Adam McKay Has Become the Grown-Up in the Room. He’s as Surprised as You Are

A few hours before I speak with Adam McKay, news breaks that Staples Center, home to the Los Angeles Lakers, has entered into a new naming-rights deal that will turn it into the Crypto.com Arena. It strikes me, as it does McKay, that this is in line with the American dingbattery that he has taken as his subject since he started making films in 2004, with Anchorman: the Legend of Ron Burgundy. “I’m pretty sure we were making that joke years ago,” he says from his office in Los Angeles.

McKay’s early movies, made mostly with Will Ferrell, were written as broad comedies, but in hindsight look more like slightly exaggerated portraits of a nation in a permanent state of tragic, hilarious crisis. He moved into a slightly darker, more realistic register with The Big Short, in 2015, and has mostly remained there since, co-creating the acid legacy-media satire Succession and swinging for the fences with the theatrical Dick Cheney biopic Vice.

Don’t Look Up, which hits theaters this week before releasing on Netflix December 24th, is another grand effort. With a cast that includes Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as astrophysicists, Meryl Streep as a tramp-stamped Trump-y president, and Timothée Chalamet as a mulleted, earnestly religious punk named Yule, the movie is a madcap, maximum-volume, frequently hysterical look at how the world might (or might not) respond to the threat of a life-extinguishing comet hurtling toward earth. Without spoiling too much, it is optimistic about our ability to change—and quite pessimistic about whether we will.

Strictly speaking, Don’t Look Up is about the climate crisis—and, as McKay puts it, the way “we’ve broken the way we communicate with each other.” But like all of McKay’s movies, it is also about our need to reassure ourselves that everything is fine, even when it’s not—a tendency that emerges in, say, wistfulness for a sports arena named after an office-supplies company. “It’s sort of like how people are nostalgic for Bill Clinton,” he says. “Which, I hate to break it to you, but Bill Clinton was a disaster. During Trump, people were talking about George W. Bush with a far-off, wistful look in their eyes,” he says. “When things are going downhill, I guess you miss the earlier part of downhill.”

I was reading an interview of yours from a decade ago, when you were promoting Anchorman 2. You said something to the effect of, “We make movies about people who are pretending they’re in control, or who want to feel like they’re in control, but they’re not.” That strikes me as a question you continue to prosecute. It’s just that the subjects have changed a little bit.

Adam McKay: I was telling someone the other day about a moment that stayed with me, and I didn’t know it when I was filming it, but I keep thinking about it. It’s when the two young guys in The Big Short played by Finn Wittrock and John Magaro go into Lehman Brothers, and Lehman Brothers has collapsed, and it’s empty. They walk onto the floor of Lehman Brothers, and one of them just says, “Where are all the grownups?”

We shot the scene, and we put it in the movie. It’s a good scene. But I keep thinking about that moment. It really does kind of describe how the last 20 or 25 years have felt like a constant state of, Wait a minute. No one’s stopping this? The trick is, you can come awfully close, and especially as I’ve gotten older, to sounding like a cranky old man going, “Whatever happened to honor and integrity?” But in this case, it’s empirically backed up by data and science. So I have to constantly remind myself that, Oh, no, no, we know how much CO2 is in the atmosphere. We know how bad the income inequality has gotten. We know that wages are flat for 40 years. It really starts to cast me as the neighbor in Dennis the Menace at a certain point. I can start to sound awfully cranky.

I think that makes you the grown-up now.

And maybe that’s truly what terrifies me. I mean, I’ll never forget years ago, back in the ’90s, I wrote for Michael Moore’s show The Awful Truth for a summer. I’ll never forget Michael Moore saying to me, “I don’t want to be doing this. I shouldn’t be the guy who’s on camera, but I’m one of the few people that seems to be doing it.”

And I constantly tell people I’d rather be making Step Brothers 2. I’d rather be writing sketches. But it just feels like it’s insane at this point, not to do stories about what’s happening. Although now that I’m saying it, maybe there’s a really subversive way to do Step Brothers 2. But anyway, yeah: If I’m one of the grownups, we are definitely in a lot of trouble.

People like to divide your career into two parts. There are the big, broad comedies of the early 2000s, and then you move into more serious fare. But they strike me as all involved in the same project. Which is, broadly, exploring this idea of American stupidity, or American decline. I wonder how you think about that trajectory, or that spectrum.

