no, it's really, really bad.” I was
late to this incredibly un-fun party. I think you showed up with
some onion dip around 2004, but I came in around there, and then
every year since it's just been escalating.


Reading David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth — that's
definitely what led me to the onramp of, “I’ve got to do a movie
about this.”


David Roberts:   


One of the things I'm fascinated by, and one of the things I
wrote about in my review, is the difficulty of making art about
climate change, the difficulty of telling compelling stories
about it in a way that will appeal to a mass audience.
Presumably, once you got freaked out about it, you being a movie
maker, you started thinking, “how can I get this into a movie?”
You've talked about this a little bit, that you had a few ideas
or premises come and go. I'm curious what some of your early
thoughts were for how you could cram climate into a movie. Did
you have other ideas that were developed at all? 


Adam McKay:  


Well, some of them I'm still going to do. I'm actually working on
a show with HBO Max called Uninhabitable Earth. It's a Black
Mirror-style show, anthology, hour-long episodes, dealing with
the climate crisis.


David Roberts:   


But fictional, like Black Mirror? 


Adam McKay:  


A hundred percent, yeah. Each one will be an hour long, we'll
have different directors and writers come in. I already have the
first episode outlined. I'm behind — I was supposed to have the
script written a month ago. So we're doing that. 


But I can tell you a couple of the ideas. The first idea I had —
and who knows, I may still do it — was inspired by the movie
Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes that came out
in the 80s. I had read that Robert Towne’s initial draft of that
script didn't have one single word spoken in it; it was all
Tarzan with the apes. Then, of course, the studio made him add
all this stuff where he went to England. I actually met Robert
Towne about four years ago and I brought that up right away,
because I found it really intriguing. 


The idea I had was that it’s 300, 400 years from now, and it's an
area on Earth where the climate crisis has fully blossomed —
we've gone to 3.5 to 4, sea increase, most of civilization is
gone, but there are little outcroppings of people that have hung
on.


We focus on one group that lives between a storm and a desert
zone. They're in between an area where there's constant tornadoes
and hurricanes and another area that's completely arid — let's
say it used to be Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada. They're on a
runoff area from the storm zone where water flows, and it's
created a deep crevasse, and they live in little Anasazi-style
cliff dwellings on the side of the crevasse. Because of the
water, they have a little civilization of 600 or 700 people. You
see the detritus from the former civilization: pieces, scraps of
our old civilization that they've used in different ways. 


Then one day the water stops. We don't say it, but you see from
the drawings and the songs that this happens occasionally.
They’ve discovered that the person who can handle going through
the river of water to find what clogged it, it's best if it's a
17-year-old boy, because they're a little more fearless, they're
at peak physical health.


So they pick their 17-year-old boy, but there’s a girl who’s in
love with him. He leaves to go on the mission, they give him a
couple of tools, and she secrets away and follows him. 


We basically follow these two teenagers as they go through the
storm zone, and we have different encounters with different
pieces of our old civilization. One scene was where they have to
get across this massive lake, and in the middle of the lake — I
thought it was a cool image — you see a giant white pole sticking
out. The boy goes under the water and you just see the city of
Chicago there. It's the Sears Tower antenna sticking up. And they
have to swim across this lake. 


So it's a lot of different episodic encounters. I don't want to
give them away in case I ever do this … which, now that I'm
telling you, it was pretty cool actually. It was a big 2 hour 40
minute, no-spoken-dialogue, epic film. That was the one I was
going to go after.


Then I started doing the thing, which I know you probably think
about a lot, where I'm like, “well, how is this going to play?
How are people going to relate to this?” I kept thinking, “it's a
little bit like a lot of dystopic sci-fi movies; there have been
a lot of those made. Is it too easy to categorize it as that? Is
the impact of it lost because it doesn't relate to our world
now?”


David Roberts:   


In all those movies, the apocalypse has already happened, so you
frequently don't learn much about it. They're rarely about the
apocalypse itself.


Adam McKay:  


I had another idea that was about the carbon wars. Twenty years
from now, most of the planet knows we have to shut down the
carbon release, but there are holdouts. There are rogue nations,
and corporations that are basically like nations, that are like,
no. So there's a full-on war going on. I had a bunch of cool
stuff for that. 


Then I had another idea that was more like a Twilight Zone
episode about submarines from different nations fighting over
claiming new land underneath the Arctic Circle that they can
drill for oil in. One of the subs gets sunk and then frozen in
the deep bottom underneath the Arctic. We go to 200 years later,
and it's rescued, and some of the people are able to be defrosted
using advanced tech. It's about them living in the future utopia
that has solved these problems, which I thought was kind of
cool. 


Yeah, I may still do that. These are all ideas that are still on
the table. I don't think I'm giving away too much. But with each
one, I just felt like, man, I don't know. 


When I talked to David Sirota, and he made the joke about how
it's like a movie where an asteroid’s going to hit, like an
Armageddon, except no one gives a s**t, I just laughed, and I
like that. I thought: laughter, it’s the best. It does a couple
of things. It lets people have a common experience. In order to
get a crowd laughing, you have to have a shared, agreed-upon
reality. You can't really get 300, 400 people laughing without
that agreed-upon reality. 


So I just thought, even my family members who are very right wing
and friends of mine who are very progressive, everyone can agree
we are living in absolutely unhinged times right now. I thought,
maybe that's a good purchase point with this idea. So I ended up
doing Don’t Look Up.


David Roberts:   


Did you just hear this joke, or this idea, of Sirota’s and go off
completely on that? How much was he involved in the story
writing? Or was he just the political consultant guy?


Adam McKay:  


With any idea, you like the idea to not leave you alone. So he
said that, I was like, “oh my god, that's perfect, that's exactly
what's going on,” and we laughed, and we kicked it around for a
second and then I just moved on. I wasn't going to write it. It
was a couple weeks later that I was like, wow, that idea keeps
coming back to me – why? So I called Sirota and I was like,
“Sirota, I think that's the idea.” 


