A question is rolling inside Adam McKay’s brain: If danger comes, will people respond? He writes a comet disaster comedy, and sets off to make it. Then, a pandemic hits. A new question haunts McKay: Am I out of my mind?
A question is rolling inside Adam McKay’s brain: If danger comes, will people respond? He writes a comet disaster comedy, and sets off to make it. Then, a pandemic hits. A new question haunts McKay: Am I out of my mind?
Narrator:
It's 2019, and there's a book on Adam McKay's nightstand called The Uninhabitable Earth. As you can guess, the book is not cheerful. Not exactly the bedtime reading material you'd expect from the man who used to be head writer at SNL, co-founded the website Funny or Die and wrote and directed movies like Stepbrothers and Anchorman. Reading all about the consequences of global warming filled Adam with dread.
Adam McKay:
I think the scale and horror of what a radically warmed atmosphere is going to do to us and the way that David Wallace Wells wrote about it so specifically was truly jarring. We're screwed and we're screwed much faster than everyone thought.
Narrator:
Adam is not alone in the bedroom. His wife of 22 years, director Shira Piven, would very much like to go to sleep.
Shira Piven:
Right before bed, he would just start to talk about how bad the climate is. He would get so agitated that I would feel like... "Did I... Is it my fault? Does he need me to change the climate?"
Narrator:
When Adam read the latest United Nations report on climate change, the facts about our coming planetary collapse were so dire that he did not sleep for two days. As much as Shira loves her husband and admires his obsessions, she got tired of hearing his fears.
Shira Piven:
A lot of us just feel like we're so overwhelmed. We don't know how to manage these feelings, this world. We're just going to find a little niche, and the way that Adam's mind seems to work is... kind of what his super power is that some tiny part of him is like, "Okay, I can do something really big."
Adam McKay:
I think we all know how to react when there's a killer with an ax, when there's... your house is actually on fire, but this is a million times worse, and how do we get people to realize this is a clear and present danger? How close does the danger have to be for us to have the proper response?
Narrator:
This is the question rolling inside Adam McKay's brain. Luckily, since his family's avoiding him, he has the space to think, and the idea for his next movie reveals itself.
Adam McKay:
A analogy or metaphor that kept popping up was the idea of an asteroid hitting Earth. And if an asteroid was going to hit earth, you wouldn't hear people saying, "Ah, that's not for six months or a year," like they do with global warming or a bunch of other issues. And then at some point, I was just like, "That's the movie." Sometimes, it's that simple.
Narrator:
As Adam worked on other projects, his mind kept getting pulled back to this idea.
Adam McKay:
I was like, "Shit, I should be writing that script, man. It just feels like..." I don't know why, but I was like, "I should be writing that script right now."
Narrator:
So in December of 2019, Adam McKay packed his bags and his fears and flew to Ireland.
Eugene Moore:
They're talking somebody local is going to buy it, or somebody from Dublin, or something like that. But when they hear the American bought it, of course, all wondering who he was.
Narrator:
Eugene Moore is the caretaker of a home near Lough Sheelin, a lake whose name translates to Lake of the Fairy Pool. Here in this flat, green stretch of central Ireland, there are more animals than people.
Eugene Moore:
A farmer next door has lots of sheep, and there's sheep, and mostly pigs. There's a lot of pig farms around here. Pig farms. Mushroom farms.
Narrator:
This is Adam's sanctuary. It's where he could find the piece to write, where he would be conscious of the beautiful planet his comet script must defend and protect. However, when the locals first heard an American comedian was coming to Lough Sheelin, they had a different celebrity in mind.
Eugene Moore:
You see, the rumor around here was Will Ferrell had bought this house. Everybody thought Will Ferrell, and even still, people come to me and ask, "When is Will Ferrell coming home? When is, Will Ferrell coming?" I just play along and say, "Well, I think he's coming in July or August." Just for a laugh.
Narrator:
Adam's movies do not play at the local theater, which prefers to screen old Westerns starring John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.
Eugene Moore:
I haven't seen any of Adam's movies at all advertised over here. I don't think he got this far. I'm not really a movie person. I wouldn't like sitting for two hours watching a movie, and I'm not a movie person at all. I'm a more of an outdoor person.
Narrator:
Nevertheless, Adam McKay made an impression.
