Adam McKay On New Film Script, Humor In The Face Of Imminent Disaster And ‘Winning Time’ Controversy
deadline.com“I tried on a lot of different emotional suits, and I tried the freaked-out-I-can’t-sleep-at-night. But, ultimately the people who survive keep their sense of humor.
I don’t think that has to be separate from being serious and emotional and profound. I think you can laugh about something while still recognizing that it is serious,” said Adam McKay, who did just that in his 2021 Oscar-nominated Netflix planetary-disaster satire Don’t Look Up.He’s at work on a new feature script now, he said at a Q&A for the Tribeca Festival.“If the last movie was about the outcome of what’s broken about us, that we’re staring at the collapse of the livable climate, this one is more about the actual arterial blocks in our hearts, what’s causing it, which is, of course, big, dirty money.
And it’s a comedy as well … blended with drama, but I would overall call it a comedy,” is all he’d say, rather cryptically. He’s also writing the HBO Max anthology series The Uninhabitable Earth based on the bestselling David Wallace-Wells book.“We have less than eight years before we cross the tipping point of a livable planet.
No one is even arguing with that and yet we are all like ‘Johnny Depp, Amber Heard.’ So you have to laugh at it, but you also have to get to work on it,” he said.McKay came from SNL, sketch comedy, co-founded Funny or Die and made Anchorman and a handful of comedies with Will Ferrell, whom he called “the least neurotic creative person I have ever met.” He said that “with every one of the comedies that we made, we would have a conversation about the political, social economic center of the movie, and say ‘Let’s never tell anyone that we had this conversation.” In Step Brothers, it’s consumerism — “that the customer is always right,
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