Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs

Magazine. I am joined today by the legendary director Adam McKay. Adam has served as the head writer

at Saturday Night Live. He is the director of a number of classic American comedies, including

Anchorman, Talladega Nights, stepbrothers, the other guys, the big short, Vice. We're here

to talk to him today about his film Don't Look Up, released on Netflix in 2021, probably the most

talked about film of that year, a multi-academy award nominee,

that divided the critics in half called shrill or unfun by some of them, and by others,

including Current Affairs, one of the great satires of our time.

Adam McKay, so nice to have you here on current affairs.

Thank you, Nate.

Thanks for having me.

Well, I, you know, it was so funny.

When Don't Lookup came out in 2021, I stupidly didn't want to see it because I had read reviews of it that described it as an obvious and heavy-handed satire. And I don't like obvious and a heavy-handed satire. So I thought, well, I'll give that a miss. But then it was Christmas and my parents and I needed something to watch. We watched it don't Look Up. And I realized immediately that not only was it not obvious, but the reason that the critics were

saying it was obvious was that they'd missed a lot of things, which clearly proved that those

things weren't obvious. But perhaps if people, it's three years ago, so perhaps you could

introduce us, reintroduce us to the film

in case people haven't watched it in a little bit. It's a pretty good representation of how

I was, and sadly, still am engaging with the world where it toggles between a broad farcical comedy and, you know, towards the end of the film becomes a really dark tragedy.

And those seem to be the two kind of genres that were living in these days.

And so I knew that I wanted to make a big film that was a world movie, you know, because of Netflix, we had this opportunity to go on

this platform that's never existed where crazy amounts of people can see a movie in all kinds

of different countries. So the big thing was, can you do comedy that plays in Nigeria, Vietnam, Brazil, the

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