Eugene Moore:
The first time I met him, I didn't realize he was such a big man, because I'm only five-foot-three or four, and he was six-foot-four or five. I couldn't believe it. Adam arrived in his car and got out. I thought he'd never stop getting up. He was that tall. But to shake his hand, it was something else, like massive. Jesus, big man.
Narrator:
Adam moved into his quiet lakeside Irish home set on 12 wooded acres and began to write. Each day, Eugene would bring him bread, milk, and coffee in the morning and light his fireplace after dark.
Eugene Moore:
He was so focused on his movie, and I have never seen buttons on a typer being banged so quick. He was so fast on it. I was in the room one time. I was cleaning out the fire, setting the fire for him, and he was just like, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, like a piano. He never stopped.
Adam McKay:
I was pretty much alone in the house except for an occasional visit from Eugene, and every time he would walk in, I would almost like start. I would go like, "Ah!" Because I was so deep in writing. I think he was like, "Is this guy all right?"
Narrator:
Adam was spending so much time hunched over his computer that Eugene started to get concerned.
Eugene Moore:
But he was very, very, very tense and preoccupied. He needed to break from the computer, from writing. He needed to get out. So then, we decided we'd take him out for a pint. We walked in the pub, and you know local people in a rural area, they'd be wondering like, "Who the fuck is he? What's he doing here?" You know what I mean? A friend of mine came over and looked at Adam, looked up at his face, said, "God, you are a big man," and just walked away. Casually just walked away. He never said no more to him. It was very funny. God, he really enjoyed himself in the pub night.
Narrator:
A month later, when the script was nearly done, Shira and their daughters reunited with Adam in Ireland. At the end of his final day of writing, Adam collapsed, dead asleep. Shira, still jet-lagged, wanted to read what her husband had written, so at 5:30 in the morning, as Adam slept calmly beside her, Shira pick up the script and began to read. It was the story of two insignificant astronomers who discover a giant, hurtling comment that will destroy the Earth in six months and 14 days.
Shira Piven:
And I got to the end, and I just started crying. And so, I was just in bed crying, reading the end of the script. He was sleeping next at me. I'm like, "I can't be crying, because I'm going to wake him up, and he has to get up and..." So, I was trying to not cry, but I was really, really moved by the end of the script.
Narrator:
Her husband had purged his anxieties, but difficult times were over. It's time to party.
Eugene Moore:
And then on New Year's Eve, we had a party in the house, and Adam got me to invite all the neighbors in the area. Adam did ask me to ask the neighbors who I thought would be suitable, because there is some neighbors that's kind of alcoholics.
Shira Piven:
Adam was like, "Yeah, I don't think a lot of people are going to show up. It's just a couple." Anyway, there was a lot of people in our house. People were drinking. People were drunk. We were playing music. And the thing about Ireland is people just... People you wouldn't expect will suddenly break into song or pick up an instrument.
Eugene Moore:
Neighbors were here, were playing the fiddles, the guitars. Shira was playing the piano. Adam was playing the vibrating... The box. Sitting on the box and banging away on this thing. And as Adam was banging, he'd take a sip of whiskey every so often and bang away again. He was very happy. His daughters were singing. The neighbors were singing, and the more beer they had, the better they sang. It was a good party. Nobody expected it. Come to Ireland for a good party.
Audio:
5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Happy New Year!
Narrator:
Happy New Year! 2020 is going to be great. Yeah, right. Over the next six weeks, this podcast will explore how and why 603 creative people, actors, costumes, producers, script supervisors, a puppeteer, a pop star, and yes, their director, Adam McKay, could tell a story about one crisis while living through another. This is The Last Movie Ever Made. Episode One: The Titanic Band.
Narrator:
Let's get something clear right from the start. Don't Look Up is a comedy, but in order to understand the seeming unholy marriage of climate catastrophe and comedy, we need to get a bit of history. Adam McKay was born on a relatively normal day in the spring of 1968, temperature three degrees above average, humidity underwhelming, making him an Aries if you subscribe to the stars, who grew into a six-foot-five man, occupation: filmmaker.
Narrator:
He was not born a filmmaker, naturally. That story begins in 1990. That's when Adam quit college and moved to Chicago to study improv comedy under the great guru Del Close. He taught Adam to use comedy as a tool to expand consciousness, to draw attention to the subversive, serious truths that must be said. Adam frequently interrupted his own sketches with facts about the cost of US military spending. Even then, Adam took a joke almost too far.