I liked that it was simple. I liked that it wasn't too-clever
clever, that it was a big enough entryway for a lot of people to
get into it. I've described it as a Clark Kent-level disguise for
climate; it's not really trying that hard, and I like that about
it. It was big, and I'm a big fan of execution-based ideas. I
don't always love big, clever premises. I like where they're kind
of simple. 


So then I started banging it out, and I would check in with
David. He was involved. I would run it by him, what the outline
was. He came up with the idea for the movie within the movie,
Total Devastation. He and I kicked around the idea of profitizing
the comet and aborting the mission; that's when I knew we had a
movie. I would show him each draft. David's a very funny,
creative guy. He's a firebrand, but he also has a good pop sense,
and he's written some scripts in the past. So he was pretty
involved, actually, from the get-go.


David Roberts:   


Is it obvious it’s about climate change? Have you gotten a sense
from the viewing public? Because I genuinely don't know. I'm so
immersed in climate that of course I see everything through that
lens. But if you just walk in as a normie with no background
information on the movie, are people thinking “climate change”
from this? Do you have any way of knowing?


Adam McKay:  


One thing I love to do is go on Twitter when the movie opens. You
see the second-by-second tweeting. Granted, that's a skewed lens,
because it's Twitter, it’s social media. But that, coupled with
the testing process we do, the screening process, gives me a
pretty good idea of how people are seeing it.


What I'm seeing, and what we learned in the screening process, is
about 60 to 65 percent right away think climate crisis. Another
25, 35 percent — there's crossover between the two — think Covid,
even though the script was written before Covid. 


But the great news is, everyone gets the idea of a society that's
broken, corrupted, careerist, distracted, self-interested, all
the different layers. I always say it’s David Simon's The Wire
grab bag of societal dysfunctions. We tried to touch all those
bases.


Everyone gets that. The way we did the movie was, we tried to
find the universal dysfunctions across the political spectrum and
not dial into the red vs. blue too much, although you can't avoid
it. When you talk about the comet denial in the movie, clearly
that's hitting the right wing. 


Overall, the people responding to it as a climate crisis
allegory, I've been very happy. Someone tweeted the other day
that she started watching it with her kids and within 10 minutes
the kids were, “oh, this is like the climate.” I have a
20-year-old and a 16-year-old daughter, all of their friends —
none of those people read interviews with me, none of those
people read the reviews, and they all immediately were like, oh,
climate, Covid, science being run over by capitalism and power.


I've been very, very happy with the way that's translated.


David Roberts:   


I think that’s part of the power of it: if you don't watch it
through the climate lens, it works broadly as well. I was
thinking yesterday that someone looking back 20 years from now at
this movie might think, oh, this was about the coup. This was
about the authoritarian takeover of America, which people were
yelling about, and other people were ignoring them. It works
eerily well for that as well. 


Adam McKay:  


To me, there are three giant, hard-to-emotionally-comprehend
realities. (Intellectually, we get it.) The climate crisis is the
big one. Then you have the coup, the impending collapse of
American democracy. Then the third one, for me, is income
inequality at a scale we just never talk about, that is
breathtaking, worldwide. 


As far as size goes, income inequality is like Venus and the
impending collapse of American democracy is like Mars. Then the
climate crisis is like Jupiter plus Saturn plus maybe the Sun.
There are five or six other ones too. There's the opioid
epidemic, which we do nothing about. There's the gun death
epidemic, which we do nothing about. 


Someone had said, “hey, relax on calling it a climate crisis,
it's really just a snapshot of this time.” I thought, that's a
fair point, because the movie is about our reaction to these very
fixable crises. As complicated as the climate crisis is, we could
deal with it if we wanted to. That's what's so incredibly
frustrating. What makes the climate crisis so horrifying is that
we do have technologies, we do have strategies that could
seriously curb the horror show we're headed toward. 


So I think it's fair to say that the movie is more about this
particular screwed-up moment that we're living in.


David Roberts:   


I've seen a lot of climate change documentaries and shows and
art, and they're generally pretty bad. I went into this with very
low expectations, terrified that you were going to get into
albedo effect and biodiversity. I was braced. But it's much more
about trying to communicate than it is about the details of the
crisis itself. I thought the best part of the movie is the way it
shows how the newsertainment blob has this capacity to digest
everything and let nothing change it. No matter how loud you
yell, it just absorbs it. 


You see it absorb Dr. Mindy, as he becomes unwittingly caught up
in it. It just rejects Kate entirely. It has this ability to
adapt and absorb and neuter everything. That's to me the most
maddening, not just about the climate crisis, but about
everything these days: everything is at the same pitch;
everything is at the same volume. Everything is the same blur.
It's impossible to make anything stick out, to stop or pause on
anything or think about anything.


Adam McKay:  


The moment where DiCaprio as Dr. Mindy says on the TV show, “why
does everything have to be so clever or likable? Sometimes we
just need to be able to say things to each other.” That's it.
It's an emotional movie. It's not a narratively complex movie,
it's just the emotion of that.


That's exactly it: these formats, these shows, will not let you
just say things. It always gets twisted and given a certain color
or shading. 


David Roberts:   


It's sitting right there alongside the celebrity love affair —
the same tone and same visuals — and the two blur together. I
thought another clever part of the movie was that, it's not like
Dr. Mindy or any of the protagonists are innocent of this.


One of my favorite moments is when Oglethorpe, the head of NASA —
who, by the way, Rob Morgan is amazing; he's such an ace up your
sleeve in this movie — is talking about Sting. It had nothing to
do with the rest of the movie, but I loved that moment so much.


But at one point, the head of NASA sitting there watching and
getting caught up in this celebrity relationship. He finds
himself really hoping they'll stay together. He's not immune to
it either. It absorbs you no matter what disposition you come to
it with.


Adam McKay:  


It's impossible to resist. This is the one thing I've been saying
throughout a lot of the press: the movie is not over anyone. I'm
in the movie. I eat Taco Bell. I was way into Kyrie Irving
returning to the Nets the other day. I'm rooting for Jennifer
Lopez and Ben Affleck to an unhealthy level.


I mean, this stuff is all focus-grouped. It's algorithmically
structured. It's like they took the science of slot machines and
they've applied it to social media, advertising, the way we
consume information. It's irresistible, and we're all part of
it. 