Early on, we didn’t know that we were tracking such a building decline, but we definitely knew something was wrong. I mean, Ferrell and I jokingly called our first three movies The Mediocre White Man Trilogy. I feel like the whole thing has been one continuous line, going back to doing theater in Chicago at Second City, the Upright Citizens Brigade, and iO. It was always a mixture of funny stuff, commentary, and trying to screw with the audience. It’s been the same kind of approach ever since. And I definitely love to laugh. So I would say the new movie is that blend kind of to a T. It’s definitely a comedy, but it’s a dark comedy, with some serious tragedy in it as well. And especially as you see reality around us become more and more characterized by that blend of the absurd, the farcical, the terrifying, and the truly sad, that’s the stew that we’re eating from. That’s what we’re putting our spoon in every day. I went way too far with the stew analogy, but you know where I’m going.

One of the things that’s striking about your early work is this real confrontational streak in your comedy—wanting to shake audiences out of their complacency. And that waxes and wanes in your other movies, but it is back in a huge way in Don’t Look Up. How did you think about this as a sort of grabbing-people-by-the-lapels kind of movie?

It’s just always what I’ve loved, it’s always what I’ve responded to: This Is Not a Movie, the early Zucker, Zucker, and Abrahams stuff, “Boy Trapped in Refrigerator Eats Own Foot,” Andy Kaufman, live prank. Is this real or not? Battle of Algiers. I love that line.

To this day, if the technology hadn’t gotten so good, I think I would still do crank phone calls. One of the highlights of my entire life is when I called the Philadelphia Phillies when I was in college and almost pulled off a trade, pretending to be a GM. I mean, without exaggeration, I view that moment with as much pride as any movie or sketch or TV show we’ve ever done. So yeah, it’s a good feeling when we’re putting out something and I have a slight worry that I’m going to get in trouble. And without a doubt, I have that feeling about Don’t Look Up. There’s a feeling like, “Oh, I could really get in trouble for this.”

What made that call to the Phillies such a resonant thing?

Oh my God, it was incredible. I was with some friends of mine. We were really stoned, and I said, kind of to no one in particular, “I’m going to call the Phillies and make a trade.” This is 1989. I called the general number, and I was like, “Yeah, it’s Lou Gorman, from Boston. Is Bill in?” And they’re like, “Hold, please.” And there was another person, and it was like, “Bill Giles’s office.”

And I was like, “Yeah, it’s Lou from Boston. Is Bill around?” “One second, please.” And then the phone picked up, and he’s like, “Hey, Lou, how you doing?” “I’m good. How you doing?” He’s like, “I’m all right. What are you calling for?” And I said, “We need a utility infielder. I’ve always liked Randy Ready. What do you say?” There was a pause, and he goes, “Who is this?” And I hung up.

There’s nothing more exciting than when the fiction bleeds into the reality, when you see the two of them start to cross. A lot of my fondest memories are those moments: where Dwayne Johnson and Samuel Jackson—at that time, or maybe in history, two of the biggest action stars ever—in the first 10 minutes of [The Other Guys], jump off the building and die. The excitement of seeing that with an audience, I just got such a thrill out of that. And it turns watching the movie into a bit of a live event. That feeling is always so exciting for me, both as a viewer and someone who makes stuff.

Well, there’s no version of that brave, terrifying thing quite as bold as the way you end this movie.

Someone asked me why I made the movie. And really, you could almost say it’s one simple reason, which is we’ve watched thousands and thousands of movies, whether they’re Marvel or action films or thrillers, and everything always works out in a nifty bow in the end, time after time, for decade after decade.

Clearly, [Don’t Look Up] is an analogy or an allegory for the climate crisis. And the idea that it doesn’t end with a nifty bow was the whole drive. I mean, that’s why I wrote the script. So, there’s two things going on. One is to hit the audience not in a prank way, but in an emotional way. It’s a different kind of live event, the way this ending hits an audience. But also, and I include myself in this, I do think a little bit of what’s going on with our just puzzling, over-the-top inaction over the climate, almost cartoonish at this point, is that I think we have been turned into audience members. I think we assume someone’s going to figure it out. We assume there are grownups that are going to do it. And we forget that it actually takes real acts and real work to get to do things. We’re all waiting for someone to solve it. And so, in this case, I did think there was a power to the narrative of a movie kind of screwing with that expectation.

How early did you know how it was going to end?