Audio:
You put up this flyer for a show you were going to do. It says, "Attention: On February 28th, Adam McKay, age 23, will kill himself during the performance of Virtual Reality. No joke. Friday at midnight." Adam, how did the show go?
Audio:
It was a great crowd.
Narrator:
By 1995, Adam McKay had gained the attention of two people who would alter the course of his life, his wife-to-be Shira and Lorne Michaels, who hired him as a writer and eventually head writer at Saturday Night Live, where Adam channeled his political obsessions into comedy catch phrases.
Audio:
I've been carrying this acceptance speech in my pocket for weeks and it's high time I read it. "Daddy, help me. I never thought I'd win this thing, and I want out." Wait, no.
Narrator:
Then, Adam and his muse Will Ferrell, whose voice you just heard, and who, again, does not have a home in Ireland, took their brand of comedy to the big screen.
Shira Piven:
I remember running into someone on vacation who was saying like, "You know what's wrong with the world, are those comedies like Anchorman and Talladega Nights. They're ruining our country."
Narrator:
In truth, this trilogy, capped by the film Step Brothers, was a long-form joke about mediocre white men making terrible decisions.
Audio:
Other weaknesses? We're slow learners, and we're not particularly good listeners. That'll be a... That'll be a huge problem.
Audio:
We're also slow learners.
Narrator:
This brief history is important, because some see a dividing line between Adam's early comedy work and his later "serious" films, demarcated by his Oscar win for The Big Short. That movie was based on the true story of how big banks were profiting off of a housing bubble in the mid-2000s and triggered a global economic collapse in the process.
Narrator:
But for Adam, all his movies are about how power blinds us and what happens when reality knocks on the door of our willful ignorance. Yet while making the film Vice, the story of Dick Chaney, a man whose driving ambitions resulted in paranoia and heart attacks, Adam himself became weakened by stress. To cope, Adam turned to junk food and cigarettes, and days after Vice wrapped, he started to feel queasy. Adam convinced himself it was nothing. Then he recalled his Dick Cheney, the actor Christian Bale, who told him queasiness is a sign of a heart attack.
Shira Piven:
He always tells the story that he knew his symptoms because of Christian Bale, and I'm like, "You dumb shit, I called 911. That's the story, is your wife saved your life, you idiot."
Adam McKay:
Well, it's a little bit of both. Shira's not wrong. She is the one who called 911, but the reason I called Shira was because of Christian Bale, so they both get credit. How about that?
Narrator:
Adam put an image of his own broken heart into Vice. It's in a montage right before night-vision footage of hyenas. And he made a quiet promise to himself and his family that the making of his next film, Don't Look Up, would be a lot less stressful. This brings us back to Ireland, January 2020. Adam McKay, exhilarated that he's gotten his comet disaster comedy out of his mind and into a script, emailed a draft to his trusted inner circle, like producer Kevin Messick.
Kevin Messick:
I was so excited when I read it. It was far beyond the accomplishment of a first draft. And to me, it was ready for talent. So the next day is when we sent it off to Jen Lawrence.
Narrator:
Co-producer Staci Roberts-Steele.
Staci Roberts-Steele:
I was just really excited how much I could really see the scenes. Sometimes, you read scripts, and you're trying to find it in your mind a little bit, and this just... It was so crystal clear what the movie was going to look like.
Narrator:
And costume designer Susan Matheson.
Susan Matheson:
I read the script, and I was laughing, and I actually was sobbing, too, because it was that profound and that important. And the minute I read the script, I knew that we were going to do it right away.
Adam McKay:
And so, one of the roles I wrote, Kate Dibiaski, who's the graduate student who discovers the comet in the movie, I wrote the role for Jennifer Lawrence.
Kevin Messick:
I had known that Jen Lawrence was a big fan of Adam's for many of the years that I'd worked with him, and they just hadn't synced up on the right opportunity yet. She was such a big fan that I had heard that she'd even said in interviews that she'd want to direct Step Brothers 2. But at the very least, I think she knew many of the lines chapter and verse and could happily quote them back to Adam. So, we'd known that over the kind of the dance that you do with directors and their projects and timings and what she was doing, but this felt like the stars were all aligned. It was a script that he had written the role specifically for her. She was the first person we sent it to, and she said yes within the week.