But I think it's important to give ourselves a break to some
degree on it. It’s going to get us. Life doesn't operate like an
action movie where every waking second you're pointed toward the
climate crisis, or gun violence, or income inequality, or the
collapse of American democracy. There are moments where you're
going to obsess about, why did the general charge you for snacks?
That's why we have it in there.


David Roberts:   


I loved that bit too, by the way. It spoke to me.


Adam McKay:  


I love the reaction to it. People are trying to figure out why he
did charge for the snacks. There are these theories that he
represents the military industrial complex, he represents
government. So people ask me, and I'm like, “I don't know.”
They’re like, “yeah, but you wrote it.” I'm like, “no, I wrote it
as that thing that sticks in your head that distracts you.” 


Comedy — the idea that we can laugh, we can be a little silly —
took a lot of the edge off of it and opened it up. It's been
cool. Once again, not everyone's going to laugh at the same
thing. The funny thing with comedy is, everyone thinks their
sense of humor is the gold standard. Which, by the way, I
wouldn't change that. That's what's incredible about comedy. But
it's funny when, some people love the comedy, some people are
like “it's dumb,” and they're definitive about it. 


That's fine. That's how comedy goes. But it's been really cool:
at Netflix, they do crazy amounts of data — pretty sure they
know, statistically, within 96 percent, how I'm going to die —
and they said that they've never seen a comedy play across this
many countries. I think the movie was number one in 87 countries
and top 10 in 90. For people that care about the climate and care
about the state of the world, I think that's a very hopeful
thing, that this current moment in the world is that universal.
I've never experienced that before.


David Roberts:   


Some of the stuff in the movie seems pretty US-specific. The
media stuff, at least; I guess I don't really know what media is
like in Turkey or whatever, but it felt very
America-specific. 


Adam McKay:  


Turns out, it's a lot like it is here. We're doing an adaptation
of Bong Joon Ho’s movie Parasite as a miniseries, and he was
saying that to me. He said, “I think you're going to be surprised
by how well this plays around the world.” I was like, “really?
You think so?” and he was like, “oh, yeah. The problems you have
in the movie are everywhere.” And he was right. It's landed in a
global way that I'd never anticipated.


David Roberts:   


For me as a moviegoer, this is the first time I've seen these
particular dysfunctions put to fiction. They're very specific to
our present moment and I've never seen anybody else take them on.
I think that's why you're getting these moments of people saying,
“oh my god, I feel seen,” because a lot of people are
experiencing this. I just haven't seen it portrayed in another
movie in quite the same way. 


Adam McKay:  


The models I used for this movie tend to be pretty small. One of
my favorite movies of the last 20 years is The Death of Stalin,
which I've seen seven times, but that played to a very particular
crowd. It's brilliant. We weren't trying to emulate that; our
movie is made for a much bigger audience, very consciously. But
there's that. There's Thank You for Smoking, which once again,
very small audience, brilliant movie, love it. Then you have to
really go back to the 60s and 70s, back when movies like this
would play big.


David Roberts:   


Network is the obvious predecessor, right? Network is all over
this movie.


Adam McKay:  


That's probably my all-time favorite movie. There's movies to die
for: the Buck Henry movie, which I love; Wag the Dog; Ace in the
Hole; Dr. Strangelove is another obvious one. For anyone who
wants to jump all over me, I'm not saying our movie’s as good as
Dr. Strangelove, but as far as the style and sensibility of it,
people forget how slapstick-y Dr. Strangelove was. So I think
that's one to look at. 


But we haven't lived in a time where … I guess Mike Judge would
be the guy: Office Space I worship, Idiocracy is brilliant. But
neither one of those movies were even remotely commercially
successful. They were found after they bombed in their release.


So it was definitely something we were going for on this larger
scale. With all these actors, we were hoping to bring in a larger
audience. It's been very cool seeing Ariana Grande fans watch
this movie and respond to it.


David Roberts:   


I want to ask about the casting and about the crew. It’s
A-listers all over the screen, constantly. To what extent did you
present this to people as “hey, we want to make a socially
conscious climate movie?” Was that part of the motivation of the
actors joining up? 


Adam McKay:  


I never framed it like that. I always described the world we're
living in right now — it's fun, every time I say it I try and use
a different analogy, so what I've been saying lately is, “it's
like a bouncy castle full of hyenas and long stem wine glasses.”
That's what it's like to be alive right now.


So my pitch to all the actors was, “we're going to try and make a
movie that's about this time that's never existed, that's crazy,
and we want to try and make it funny, but we also want to make it
emotionally moving as well. And yeah, it's about the climate
crisis” — everyone knew that, they got that — “but hopefully it's
going to have a big feeling to it for people.”


With our casting director, Francine Maisler, we hit a point where
we had a bunch of big-name actors, and I remember Francine and I
talked about it and she said, “isn't the point of this movie that
you kind of go all the way? That the movie is a comment on what's
going on, and the movie should have a breadth?” I said, “Yeah, I
totally agree.” So usually we would have stopped, because you
don't want the movie to be overwhelmed with stars and be
distracting, but in this case, we felt like oh, no, that's kind
of the point of the movie. 


That's when we got Timothée Chalamet to play the part of Yule,
and Ariana Grande came in, and, I'm trying to remember the order,
Cate Blanchett, Kid Cudi came on at that point. Normally we
wouldn't have filled those roles with recognizable actors, but in
this case we just said, let's drive straight through the locked
gates.


David Roberts:   


The density of A-listers is so high that it does feel almost like
a comment in and of itself. It feels like you're making a
point. 


Adam McKay:  


We were joking in the edit, with my editor Hank Corwin, I was
saying, “this movie is like a combination of It's a Mad Mad Mad
Mad World and Lars von Trier's Melancholia.” That was another
part of the movie, too, was the style of how we cut it and put it
together. We wanted it to feel kind of jumpy and assaultive,
keeping you off balance — sort of like the world feels now,
too. 


David Roberts:   


I love the editing. To me, most of the big laughs were from the
editing. 


