Don't Look Up is top of the Netflix charts; its creator talks up his Cork links
Jonah Hill, Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence in Don't Look Up.
When Oscar-winning director Adam McKay started visiting Ireland on a regular basis, he was struck by how obsessed everyone was with The Simpsons.
“The Simpsons is like the national show,” he says. “You talk about the Simpsons a lot. It’s popular in the United States. But not like it is in Ireland. I thought that was very telling, that the sharp, biting satire of The Simpsons, its absurdity, resonates. And then I noticed, too, an extra love for movies that we’ve done like Anchorman and Step Brothers. Irish audiences really appreciate them.”
With the aforementioned, endlessly quotable Anchorman (“that escalated quickly”) among his achievements, McKay (53) is indisputably one of the great comedy directors of the 21st century. However, in recent years he has stepped sideways into satire. He won an Academy Award for The Big Short, his pithy 2015 deconstruction of the American mortgage crisis.
His latest feature, Don’t Look Up, is a pointed commentary on humanity’s head-in-the-sand attitude to the climate crisis, featuring a gold standard cast including Leonard DiCaprio, Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence.
McKay is also a proud Irish-American, who, pre-pandemic, would flee the frenzy of Hollywood for his lakeside home in deepest Cavan. “My friends in Ireland ask me – ‘really, Cavan?’” he says. “I hate to let the secret out of the bag but it’s beautiful and peaceful and we’re right on this big lake. It’s stunning. I love that it’s out of the way. It worked out well. We got a good deal. It couldn’t be a better place for my purposes, which are mostly to write and for my family to come out and get away from it all.”
Much of Don’t Look Up was written in Cavan, in that silence by the lake. The film is an absurdist farce that imagines what would happen were scientists to discover a huge comet on collision course with earth. The answer, McKay posits, is that people would be too distracted by social media and other inanities to take the threat seriously. Or they would flat-out deny the science and assume the experts were part of a conspiracy.
This was intended as a pointed commentary on the world’s unwillingness to grapple with the clear and present danger posed by the melting ice-caps and rising sea levels. But then the pandemic happened and the tin-foil hatted anti-vax movement sprang up. Suddenly, Don’t Look Up took on an even stronger resonance. It captures the preposterousness of our times like nothing else.
“I wrote it before Covid,” say McKay. “And even when I wrote it the climate crisis wasn’t quite as active as it is now. That seems to have picked up. Reality is coming fast and it is coming hard. In the future maybe my script has to be even crazier.”
Don’t Look Up is political satire with a difference. It resists the temptation to take sides or to project its own affiliations. That makes for a pleasant change from most American political comedy, which usually comes down firmly on one or other extreme of the ideological divide.
So while McKay gives us a cartoonish and idiotic president, the character, portrayed by Meryl Streep, is not a lazy Donald Trump clone. She is, rather, a sort of composite of Hilary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Veep. That isn’t to say McKay is shy about his views. He’s a progressive who, in the last US presidential cycle, campaigned for Bernie Sanders, the closest mainstream American politics comes to socialist.
“The story of American over the last 40 years, 45 years, is definitely the rise of right wing extremism,” says McKay. “But mostly it’s big money taking over everything. And that includes what used to be our left, which his now almost centre right with the Democrats. And then [you have] the right-wing extreme right. The media owned by corporations. I think that’s the story. Big money took over all our institutions. So, yeah, everyone gets a little shot [in Don’t Look Up], including Hollywood, including myself.”
McKay started coming to Ireland in the mid-1990s, when he was writing for Saturday Night Live. His mother’s family is from Cork, his father is from Tyrone. McKay actually welcomed in the new millennium in a holiday cottage in rural Cork though, two decades on, he cannot recall the particulars.
“I remember a beautiful house up on a hill overlooking a green valley. I first came to Ireland with some friends in 1995 and loved it. It wasn’t something that was conscious: ‘Oh, I have relatives my great grandparents are from Ireland’. I felt so comfortable. The people were wonderful. Sitting around having a pint, having conversation for three hours – ‘oh this is what I like to do’. I don’t know if that’s in my blood or it so happens I like Ireland. If I had been Armenian, would I have had this reaction? I think I might.”