Jennifer Lawrence:
Yes. I saw Step Brothers four times in the theaters, and I also just re-watched it a couple days ago. My favorite line in the whole movie is, "Well, I'm not going to call him dad ever, even if there's a fire." And I find myself saying like, "Even if there's a fire," many times in my life.
Audio:
Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence has come aboard to star in Don't Look Up. McKay plans on beginning principal photography in April with a tight turnaround in mind, as Netflix hopes to release Don't Look Up later this year.
Narrator:
Adam McKay knew if he was going to succeed in waking up the world to the dangers of climate change, he would need the gravitational pull of beloved movie stars to draw viewers in. Jennifer Lawrence was first.
Jennifer Lawrence:
It's pretty rare to read something that's just an absolute slam dunk. I just flipped through it and was just like, "When do we start? Like tomorrow? Let's go."
Narrator:
Leonard DiCaprio was close behind.
Leonardo DiCaprio:
I often in my career looked for a film that had an environmental undertone to it, but much like the inundation of news on climate change, a lot of people don't want to hear it, and making a film about it is an even more difficult task to take on. I'd never been offered a character like this, and I thought that the opportunity to do this movie, certainly at this pivotal point in time, was something you just don't get the opportunity to be a part of more than once in a lifetime.
Narrator:
Other big names followed. Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Jonah Hill, Kid Cudi, and Rob Morgan.
Rob Morgan:
Oh, man. The amazing, stellar, all-star cast. It's like the Bulls in the '90s. Championship rings all over the place, baby.
Narrator:
Producer Kevin Messick saw this as a big holiday movie.
Kevin Messick:
Our collective goal was to sell it, make it, and have it out by Christmas 2020. That was the plan.
Adam McKay:
I don't think I've ever had an experience where a movie moved this fast.
Narrator:
Usually, a film production moves at the speed of a planet revolving slowly around the sun, but this was fast, hot, and inflamed, a one-in-a-million passion project hurling toward its destiny, and in March 2020, they were already in pre-production.
Adam McKay:
So, only two months later, we're out here in Boston, and we're scouting, and we're looking at locations. We're driving around, and we start hearing kind of in the background on the news...
Audio:
Now to growing concerns about the deadly coronavirus officially hitting the US. Officials now say more than 400 people have been sickened, and nine people have died. The World Health...
Adam McKay:
And then as we were here, it was really strange. It was like something out of a disaster movie, where suddenly the hotel was just getting less and less populated, and you wouldn't see anyone on the elevator for like two days. And the lobby, there's just a couple people walking around in the lobby. Then, I'll never forget the night where it all hit. I was in the hotel room. We'd been scouting all day, and I turned on... the big NBA fan, and I turned on this game to watch it. It was like the Utah Jazz versus...
Audio:
The Thunder are no longer on its bench. The officials have gone back to the locker room.
Adam McKay:
It was the strangest thing. You just turned it on, and they're like, "The game's canceled."
Audio:
This is the playoff. [crosstalk]
Audio:
The game tonight has been postponed. You are all safe.
Adam McKay:
And I was like, "Whoa." So the next day, we still scout, but suddenly, the mood has changed. And we're all in the van, and I remember calling my wife, and I was like, "You should order a bunch of surgical masks, and you should get some gloves. And you know what? You should even get a couple oxygen tanks."
Shira Piven:
He always goes to like the worst. He's like, "It's possible I got it. It's possible I have COVID, so I have to come home and quarantine. And he asked me to buy oxygen tanks. He just decided that we needed oxygen tanks, and I'm like, "Oh, God."
Audio:
One in eight New Yorkers who has the disease is getting hospitalized. We're breaking at the seams in New York City.
Audio:
Shoppers at this San Jose warehouse store agreed this was panic buying.
Audio:
Actually seeing all this, I'm getting scared. I wasn't scared till I got here.
Shira Piven:
The 12th of March and the 13th of March, I have said, were the weirdest two days in show business that have ever existed, because everyone I know... I mean, all my friends work in this business, and we were all texting each other, like, "Are you shutting down?"
Jennifer Lawrence:
My husband and I live in New York, and we landed in LA to go to my friend's wedding, and the moment we landed, she texted, "It's over, sweetie."