Adam McKay:  


Hank Corwin is one of the great editors of all time. He edited on
JFK, he's edited Terrence Malick movies. The guy is a legend. It
came from Big Short and Vice: even though those movies had funny
things in them, they weren't full-on comedies. I kept telling
Hank, “I think your style would work. I think this
cut-in-the-middle-of-the-line, this breaking the rhythm of
traditional editing, would work really well for comedy.” He's a
funny, kind of sheepish, neurotic guy, and he's like, “I don't
know. I've never cut a comedy,” and I'm like, “no, Hank, I think
it's going to work.” But it's another element of the movie. For
some people, they are thrown off by the style. I've seen people
complain about it. Some people think it's sloppy
unintentionally. 


David Roberts:   


No, every one of them is absolutely perfectly timed. It really
gets at the feeling too — you get swept up in these
super-intense, crazy moments and then it cuts to this quiet
moment where they're trying to digest it afterwards, and you feel
the same thing. You're like, “whoa, what was that? Why was I just
so worked up?” It's that same whipsaw feeling of modern media.


Adam McKay:  


That was what we were going for, those montages and slices and
images. Hank had the brilliant idea to play the natural world as
a character in the movie. It's funny how in the process of making
a movie you can actually learn things about the climate. That was
something; like, oh, yeah, the natural world is a character in
the story of the climate right now. It was amazing how well it
fit with the movie, and that was all credit to Hank Corwin. That
was his breakthrough idea.


David Roberts:   


There are these cuts of nature scenes, but they're not the
conventional climate-documentary nature scenes of pastoral
beauty; some of them are just weird. It's not necessarily natural
beauty, it's “look at this weird fucked-up natural world.”


Adam McKay:  


The one that got me — he just cut this in, I didn't have it in
the script — was the shot toward the end of the movie of the bee.
Every time we would screen the movie, I would see that bee, I
would get teary-eyed. It was like a punch in the gut to me,
because the bee is so beautiful-looking, and perfectly
constructed, and delicate. Frickin Hank, man, you got me with
that bee shot.


David Roberts:   


Let's talk about the ending because this, I'm sure, is
controversial. I guess we're doing spoilers. 


Adam McKay:  


Yeah, we should warn people, if you haven't seen it. Part of the
impact of the movie is, most people do not know that ending is
coming. Some people do, but most people don't imagine that we
would ever end that way. So yep, big spoiler alert.


SPOILER ALERT


David Roberts:   


You watch a Hollywood movie, especially a big Hollywood movie
with a bunch of stars, you are trained by a lifetime of movie
viewing to expect the white horse at the end, to expect the good
guys to pull it off. It inches right up to the ending and you're
like, oh, well, I guess not!


This might be perverse, but I was delighted when I finally
realized, “oh, he's not going to do it. Sweet. He's just going to
let it play out.” How much did you think about that ending? How
early did that come in? What do you think is the larger
significance of the ending? What are you trying to say?


Adam McKay:  


I was just kicking around this idea — and part of it came from
reading Sapiens by Yuval Harari — I thought the big idea of that
book was when he posed that our ability to create myths and story
is what separated Homo sapiens from Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons.
It’s a legitimately big idea. I know some people knock Yuval
Harari, but that is a heavyweight idea. 


That got me thinking about what that means, that stories are that
important. Obviously, we've talked about stories, and what they
mean, and narratives, for years and years and years. The idea
was, we've watched 10,000 movies — whether it's Marvel, James
Bond, an action movie, Fast and The Furious, the comedies, the
stuff I've done — and it's always a happy ending. You just know
it's coming. You know Hollywood's going to give it to you. In
some ways I started wondering, are we sitting back and watching
the climate and expecting a happy ending? 


David Roberts:   


I really think that’s part of it. “Someone, somewhere, has got
this. That's how things work, right?”


Adam McKay:  


DiCaprio told me a story where Elon Musk was at some conference
and DiCaprio implored him, “dude, come on, you've got news
sources” and Elon Musk is like, “the technology will solve it.”
That is terrifying. I hear this from a lot of people: “They're
going to figure it out. Don’t worry. They'll get it.” No,
we're not. We're now at the point where we're definitively not.
So I thought, there's a simple power to going straight down the
chute with this ending and not having the white horse ride over
the horizon line. 


I have never been more nervous for a screening in my entire life
than the first time I screened this movie. There was a break in
the pandemic, it was after the vaccine, and they said if
everyone's vaccinated and they wear masks, we safely could do a
screening. You have to remember, this is a big movie. It's
Netflix, they're a big company, you have these big stars in the
movie, and we're going to go to Orange County and we're going to
test screen this movie that ends with — once again, spoiler alert
— the entire planet dying. I was telling my wife and Hank, my
editor, who during the period of putting the movie together I
spent equal amounts of time with: “I've never been this nervous
for a screening. This feels like we may have screwed up in a
profound way.” 


They test it from zero to 100. The test is not a sciencep you use
it as a loose guide rail. But in general, if you get like a 35,
that's really bad. You want to be in the zone of high 50s to low
80s. Mike Judge actually told me that Idiocracy, the first time
he screened it, he got a 20. A 20! I've never heard of that in my
life. He told me how then the studio felt like they were
protecting Judge and that's why they buried the movie. I was
like, “oh really, that's what happened.” Maybe Spielberg and
Scorsese are two people that could score a 20 on a movie and say,
“I don't care, put it in 3,000 theaters anyway.” No one else on
the planet has the clout to tell a studio, “I know we got a 20
but go with it.” There's just no one. 


So I'm driving to the screening and I'm like, “oh, s**t, oh,
s**t.” But I love the ending. We've been watching it, we've
screened it for ourselves, I think it's beautiful. We screen it …
and it's the audience's favorite part of the movie. Universally.
Unequivocally.


David Roberts:   


How does the whole test screening thing work? Do people write
responses? 


Adam McKay:  


Everyone fills out a card. There's the 1-10 stuff, but then
there's handwritten stuff. You do a focus group with 20 people
afterward, they ask in-depth questions. Universally, no question
about it, favorite part of the movie: the ending.


