Adam McKay on ‘Don’t Look Up’: ‘An absurdist comedy that reflects how absurd our ignoring the climate crisis is’
“Don’t Look Up” is filled with so many Oscar winners — Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett and Mark Rylance — that it brings to mind those classic star-studded 1970s Irwin Allen disaster flicks “The Poseidon Adventure” and “The Towering Inferno.”
Oscar-winning director/co-writer/producer Adam McKay (“The Big Short,” “Vice”) didn’t mean to have that many well-known actors in one film.“But this is a movie about this time,” he explained in a recent Zoom conversation for Variety. “It’s built to be about the potential end of the livable atmosphere, distraction culture, clicks, all that kind of stuff. So it made sense to have these actors in it.”
He did create the character of Kate Dibiasky, the manic grad student in astronomy who discovers the massive comet hurtling toward earth, for Lawrence. “No one spits fiery truth better than Jen. She is physically incapable of lying and her lying truth is so enjoyable. Then the other actor I wrote for was Rob Morgan as Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe. And then Meryl Streep came in. What we started realizing was all the actors wanted to come on board because we were going to go for it. We were going to give into the giant black hole question mark of our times, which is what the F is going on?
But, he says, “we were going to do it with a sense of humor, we were going to do it with a playfulness. There were so many actors who were so hungry to take a whack at that. It just kept getting bigger. And a lot of them were ready to improvise an so it seemed to fit this movie.” This end-of-the-world black comedy is Netflix’s second most popular movie ever and it has gained a lot of attention this awards’ season. It’s been nominated at the PGA, WGA and SAG awards plus the Critics Choice.
Though the film was shot during the pandemic, McKay begin plotting it out before COVID. “We were already seeing tell-tale signs that our institutions were not working very well when it came to problem-solving. We had gone ten or 20 years without solving any problems. It started to become a joke among my friends.” The idea with the movie, he added, “was that the biggest story of all stories is the climate crisis. What if we could laugh at it? What if we could create an absurdist comedy that reflects how absurd our ignoring the climate crisis is?”
McKay sent the Oscar-nominated editor Hank Corwin and composer Nicholas Britell his original drafts. “I was like ‘guys, is this crazy? Can we laugh at this?’ I kind of feel like I need to laugh at it?’ I remember Nick, sending it to you and you were like ‘Absolutely.’”
The composer was excited to do something on such a large scale and “to sort of have this idea be within it. That was a really powerful thing.” Britell noted the always felt that “storytelling has that opportunity to sort of pass through ideas in a way that just understanding information can’t always do. If someone tells you something, it’s different than if you experience a story and feel that knowledge. “
While McKay was off shooting, Corwin and Britell would talk about the film. “I wasn’t convinced it was comedy,” said Corwin. “It felt like the great tragedy of our time, and we were living the great tragedy of our time. For me personally, I must say it evolved into a comedy and the cutting evolved as well. It became much sharper. I had to be more cognizant of the timing.”
But the timing alters drastically in the last part of the movie when people finally look up and see the comedy with their naked eyes. “It becomes almost a religious experience,” said Corwin “The whole tone of the film changes there and the tonality of the cutting changes. So a opposed to being sharp, when the film stops being a comedy the cutting becomes more lyrical.”
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