Adam McKay:
And then just like that, we're like, "Let's get out of here." And Netflix is like, "You should get out of there." And then I just got home, and that was it. I was in my house for seven months.
Susan Matheson:
Are they going to edit out my... The way I speak? Like shit scared and stuff like that? Because that is how I speak.
Narrator:
Costume designer Susan Matheson is from Cape Town. She first collaborated with Adam McKay on Talladega Nights. Since then, Susan has worked on nearly every single film he's directed. She even worked with him while serving on the jury of a murder trial that lasted four months. There is very little that can unnerve Susan Matheson, until...
Susan Matheson:
First six weeks, I was so scared that I wouldn't even leave my house. I was scared to go to my garbage can and put garbage in the garbage can. And when I did, I would take an alcohol wipe and wipe the garbage can every single time. I would go to the mailbox and leave the mail outside in my driveway for over a week on the ground. I wouldn't walk outdoors, and I was petrified, because I have asthma, and I was absolutely convinced I was going to drop dead on the spot.
Narrator:
Everyone who had expected to spend March inventing a disaster movie found themselves living in one. Adam McKay's glamorous stars, Jennifer Lawrence and Cate Blanchett, became method acting homesteaders.
Jennifer Lawrence:
I just felt like a Colonial woman. All I did was like cook and clean, and that was that. I felt like a 1950s housewife.
Cate Blanchett:
I spent a lot of time with the sheep and the pigs and the and the children and homeschooling.
Adam McKay:
Everyone's kind of guessing, and they're saying, "Well, it's going to plateau, and it looks like it's going to be two months." I remember that was the thing we kept hearing. And then, you started hearing "No, no, no, it's going to be five months." And meanwhile, I've got two daughters. I've got a 20-year-old and a 15-year-old daughter, and I've got a wife. So, I start hearing, "No, it's going to be all the way until next year." So, I would say that in the house, and they would all be like, "Shut up! Don't say that. Why are you upsetting us?" And I was like, "I'm just telling you what I'm hearing."
Shira Piven:
Yeah. One of the biggest fights we've ever had is when he wanted to sit down with me and our two daughters and tell us it's going to go on for a long time. And just like, we were already so stressed that we could not handle it. So, right away, I saw where this was going, and it's not a good idea to interrupt him if he's on a roll, so I saw where it was going, and I was just like, "Holy shit, I'm just emotionally just not... I'm just too raw."
Narrator:
If Adam McKay's own family does not want to hear what he has to say, does anyone? Can a comedian even talk about one crisis when people are so focused on another?
Audio:
10 states show a 50% rise in cases since last...
Audio:
You could get an uptick. I won't call it a second wave, because that would imply that a first wave has come and gone. We're not there yet.
Narrator:
Adam's heart attack had forced him to quit his addictions to cigarettes and junk food. However, he still suffers from an addiction to depressing news. By July 2020, locked in his home, away from the outlet of work, Adam begins to have an existential crisis.
Adam McKay:
I'm like, "Do we even do this movie?" Like, this movie's kind of about what's happening. I mean, it's about a comet that's going to hit Earth and how people don't take the science seriously and how it becomes about profit and politics. And then, we're watching all this happen right in front of us, so I'm having a moment where I'm like, "Do we need to even make this anymore?"
Narrator:
Fictions Adam wrote started to become true. In his script, the president reacts to the comment with a funding bill that crams in a tax cut for the rich. And then...
Audio:
I'm told that the president pitched a payroll tax cut to 0% on both the employer and employee side. I'm also told that there is some consideration, some discussion, of making that 0% payroll tax rate permanent.
Adam McKay:
We had the rallies in our script. The president keeps doing rallies, and I in a million years would not have guessed. Even as crazy as Trump is, I did not think he would keep doing rallies during the pandemic.
Audio:
The president's rally coming after yet another brutal day on Wall Street amid growing uncertainty over the coronavirus, with the stock market having its worst week since 2008, during the height of the financial crisis...
Adam McKay:
We also had a whole comet denial movement, people that didn't believe the comet was coming, thought it was a hoax. I mean, obviously, that's happened.
Audio:
(beep) idiots.
Audio:
We're not doing it! Take off your mask!
Audio:
Take it off!
Audio:
Take it off!
Adam McKay:
And then on top of all of that, American democracy is teetering, and we have a president who may not leave the White House.