David Roberts:   


Did people say why it was so satisfying to them? Could they
articulate it?


Adam McKay:  


Oh, yeah. The person who leads the focus group is an incredible
woman who ran the focus group in Vice. (True story: they ran
focus groups on the Iraq War.) She actually runs our focus
groups, and she asked them, and they were very clear about it.
They said, “we're sick of the b******t endings.” It was an
incredible moment where you realize, oh, of course, the audience
is way smarter than we give them credit for. They're totally
tuned in to what's going on in the world. They all expressed it.
They talked about the climate crisis, about Covid, about all the
s**t going on in the world. They're fully in line with it.
They're sick of constantly getting served fake happy endings.


Even though I've done silly comedies, I'm a big fan of never
underestimating your audience. The Simpsons is an example of how
you can be brilliantly stupid. Even when you're doing silly
stuff, try and be top-of-your-intelligence silly. So I've always
believed audiences (and voting blocs, and the population at
large) can go way further than people think. They're way smarter
than they get credit from the media, from the savvy crowd, the
gatekeepers. But this even surprised me. Number one part of the
movie, unequivocally, no doubt about it.


David Roberts:   


The whole movie is about us b**********g each other. It would
have been a unique sort of betrayal to have a happy ending to
this particular movie.


Adam McKay:  


There was never one moment where I was going to do it. I just
wanted to make sure to balance at the end — that it is a comedy,
even though it's this very emotional ending — so I did shoot the
joke that we have in the movie that's in the middle of the
credits, and then we have a joke at the very end of the credits.
I did think that was important too, because some people were
really in tears. We had some very emotional responses to the
ending. My wife went into her car and cried for 10 minutes after
she saw it. Another agent saw the movie when we were first
screening it and she was so emotional, she backed her car into a
pole when she was leaving the screening. We've seen it in the
online responses, a lot of people moved to serious tears. 


So I did think it was important that you don't want to be
traumatized. You want to still be able to laugh, yet have those
feelings. That was more the alchemy of the ending, how we were
going to balance that. But there was never any chance that was
ending any other way.


David Roberts:   


It’s sad in the context of the movie itself, but I also think
part of what's hitting people is that it gives them permission to
imagine that in the real world, there's no white horse. Sad
endings are perfectly possible in the real world, and once you
really start to think about that in the climate context … it's
big. It's overwhelming. 


Adam McKay:  


I think it's essential to understanding the climate right now. I
think you have to realize this could end poorly and in fact is on
track right now to end poorly. That's hard for some people, and
that's okay. I'm not saying they're wrong or their reaction to
the movie is wrong. But I do think it's hard, and I think you
have to realize that what we're seeing right now, it's not going
well. It’s not going well at all.


David Roberts:   


Can you talk about the other ending, the mid-credits scene? Since
we're spoiling things: the rich people escape the disaster on a
spaceship, find another planet, and then are immediately consumed
by the planet's denizens. I couldn't fully tell whether that was
just a gag to prevent people from going home and hanging
themselves, or if there was more significance, a point freighted
in there. What's your take on that? 


Adam McKay:  


It started as the rich people just get away. The original
scripted ending was that they land on that planet, and it's
beautiful, and they're like, this is going to work out great. And
I just ended it.


David Roberts:   


That's kind of what I hoped it would be. That's what I was
rooting for, to be honest. 


Adam McKay:  


Well, we ended up improvising this beat. Meryl’s a great
improviser, and she kept saying, “I want to know how I'm going to
die.” So she put it in the scene. Then Mark Rylance and I said,
well, maybe she gets eaten by a creature on a planet, and he's
like, “oh, yeah, we don't know what it means.” We did it, and
then it started making us laugh, that maybe we do see her get
eaten by a Brontaroc, which was just a name we made up on the
day. 


I was hoping it did both, because you see the pods of the rich
people, and they're from oil companies and lobbying firms, and
it's got this sting. They walk out and there's this beautiful
planet, and then we have this joke, which some people are going
to like, some people aren't. Judd Apatow was like, “oh my god,
that's my favorite joke ever.” DiCaprio was a little bit like, “I
don't know if I love that joke.” So once again, it's comedy. My
wife was like, “can’t you just end with the world ending?” and I
was like, “we actually tried it one time, and it was
tough.” 


I like the idea of, you get the ending of the world ending, you
get that beautiful Bon Iver song, you get to see the Earth
undone, and that's an ending. Then we go for a little while
longer and there's another little thing that happens, where the
rich people get away with it, but then there's the big joke. I
actually am a big fan of, you can have an ending and then have
another ending, and whichever one you need, you can choose to
lean into. Apatow was telling me he leaned in heavily to the
president being eaten by the Brontaroc, he needed that. You
didn't as much. My wife didn't, DiCaprio didn't.


David Roberts:   


The whole world ending has one sort of emotional tone; the world
ending but all the rich f*****s who made it happen escaping
untouched has a very different emotional complexion. I just
thought that was an interesting move. If you find out the rich
people die, then …


Adam McKay:  


… it’s a little happy. Yeah. There was another ending I had where
the rich people then started saying, “let's get my house built,”
and someone's like, “no, the pod with all the workers in it
crashed, they're all dead,” and then the rich people started
going, “I'll pay anyone a billion dollars who’ll build me a
house,” and then another guy went, “I'll pay 5 billion,” someone
else goes, “10 billion,” and we just pulled out on that. My
friend Tom Scharpling liked that ending. 


As I'm talking to you I realize, you know what we could have done
on Netflix, we could have done three different endings. Some cuts
could have had the rich people with no one to work for them,
another one could have had the Brontaroc, another one could have
just had the rich people get away with it and that’s it. I wish I
had thought of this: we could have told Netflix, “every third
screening has this ending.” That would have been really cool,
actually.


David Roberts:   


It makes a difference in the context of the movie, but it also
makes a big difference in how you think climate change is going
to play out, if rich people can survive it.


