Hey, it's Glenn Thrush with Politico's Off Message podcast.

Adam McKay is the Academy Award nominated director of The Big Short.

He's also one of Will Ferrell's best friends.

He wrote and directed Anchorman in Talladega Nights, but he's gotten dead serious lately.

And his big issue is really Washington and Wall Street.

He's big Bernie Sanders supporter, not so much on Hillary Clinton.

And at the time of this interview at the Ritz Carlton in Georgetown,

he'd just gotten back from talking to Elizabeth Warren and man was he fired up.

But the most interesting thing we've talked about was something a lot of people deal with.

He is really liberal and his mother is really conservative and they don't talk about politics.

And he tells the story of how that relationship, at least the political relationship, blew up. At the end of the interview, he asked me an interesting question.

He wanted me to find out if Hillary Clinton had seen his movie and if so, what she thought

about it. That said, here is Adam McKay.

Well, I lived through the 2008 financial crisis as everyone else did.

I got up in the morning.

You'd look at like the CAC index and Dax and stuff and you just unload.

Shit was just completely falling apart.

And something that you have said in interviews, I think, is really stuck with me.

The complexity of this stuff is really what keeps people from understanding it. But you've said that it's really not that hard to understand.

Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, well, you know, my approach to it was obviously the first

thing I did was read the book, which I loved. You know, Michael Lewis writes very entertaining

books. They were great characters. I just hadn't read anything that had that much information coiled around such a great,

...