Oh, from the second we had the idea. There was never one moment ever where it was going to end with the hero coming in to rescue the day. I don’t want to give it away, but I knew the nifty bow was never, ever going to be the case. I considered a slightly less definitive ending. I had one that was a little muddier, and it felt wrong. And it’s funny. Audiences now, they can smell it. They know it. One of the most remarkable experiences we had on this movie—I’ve never been so nervous test-screening a movie as test-screening this. And you know what? This is crazy, and it says a lot about the times we live in. It was their favorite part of the movie. I’m not kidding—hands down. Everyone was like, “Thank God they didn’t end with the cliche ending. I was so worried they were going to do it.” One of the most surprising reactions from an audience I’ve ever seen in my entire life. And in a weird way, maybe a little foreboding, and at the same time, hopeful. Maybe it’s both.

I know in the past you’ve screened cuts of your movies for people you’ve consulted for research, or for friends, or academics. I’m curious if there was a response from someone that really surprised you as you were showing this to people.

There was one. So we do early screenings for the actors and their agents. And I won’t say who it was, but a very esteemed and revered agent was so emotionally hit by the movie that she got in her car and backed her car into a pole. And then the next day, wrote me an email saying, “I’m looking at the giant dent in my car, and I’m going to change my whole life.” And I was like, “Wow.” I’m very clear about the fact that that is one reaction. I do not expect that to be the reaction to the movie, but it’s the single most surprising reaction I think I’ve ever had to anything I’ve ever done.

You’ve said you wrote the script for Don’t Look Up, and then put it away for a while, and then took it back out during the pandemic and worked on it. Did it get more cynical over that time, or less?

Did I get more cynical? No, no. I was exactly where I was at, but I did have to make it a little crazier, because the way it was written was a little too even-handed. [Because] even the craziest elements I then found out were true. Of course there are several companies that are trying to mine comets and asteroids. Of course NASA has a program where they goof around with it. Of course the original comet denial I had in the script turned out to be times 10 in the real world with COVID. I had one section I wrote where the comet spending bill included a tax break for the top .01%, and then that actually happened: the COVID spending bill that Trump put through had a tax cut for the .01%.

The only thing that stopped me from getting too cynical was that, during the pandemic, I was reading a lot more about carbon removal technology, carbon capture, renewables. I actually started to get quite optimistic about the science side of it, and then way more pessimistic about the political and economic will side of it. So I’m an incredibly optimistic pessimist.

I also found the movie to be, in a really interesting way, incredibly pessimistic about the concept of celebrity. DiCaprio plays this character who becomes famous and has a platform. And that is in some ways helpful to the message he wants to get out, but in some ways it’s harmful. I wonder how you thought about the cult of American celebrity when you were putting this together.

If someone like Greta Thunberg is trying to start a movement, you can predict the first four or five moves that the entrenched powers are going to chuck at her. And one of the tried and true ones is: you turn the person into a celebrity, and you splinter them from the movement. So I was trying to show that’s one of the ways they’ll get you. They’re going to turn you into a celebrity, they’re going to turn you into a hypocrite. They’re going to try and parse your entire life to conflate it and blow it up, so it looks as hypocritical as Exxon. And they’re going to find your low moment. They’re going to pay you a ton of money. There’s a lot of moves they do.

It’s a little bit like in The Godfather, when Michael Corleone goes to light the mortician’s cigarette and his hand doesn’t shake. Turns out he’s a sociopath, and he’s perfect for this. Well, turns out when Leo gets in the line of fire of the cameras, he’s actually quite good. And it’s more of an accident of how his adrenaline is distributed to his body, how he happens to look when his beard is shaved. It’s one of the worst Greek curses you can throw on someone.

When you put a new project into the world, people seem eager to play the whatabout card. What about your own celebrity? What about your own life? What are you doing, Adam McKay? What do you make of that?

It’s a tricky spot, because basically you have two ways you can answer that. Number one, you could say, “None of your business.” And then the person could say, “Well, you’re a hypocrite. You just don’t want to answer it.” Or I could start listing all the things I do, which is awfully pathetic and no matter what is never going to be enough. So I would just say to people that ask that question, I’m probably not doing as much as I could do, but I’m doing a fair amount that I’m pretty comfortable with.

But I would also say yes, criticize me on that front. I’m going to go on some airplanes on this. Now, I double-bought carbon offsets: Netflix has carbon offsets, and I then went and bought more carbon offsets. There were third-party verified companies. It’s still kind of bullshit. So people should call me out on that. But don’t use calling me out on that as an excuse to just give up on the whole subject. That’s the part that I think is not sincere. We’ve all got to be accountable, and we’ve got to really talk about: do we fly anymore? Do we start taking boats? That’s a conversation I’m here for. And just by living in this world, there’s no way I’m not dirty to some degree. So I do get that question a lot, and I think it all depends on how sincere the question is. If it’s a sincere question, fucking A, call me out. If it’s not a sincere question and it’s an excuse, you don’t get the list of shit that I’m doing, you don’t get to hear everything. And you think I’m a creep, no matter what. So have a good day.