Adam McKay:  


They're not going to get away. No way. This idea that they're
going to go in bunkers or go to another planet, it’s ludicrous.
You saw it when we had the fires here in LA, I think one of
Murdoch's homes partially burnt down. They aren’t getting away
from this. If we imagine the climate crisis going to its worst
degree, maybe you could see some people clinging to the poles to
survive. It's debatable if it's an extinction-level event, but it
is possible that it’s an extinction-level event. But if people do
survive, it's going to be grim. I think the money can help for
the first couple of waves.


This is me, by the way, just completely theorizing. There's no
basis to what I'm saying, let me be very clear about that. I
don’t know. But we can kind of guess, right? We know that the
whole center of the earth becomes totally uninhabitable from
extreme heat and wet bulb events. We know that there'll probably
be perpetual giant fires where hundreds of thousands of people
die from smoke inhalation, drought, famine, mass migrations,
wars, even the poles are going to be nasty. They'll just have to
come up with different categories for hurricanes. There'll be
Category 10 hurricanes. I was talking to someone online who was
saying it is possible we could have a perpetual storm on Earth if
this thing really does hit 3-4 degrees Celsius increase.


David Roberts:   


My even more dystopic possibility is that we half solve it, so it
gets bad but not apocalyptic, and bad-but-not-apocalyptic will
probably just mean exacerbating existing inequalities. It'll mean
an exaggerated, even more grim version of global oligarchy.


Adam McKay:  


Oh, that's bad. You might be right. We talk about this nonstop,
my group of friends who are equally as freaked out as I am and
that can talk about it, and one of the things I always say is,
the saving grace may be that our civilization collapses, meaning
we don't produce more carbon dioxide; that actually, civilization
collapsing stops a lot of the emissions. 


That's a hellish proposition, because that's closer to what
you're talking about; we’re at 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius increase,
and we start to see systemic collapse around the planet, wars,
refugees, fire, all that kind of stuff, but a billion people have
survived and the inequality is more like The Road Warrior. I'm
not being flip with that comparison. Literally, that could
happen.


David Roberts:   


Related to this point, one of the critical responses to the movie
has been that it’s not an accurate analogy for climate change.
Climate’s not a succeed or fail, one or the other proposition:
there are all these degrees in between, we're going to land
somewhere in the middle. There's an emotional satisfaction to a
comet, that either hits or doesn't, that we're never going to get
out of climate change. A) Do you agree with that, and b) do you
think that's relevant to the quality of the movie? Did you feel
like you were trying to do an exact analogy to climate
change? 


Adam McKay:  


God, no. Allegories are a sleight of hand. The prodigal son
coming back doesn't exactly match the massive emotional bandwidth
of loving forgiveness. “Well, the brother was kind of a dick,
whereas loving forgiveness knows no bounds and judgment, so I
don't know if the prodigal son was the exact allegory.” No
allegory is a perfect fit. 


So yeah, there's a little cheat that we did: we took away the
hyper-object of global warming, which is so vast and timeless and
slow-moving, and we put in a very concrete event, a comet. So no,
it's not a precise match at all. The real story of the movie is
that the hyper-object, the hard-to-categorize force, is our
reaction to the comet. I would say that's the important story
when it comes to the climate crisis. It's about our reaction to
the climate crisis, which is pretty horrific to this point, and
kind of a disaster.


David Roberts:   


You’ve said in previous interviews that lately you've gotten a
little bit more optimistic about the science and tech side of
this, and I think that's for good reason. I feel the same way.
The leaps and bounds being made now in clean technologies are
amazing; if clean energy just keeps getting cheaper as fast as
it's going now, it's going to be dirt cheap in five to 10 years,
and utopia awaits.


But then you look at this other track of American democracy
falling apart, income inequality, etc. … you could tell
completely different narratives about where we are in history and
where we're going. 


How do you reconcile the two: the positive tech story about
climate change and the total flaming-bag-of-s**t-dysfunction
political story? If you wanted to make a movie about 10 or 15 or
20 years from now, what does it look like? Do you have the
slightest f*****g clue?


Adam McKay:  


Stuff can change so fast. The example I always use, and it's a
common one, is that I remember being with my kids when they were
young, in the car, and they were like, “Dad, why is gay marriage
illegal?” because they had friends at school who had same-sex
parents. I was like, “you know, it's weird. Some people are hung
up on it. I don't know why they care.” 


“Is it ever going to be legal?” 


“You know, it doesn't look great politically.” 


Then three months later, it was legal, and my kids were like,
“you said!” and I was like, “I'm as shocked as you. I don't know
what happened. Joe Biden misspoke and then … Obama couldn’t back
off? I think that's what just made gay marriage. And it turns
out, people were way cooler with it than most people thought.” So
I mean, that was a crazy rate of change. 


I'm working with a group out of UCLA that's got some pretty
serious breakthroughs on removing carbon dioxide from the ocean,
and it's exciting stuff. They're nowhere near the scale to do it,
they'll need like a trillion dollars to really make a dent. But
is it possible? Technology doesn't advance in a linear way, and a
lot of times happens in spurts. So it's very possible you and I
could be talking in a year or two and we could be like, “holy
s**t, those guys from Carnegie Mellon, what do you know, they had
that breakthrough, and there was someone in the Pentagon who was
smart enough to go, ‘hey, let's move $100 billion from this B-52
bomber thing and do this,’ and we're actually rolling back some
carbon dioxide.” 


That could happen. But if I had to bet, the will and action and
awareness part of it is such a train wreck right now.


David Roberts:   


Sure. What if that happens and Donald Trump is president and
Republicans are in charge of both houses of Congress? Would it
even make a difference if there was a tech breakthrough in the
woods and no one heard?


Adam McKay:  


One hundred percent. The US just suddenly becomes not a player in
solving the climate crisis. All eyes go to Europe and China, and
the US is just out of the picture; we're the bad guys. I'm happy
with what's happening down in Brazil and with Chile, that we're
starting to see some progressive leaders step in down there, so
hopefully, they could be a part of it, too. And is it okay if
some other countries get on the stick? The Chinese are not dumb.
They know what's coming. Europe clearly knows what's
coming. 


But you're right, if the Republicans take over, which it looks
like they're going to, because the Democrats have just completely
face-planted — in three years, if the Democrats haven't done
anything and the Republicans stroll in, they're not giving power
back. We know what they're doing, and that may be all she wrote
for the US.


