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 o