If this movie is anything, it’s a call to arms. You’ve done your part [in making it], and now maybe someone else does theirs. The desire to just instantly be like, I don’t want to, stop pointing it out to me, I’m surprised when I see that. What do you make of that impulse?

I think in our society, we are living in a grind, most people. Wages have been flat for 40 years. We don’t really have universal healthcare. Everyone’s in debt. Student debt is crippling. Minimum wage is $7 an hour. People are terrified. The government isn’t working, people are capped out on stress. And I think what happens is sometimes when you bring these subjects up, people are basically just saying, “I can’t. I can’t do it.” It’s almost like when you bang your knee on a table and you curse out the dog. It’s just, “Well, who the fuck are you? What do you know? What are you doing?” And I think that’s probably really what it is.

And then I would say the other part is that a lot of cynicism has been strategically pumped into our culture in the US by a lot of public action groups, lobbying groups, Prosperity for America, Fox News, and even to some degree MSNBC and CNN. So you mix those two things, and I think it’s actually surprising more people don’t react that way.

I’m curious about the difference between making movies or television shows that are about real people, as you’ve done in the last couple years, and then inventing from whole cloth. What brought you back from sort of the land of historical work, and what’s different about doing pure satire?

I mean, a simple answer is that Dick Cheney brought me back. That guy is the hardest nut I have ever encountered—so secretive, so hard to penetrate. We did so much work. We hired our own journalists. He really has turned himself into a shadow. It was one of the hardest projects I’ve ever worked on in my life. I, without exaggeration, had a heart attack.

And afterwards I had two reactions. Number one, I’ve got to do something on the climate, because holy moly, this is barreling towards us, way faster than I thought it was. And number two, I need to laugh.

Has your perspective on Cheney, or on that movie and the way it was received, changed since it came out?

The big thing that was really incredible was seeing Liz Cheney come out for gay marriage. [The Republican Congresswoman from Wyoming, whose sister Mary is gay, was opposed to gay marriage until earlier this year. “I was wrong. I love my sister very much,” she told 60 Minutes.] It’s one thing for her to go against Trump. But when she came out for gay marriage, there was a part of me that was like, that can’t be an accident. I saw that on social media, people went after her because of the movie. There were a lot of people saying, “You betrayed your sister, you betrayed your family.” And it wasn’t by accident that we ended the movie with that. Because the one thing everyone said about Dick Cheney was he loved those daughters, and he loved that family. And in the end, the family shattered apart because of politics, because of that anti-gay stance that Liz took. Then to see her come out for gay marriage? I don’t know what to make of that. I like to think we had something to do with that, but I have no way to… I know the Cheneys hated the movie. I know they really hated it. It wasn’t a passing annoyance. So I was quite proud of that. We hit him in the real way.

And then the other surprise was that we ended the movie with the unraveling of America, and I was surprised that people sort of rolled their eyes. Like, “Oh, relax. That’s a bit much.” So that was a moment where I woke up to the idea that a lot of people think we can put this back in the 1997 box. I think that’s now changed.

I went for an operatic ending. I wasn’t in any way trying to be clever. And I was surprised to get shit from people that said, “Well, that’s not so clever.” No, we’re falling off a cliff. I think I said at one point during a Q&A for Vice, “Look, this is not a cool movie.” This is not a clever movie. This movie has pit stains. This movie is waving its arms frantically. And I would say that’s a pretty good description of most of the stuff that I make. It’s not cool. It’s not Mike Nichols. It’s not sly.

I’m running through the endings of your other movies in my head now. Step Brothers literally has Will Ferrell singing opera at the end. And then there’s Don’t Look Up. These are not, like, quiet endings. Coming off a movie that is about endings, how do you think about endings?

Even if you look at Talladega Nights, we play that Pat Benatar song. They kiss in front of an American flag. It’s way over the top. Anchorman’s my favorite, because it’s a big dramatic ending, but it’s utterly empty. Ron Burgundy does nothing. Nothing’s really resolved. Nothing’s been figured out. He never really apologizes.

But yeah, I think you’re right. The endings are getting way bigger and way more climactic. I don’t know if I could go any bigger than the ending I’ve just done. I have my next movie in mind. I actually know how that one ends. I will see how it works out, but it doesn’t end with the fall of America, or the end of planet earth.