But then you may see some private industry. So that's the part
that I'm optimistic about. I also am just a big believer in pain.
Pain got me to lose 40 pounds. I had a very minor heart attack.
Pain got me to stop smoking regularly; I have to confess I still
cheat and have one or two on occasion. But that was pain, and I
do think there's some pain coming our way with this stuff. There
are fires we can't even imagine, storms we can't even imagine.
That could shock us into waking up very quickly, in like a
three-week period of time.


So I guess I just, in a really long-winded way, told you I have
no idea.


David Roberts:   


It's never been easy to predict the future, but it feels so
incredibly opaque now. I don't even know the basic valence.
Dystopia or utopia or somewhere in between, I couldn’t begin.


Adam McKay:  


I like your guess of somewhere in between. Man, if we solve some
of this and it becomes just crazy robber baron 3.0, like an 1880s
Gilded Age, I'm going to be frickin’ pissed. That's just the
grossest outcome, and you're probably right, they're going to try
and swing it that way. I don't think you're wrong. 


David Roberts:   


I feel like this is the history of America: when things get so
bad that the working class is about to revolt or go communist,
they'll give a little; they'll do a New Deal or whatever, just
enough to keep the basic system in place. That's what I could
envision happening on a large scale here.


Adam McKay:  


I think that's a good guess. Do you remember the Arab Spring,
when those revolutions were spreading? There's a story as part of
that that not enough people talk about, that Saudi Arabia just
cut checks for 25 grand for everyone in their country and handed
them out, and people were like, cool, and they didn't have a
revolution.


David Roberts:   


Is it that far off from what we did with the Covid relief bill?


Adam McKay:  


No. I just wish goddamn Biden would do it with student debt. It's
the only button he's got left to push, and they just won't do it.
They will not do it.


David Roberts:   


I want them to get the comet’s-hitting-in-2024 mindset. We need
to spend all the money we can, as fast as possible. 


Adam McKay:  


All of DC is designed not to let that mindset happen. Every
restaurant hallway, every bit of muzak playing is like, “don't
let anyone have that mindset.” But we'll see.


David Roberts:   


Let me ask you about Hollywood. I'm sure poor Leo DiCaprio
probably has answered this question 4 zillion times — it's
obligatory, you're asked every time you are interviewed at this
point — but there will be some people who say, “the last thing I
want is a bunch of rich, Hollywood, carbon-intensive-lifestyle,
private-plane-flying, etc. trying to act like they care about
climate change. If they cared, they would sell their yacht or
whatever.” How do you process all of that? How do you think about
that general critique?


Adam McKay:  


People think of Hollywood as some bizarre foreign country. I wake
up every morning, I swim in my pool with my three dolphins, I get
in my helicopter, I fly to my solid glass pyramid office.


No. I would say this: if it's a good faith argument, yeah, give
us s**t. I know Leo doesn't fly private anymore. We all are as
green as we can possibly be, making as much noise as we can. I'm
trying to do a bunch of different things; I'm not going to list
them because that just sounds pathetic. 


If someone's saying that to just avoid the subject, then f**k
that. That's b******t. But if someone's really saying, “hey, you
hypocrites, what about this? What about this?” I'm here for it.
Give us s**t. Is there something we can be doing better? Is there
something we can be more aware of? I think we have to get used to
that being a part of how we talk to each other, without being
defensive. If you told me right now, “hey, you guys never have
done this with your movie shoots, but you could do X, Y, and Z,”
I think I've got to be like, “oh, s**t, I never thought of that.
You're totally right.”


So I think it's good when it's done in good faith. When it's done
in bad faith as a way to just shuck off the whole discussion,
then I roll my eyes at it.


David Roberts:   


I think it's the latter most of the time, but who knows? 


Adam McKay:  


I'm playing a little bit dumb because I do go on social media and
90 percent of the time, it's the latter. No question about it.


David Roberts:   


In terms of climate’s presence in your own life, do you talk to
your kids about it? I have an 18-year-old and a 16-year-old. All
my life I've been talking about 2030, 2040, 2050, this or that
has to happen. They're going to be alive during those years, in
the prime of their friggin’ lives. I have gone back and forth
about how to think about that a million times. How do you think
about that? Do you talk to your daughters about it? How do they
process it?


Adam McKay:  


Yeah, we do. They saw the movie, obviously. My older daughter was
very emotional about it. Younger daughter loved it. It was
emotional. 


David Roberts:   


If I made a work of art that my 18-year-old showed open emotion
in response to, I’d be parading around the f*****g streets like a
king.


Adam McKay:  


I don't think they've ever had a reaction to anything I've done
like this. Going through the years, they’ve mostly tolerated what
I've done. Though they discovered the early comedies, their
friends like the early comedies, so they love Stepbrothers and
Anchorman and stuff.


But the way I talk to them is mostly the way we're talking right
now. What I say is, “this is very, very serious. It's the biggest
issue of our lifetime. It's huge. It's no joke. It's not like a
normal issue, it's a 1,000-times issue. However, we have
technology and science, and people can do amazing stuff when they
have the will and the direction. So don't get hopeless about
it.” 


During the pandemic, we couldn't go in our backyard because it
was filled with smoke from the Pasadena fires. Their aunt lived
up in Oregon, she had to evacuate her house because the AQI was
around 550. So they've already encountered this stuff. It's
already part of their life. I just tell them, “you don't have to
solve it all by yourself. Just find a couple little things you
can do. Make sure to talk about it, make sure to feel it in your
bones, and you'll find your way you can pitch in, and we're going
to do what we can do.” 


I think the trick is not to freak out. Even though many times I
am fully freaking out, my mantra is just, we can only do what we
can do. So if I ever get too freaked out, I remind them, or
remind myself, we can only do what we can do. That instantly
calms me down. 


I make movies, so we made a movie. We have probably more money
than we should, because our society is broken and screwed up, so
I'm going to try and use some of that money to do some other
stuff. We'll make little personal choices. We'll talk about it.
That's what we can do. A lot of it's about emotional tone and
providing the right perspective and sense of the moment. But it's
tricky, no question about it.