It was while working on Saturday Night Live that McKay met Will Ferrell. The two became friends and collaborators and enjoyed huge success with Anchorman, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Rick Bobby (a satire of Nascar racing) and Step Brothers. Sadly, the pair recently had a falling out, reportedly over McKay’s decision not to cast Ferrell in Winning Time, his upcoming HBO series about the LA Lakers basketball team of the 1980s.
This was revealed in a recent Vanity Fair profile of McKay which suggested Ferrell had cut off contact from the director after it was announced that John C Reilly (his co-star in Step Brothers) would play Lakers owner Jerry Buss.
“It’s like having your colonoscopy footage broadcast in Times Square, with the heading “Mr Adam McKay”,” says McKay of the Vanity Fair piece. “It’s what happens now. Social media plucks pieces. Other sites aggregate and, boom, before you know it’s on 100 other outlets.
"Initially, it always feels strange. But then you remember the world we live in. Everybody’s busy. It feels worse for you than it does for everyone else. The part that’s not so fun about it is that it’s distorting. It’s not the whole truth. It’s a tiny little piece. Suddenly it’s the answer for everyone. But boy, it’s quite a world we live in.”
Since moving on from straight comedy, McKay has had his finger squarely on the zeitgeist. The Big Short was a zinging adaptation of Michael Lewis’ non-fiction book about the collapse of the US mortgage market which triggered the financial crisis (and bankrupted Ireland). It was nominated for six Oscars, and McKay walked away with the gong for Best Adapted Screenplay.
His other big hit is Succession, the HBO comedy-drama about a wealthy media family that McKay executive produced and for which he directed the pilot. Was he surprised the show, which has just concluded its third season, has become such a phenomenon?
“I was excited about it. We made the pilot and I saw the first couple of episodes come rolling in. I thought, ‘oh this is one of the best things I’ve seen’. That doesn’t always translate to popularity."
McKay points out he's been involved in other projects that he's been equally enthused about but they haven't taken off in the same manner.
“So I’m not surprised it’s done well. But I am surprised it’s gone gangbusters like it has. I do think audiences are hungry for material that goes inside and understands this twisted, crazy world we are in. Audiences are sophisticated; they want to be challenged, they want different things. It’s heartening. I’ve got to say I’ve loved the show right from the beginning. When I saw those first rough cuts, I was ‘oh this is good…this is one of my favourite things that we’ve done’.”
Succession recently became a trending topic for an unexpected reason when the New Yorker published a profile of actor Jeremy Strong. It portrayed him as a Daniel Day-Lewis-style obsessive, who carried the idea of method acting to ludicrous extremes. In the aftermath of the piece, there was a lot of jeering at Strong.
A number of friends and collaborators have since come out in his defence including Jessica Chastain, Aaron Sorkin – and McKay, who had actually sounded out Strong for Succession and the part of tragic rich kid Kendall Roy, having previously cast him in The Big Short.
“Jeremy’s a tremendous actor,” he says. “Part of it wasn’t necessarily the profile piece but what happened to it on social media afterwards. People were cherry-picking sections of it and mocking him. The funny thing about it was that everything they were laughing at is why we cast him. He’s supposed to be in the show like it wasn’t a comedy. We put him in that role because he is so sincere and method.
"And then the other cast, they all have different roles in the show. He’s a friend of mine. He’s such a sweet, lovely guy. I just felt for him. We know how it goes nowadays with aggregation and social media. It can chew you up and spit you out in a couple of days. I reminded Jeremy the storm will pass. And it seems to have passed.”
McKay’s future projects include the aforementioned Winning Time. He’s also working on a biopic of Elizabeth Holmes, the medical tech wunderkind who fell to earth when her blood test company Theranos was revealed to be making false claims about its technology. Holmes is currently on trial in Los Angeles and if convicted could face 20 years in prison. It is a real-life morality play that could be told either as tragedy or dark comedy. How does McKay plan on approaching it?
“I am inclined to play it pretty dramatic,” he says. “But I don’t know yet as that story has yet to be fully told. Man, what a crazy story. But we’ll see what happens.”
Don’t Look Up is in cinemas now and is released on Netflix on Friday December 24