Audio:
Have you ever considered what would happen if the election result came out as you being the winner and Trump refused to leave?
Audio:
Yes, I have. It's my greatest concern. This president's going to try to steal this election.
Narrator:
It became clear that there was not one but many comets hurdling towards earth. These comets were forged from our own toxic soil, and they were interconnected in ways our social scientists were desperate to explain. Inequality, inhumanity, environmental collapse. There was smoke and fire in the skies and on the streets. Finally, Adam forced himself to look away from the news and back at his script.
Adam McKay:
When I reread the script, my very first thought was, "It's not crazy enough." And that was the big thing I did in the rewrite, was I just tweaked everything like 15% crazier than it was before. That it actually read a little bit dry compared to what's actually happening.
Narrator:
But the question still lingered. If real life is out-satirizing satire, should you even try to make one? So, he posed that question to his cast and crew.
Adam McKay:
Every single actor was like, "I'm more in than ever. We have to do this. We have to do this." We didn't lose anyone.
Narrator:
Himesh Patel, who plays an internet journalist in the film, was committed.
Himesh Patel:
It's a satire about what would happen if the world was faced with a global crisis and we had idiots at the helm. And some may say that's kind of what's just happened, yeah. So obviously, it took on a whole new meaning.
Narrator:
Rob Morgan, who plays a scientist in the film, was committed.
Rob Morgan:
80% to 90% of my industry is shut down, not working at all, so we were mostly grateful and thankful for that to be able to make an honest dollar during this. I mean, it's really a blessing.
Narrator:
Cate Blanchett, who plays a television journalist in the film, was committed.
Cate Blanchett:
When I read it, I thought, "Wow, this is an extraordinary parable about the undeniable nature of what's happening to the planet." But then, as the intervening months happened, and obviously, the pandemic became an undeniable reality. There are so many undeniable realities which we're having to come to face, but I would text him and say, just saying, "Are you psychic?" Because all of these things would happen that made what I thought was satire become... make it feel like a documentary.
Narrator:
Cate also thought that Adam should be committed.
Cate Blanchett:
I feel like as soon as he writes it, it happens, so he has to stop. Someone has... An intervention needs to be staged.
Rob Morgan:
The script had a pulse of current day so much that I was like, "Who does Adam know? How is he getting information?" You know what I mean? I was like, "This is very interesting." And then, compound that when the virus hits, and you're like, "Hmm, what the hell is this man's vision?" Literally, it was like the Nostradamus of 2019 and 2020.
Narrator:
There was one big part still not cast, a role that required a specific talent, a pop star who would descend from the rafters wearing a fabulous dress to sing the ultimate ballad to planet Earth. It was a part only suited for a genuine pop star, one Ariana Grande.
Ariana Grande:
Adam invited me to a Zoom call and sort of spoke to me about the film and pitched me the idea of playing this pop star who's kind of in this yucky tabloid frenzy. She's kind of yucky, too, a little bit, but we love her. Adam's one of my comedy heroes, and I was jumping out of my skin.
Adam McKay:
The cast is kind of lined up, and we're like, "All right, we're going to go for this." And we make the decision that their safety protocols seem thorough enough, and we talk to enough professionals that it seems really good, and if there's a movie to kind of jump in and give it a go, it's this movie and see if we can do it. And that was it. We came back, man.
Susan Matheson:
And then I get the call that we're going back to work.
Narrator:
Costume designer Susan Matheson was excited and secretly a little nervous.
Susan Matheson:
And they say to me, "Susan, we've got great news. We're going back to work." And they're like, "We're going to have the safest movie in the world, so not to worry, and we have an entire team dedicated to this, and they have hired the top doctors and immunologists in the world, and they are working on it, Susan." And I'm like, "Okay, sure." I don't tell them that I'm freaking out. I don't tell them anything. I'm just like, "Sure, great, great. I'm back to work. No problem."
Narrator:
Sure. No problem, except the problem of costing, measuring, fitting, tweaking, and sharing close space with a slew of actors and fellow crew during a global pandemic. And as we will learn, Susan's struggles were just beginning. Meanwhile, the home of Adam McKay was a house divided.
Shira Piven:
I was really happy that the movie was going to get made, but I think the kids were just like, "What the hell is he doing?"
