Adam McKay Made ‘Don’t Look Up’ Because Climate Crisis Is Not Years Away, “It’s Right Now” – Contenders Film: The Nominees

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Adam McKay is known for, among other things, his blistering satires, Vice and The Big Short among them. His latest, the four-time Oscar-nominated Don’t Look Up, takes aim at our ignorance of climate change, our politics and our obsession with tech.Speaking on a panel during Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees event, McKay explained how the idea for Don’t Look Up germinated for him.“It came about from the dawning awareness that the climate crisis, which I think a lot of us always thought was 50, 80, 100 years away,” he said. “And in the last four or five years it started to hit me that it’s right now.

And that a lot of the modelling that we’ve seen has been incredibly optimistic. And in fairness the scientists were telling us that all along.

And so, I started to get this bad feeling in my stomach. And as someone who writes and directs and produces, you get that kind of feeling and you want to make a movie.”A conversation with journalist David Sirota really ignited the idea for the film though, he said. “He made a joke about how ignoring the climate crisis is like the asteroid’s going to hit in Armageddon and no one cares.

And I just thought it was such a great, simple, emotional idea. That was it. We dove in.”Don’t Look Up follows a pair of low-level astronomers, played by Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio, as they discover a meteorite is going to render the planet extinct and try to explain the situation to a self-interested president played by Meryl Streep.With McKay on the panel were his frequent collaborators, producer Kevin Messick and composer Nicholas Britell.Messick said his working relationship with McKay is “really fun,” adding, “I am in the luxurious position of being one of the first to read great