David Roberts:   


When you pivoted and did The Big Short, you out of nowhere went
from comedies that are dumb in a smart way to something that's
smart in a smart way and about an issue of substance. I think you
baffled people; a lot of people thought that was going to fall on
its face, and it didn't, and you've kept at it, and you've kept
succeeding at it. 


So I'm just wondering, what's the temperature among your peers in
Hollywood about making more of an effort to engage with social
issues? It's so fraught, for all the reasons we've discussed, but
you're making a go of it and succeeding. Is anybody going to
follow along? Have you talked to other filmmakers about this?


Adam McKay:  


One of the coolest things I heard as a reaction to this was that
a couple of other filmmakers were like, “hey, can I talk to you
about an idea that I have?” I actually did get some of that. I
think they saw, if I can take the right crosses that came with
those reviews and the savaging I took online and then in the end
have the movie find an audience like it did, I think they're
like, “s**t, if he can do that, we can do that.” 


Vice, when all is said and done, will probably break even, but
Big Short made a nice chunk of change. Succession — obviously
very different, because Jesse Armstrong writes that, but still a
show I direct the pilot, produce on — that's a very different
tone. We did Q: Into the Storm, the docuseries which was very
successful, got very high ratings for HBO. 


So I think what people are starting to see is, you can make money
doing this. It's not some altruistic thing. Audiences want to
hear what's going on, and it's a good thing — you can talk to
people about the real stuff that's happening and they're excited
by it. So it doesn't have to be altruistic, it doesn't have to be
pure business, there is this nice middle ground. 


Yeah, for the first time, three people actively reached out to me
that want to talk about ideas. I think it's bound to happen. You
can't live in the world we're living in right now and pretend
it's not going on. I think you're going to see more and more
people going for it, whether it's in a subtle way, an overt way,
a funny way, a horror movie. There are a thousand different ways
to tell the story of right now, and I think we're going to see
more of it.


David Roberts:   


I hope we don't end up in five years thinking, “oh, man, I wish
we hadn't told all those filmmakers to talk about the social
issues. What were we thinking?” I often think that when people
start talking about climate change: “oh, man, I miss when people
weren't talking about climate change.”


Adam McKay:  


Weren’t those good days? The year I always say is 1997. Do you
remember 1997? It just felt like no one gave a s**t about
anything. I know Clinton kind of sucked, there was stuff on the
horizon, the Republicans were starting to get a little crazy,
there was bad s**t, but oh my god, it felt like my seventh
birthday party, 1997. Oh, I miss it.


David Roberts:   


Final question, and I'm 75 percent serious about this: Have you
thought about making a movie about a reactionary movement that
takes hold in a democracy and grows and exploits weaknesses in
media and institutions to eventually take over and institute a
one-party autocratic state? Just spitballing here.


Adam McKay:  


I have my idea for my next movie, and it's not that, but it's a
close neighbor of what you just said. It's about two blocks up
and one block over. I will tell you this: from doing this movie
and from doing Vice, The Big Short, Succession, and Q: Into the
Storm, it does seem to always come back to big loads of dirty
money clogging up our system. If Don't Look Up, Vice, and The Big
Short were about heart attacks, dirty money is the plaque. It's
what's blocking the arteries. 


I think I have an idea that's kind of funny and interesting; I
haven't started writing yet, but I'm interested in it. As far as
the autocratic rule, we have a bunch of projects at our company
that are in development that circle around and get near that.
We're constantly looking for ways to play with that.


David Roberts:   


My other topic I want somebody to take on, that I have also been
thinking is un-fictionalize-able: A lot of the problems in our
country now are because the electoral college is fucked up, and
Senate representation is skewed, and gerrymandering; all these
very boring, procedural, structural, institutional issues are
playing a huge role in this minority being able to basically
control the country. How on earth do you get the American movie
public excited about filibusters? 


Adam McKay:  


We're doing a movie called Rat Fucked, starring Paul Dano, that's
about how they gerrymandered America — the story of who came up
with the idea. We've sold that, that's happening at Hulu. Another
idea I'm thinking of gets into a lot of that procedural stuff,
and I think I’ve found a way to wrap it in a fun bow. That stuff
is wildly interesting. I think it's just how it’s told to the
public; it's presented as boring. 


David Roberts:   


What you need is Margot Robbie in a bath talking about
filibusters.


Adam McKay:  


We need the “Margot Robbie in a bubble bath” channel where all
the news is read. But yeah, we are working on one about
gerrymandering that's actually already sold and set up, and then
this other one gets into a lot of that procedural stuff. That's
exactly why we started this company, Hyperobject Industries. I
believe that stuff is interesting, and that there is a way to do
it. We have a lot of projects circling around exactly what you're
talking about.


David Roberts:   


Awesome. Well, I will look forward to those. It’s a good time for
geeks in the movie world.


Adam McKay:  


Absolutely. We've always been pretty comfortable in the movie
world. Movie world’s always been kind to geeks.


David Roberts:   


Yes, but usually geeks trying to appeal to the vaguely imagined
jocks of their youth. Now they're just straightforwardly
appealing to one another.


Adam McKay:  


I do have to tell you, full disclosure, I've been lifting weights
this entire interview. 


David Roberts:


Are you getting swole?


Adam McKay:


I'm so swole. I'm all swoled up, bro.


David Roberts:   


It's time to go in front of the camera.


Adam McKay:  


Well, man, thanks for having me on. This was a pleasure. I can't
believe this is the first time. Like I said, I've been reading
your stuff and following you for a long time. Thank you for
everything you do.


David Roberts:   


Well, likewise, thanks for making this movie. Wow, did it stir
things up. You achieved that.


Adam McKay:  


It did. I hope it continues to.


Honest to god, that was maybe the most enjoyable conversation
I've had during the entire press run of this. I'm not kidding. I
needed that badly. My soul needed that.


David Roberts:   


I'm sure you've been going through it. Good luck enduring the
rest of it.


Adam McKay:  


Absolutely, man. Be well.


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