Adam McKay:
My oldest daughter flat out thinks we are crazy and this is idiotic that we're doing this. And she said it to me, and I'm like, "I can't really argue hard back at you." So, the big thing I keep asking myself in the two, three weeks leading up to me leaving is like, "Am I out of my mind?" I kept going through in my head like, "All the levels of safety, why are we doing this? Is this really going to work?" And just trying to triple-check myself. "Am I crazy? Is this delusional that we're doing this?"
Narrator:
What Adam McKay and his cast and crew were about to embark on was unprecedented. Nearly.
Adam McKay:
The example we kept looking at was the band playing on the deck of the Titanic when it was sinking. And that's always been mentioned as an example of denial. They didn't really get how bad it was. The band came out and played.
Adam McKay:
All of a sudden, I realized, oh, no, the band knew exactly what was going on. And in that kind of situation, you do what you do. The band plays music. And people were upset, so the band came out and played some music to calm them down. And we do movies, as ridiculous as that is, and this is a movie that does reflect some of what's going on, and like, "Yeah, let's do this." I mean, it seems crazy to say, would I die for this movie? Because good Lord, I do not want to.
Narrator:
The exact calibration of Adam McKay's insanity I will leave to you. My role is to share what happened on the set of Don't Look Up when these particular people came together to tell a story about one crisis while living through another. In the coming weeks on The Last Movie Ever Made, we'll take you behind the scenes with the cast and crew, people like Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ariana Grande, Tyler Perry, Cate Blanchett, Timothée Chalamet, Rob Morgan, and Kid Cudi.
Susan Matheson:
Everybody's talking about it. It's exciting, scary, and it's like a countdown. The clock is counting down to lockdown.
Adam McKay:
All right, let's do this shit.
Speaker:
Master roll, [inaudible] roll. Ready. And... let's roll [inaudible].
Meryl Streep:
I'm Meryl Streep, and I'm the president of the United States, in the movie.
Staci Roberts-Steele:
Just pulling up to drive-through testing. Oh, wow. These people have like hazmat suits on.
Michael Tow:
Yes, COVID testing tomorrow. Yeah. I can't wait to stick some stuff up my nose.
Jennifer Lawrence:
And then I heard like, "Hello." And I looked up and was like, "Oh!" And it was Meryl.
Susan Matheson:
There's a lot of times I'll say it to an actor in a fitting, "Listen, just tell me to my fucking face, 'I fucking hate it.'"
Meryl Streep:
I was insane, I will say that. On this film, I was completely nuts.
Cory Candrilli:
I swear to God, we've blown up houses, flipped cars, shot people, and I've never been so stressed over a damned dress in my life.
Cate Blanchett:
It's like being beaten over the head with a cross between salami and a brick.
Ariana Grande:
I left my phone for a few hours, and I look back, and the country has fallen apart again.
Audio:
Let's go, patriots! Let's go!
Tyler Perry:
It was really, really sad to see those hollowed out halls with Confederate flags walking through them, a house that slaves actually built. Slaves built.
Taura Stinson:
You don't even have to look up anymore. It's all around you.
Speaker:
[crosstalk] looking at right now, these people...
Speaker 29:
Wow.
Jeff Waxman:
I was just on the phone with the film commissioner, and we're shooting a riot after the Capitol had a riot yesterday, so I'm a little anxious people are going to come by and join in and think it's a real riot.
Jennifer Lawrence:
I mean, a lot of this experience on this film has been life imitating art accidentally.
Credits Narrator:
The Last Movie Ever Made is a production of Netflix Film, Hyperobject Industries, and Pineapple Street Studios. It's produced by Emmanuel Hapsis, Gabrielle Lewis, Staci Roberts-Steele, Daniel Waxman, Sophie Bridges and Alexis Moore. Our editor is Darby Maloney. The show's narrated by Emmanuel Hapsis. Our theme song is by Nicholas Britell. Mixing, sound design, and original music by Hannis Brown with additional music from Epidemic Sound. The show is written by R. Roosevelt. Fact checking by Charlotte Goddu. Executive producers at Hyperobject Industries are Adam McKay, Harry Nelson, and Claire Slaughter. Executive producers at Pineapple Street Studios are Bari Finkel, Jenna Weiss-Berman, and Max Linsky. Special thanks to Eleanor Kagan. Don't Look Up is streaming now on Netflix. Follow @netflixfilm on Instagram and Twitter.