Look up and look around

Adam McKay is one of the biggest directors in Hollywood right now. Almost everyone reading this will have seen his movies. Starting as a writer on Saturday Night Live, he went on to direct highly successful films, such as Step Brothers, a successful comedy starring Will Ferrell and John C Reilly; The Big Short, a dark comedy about the Wall Street financial crisis, starring Brad Pitt, Steve Carrell, Christian Bale and Ryan Gosling; Vice, a movie about the former US Vice President Dick Cheney, starring Bale, and most recently he made Don’t Look Up, starring an ensemble cast including Meryl Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio, which tells the story about a scientist trying to warn the world about a meteor heading towards Planet Earth, but no one takes him seriously. The meteor is meant as an analogy for the Climate Crisis.

McKay sat down for an interview with The Express Tribune to talk about his work and the climate crisis, which is the existential crisis that Adam has dedicated his life to.

ET: Could you briefly introduce yourself and give us a background of your work?.

Adam McKay: I'm a writer, director, and producer, originally from Philadelphia. I became climate aware probably about eight, [or] almost 10 years. Since then, we've started a non-for-profit climate studio called Yellow Dot that combats oil company misinformation and a lot of other things.

I started as a comedy writer [for] Saturday Night Live, Upright Citizens Brigade, all of that kind of stuff. But, mostly now I'm a producer, writer, director, and a lot of my time is devoted towards climate activism.

ET: What drew you to focus on the climate crisis being in the show business?

McKay: We were working on a movie we did about Dick Cheney, and we hired a journalist to interview people about him because there's really not one defining book about Dick Cheney. So there are some really good books like The Angler and a few others, but there's not really one that kind of tells his whole story. So we hired a journalist to go interview people.

When he interviewed Christy Todd Whitman, who was head of the EPA at that time, oh my! What an earful he got about how Dick Cheney was instrumental in halting United States action on climate. Then off of that because, like a lot of people, I had seen Inconvenient Truth, I knew that it was a real thing, but I kind of assumed that we'd been working on it. And at that moment, I was like, where are we at with the climate? And right away when I looked into it, I could tell, oh, we haven't done anything.

The numbers I kept seeing were so disturbing that eventually, as my wife can tell you, I started losing sleep. …One of the benefits of having a job where you make movies and TV shows is you can call people. So I kept talking to scientists and climate journalists, looking for someone to tell me that I was wrong, that in fact, we have a lot of time, it's okay. [But] the people I talked to made it worse. So yeah, I started losing real sleep. I couldn't let it go. And that's what led to us making the movie Don't Look Up.

ET: Could you briefly explain the premise of Don't Look Up?

McKay: I thought long and hard about what is the best way to tell the story of climate in action. And, I had dramatic ideas, I had thriller ideas.

But it was a friend of mine, David Sirota [who] just made some joke about the comet hitting the earth, referring to the Chicxulub event that hit the dinosaurs, some 60 million years ago. And he [Sirota] was like, we all know it, and no one cares. And that just clicked. I really felt like, if we could laugh about the horror show that's coming, that would mean that we have enough distance that we can do stuff.

The premise is a comet is going to hit the earth, and scientists discover it and leaders, news media, billionaires, corporations don't really care or just want to profit off of it, which, sadly, is exactly what happened.

ET: Ever since that movie, things in the US have only gotten worse in terms of the climate crisis. Have you had any luck in bringing people along in terms of at least your circles in Hollywood?

McKay: You know, it's both sad and positive, because for the most part, no. I've learned a lot about the mind-altering effects of privilege, money, and ego. But then there have been people, and whenever they step up, it's kind of like a mini miracle. So, there are people that are waking up.

When I made the movie, and in the year or two afterwards, pretty much everyone treated me like I was crazy, I was overreacting. And that's not really the case anymore. Now, all that really matters is who is being active.

And that's the level I wish were higher. But there are people like Hannah Einbinder, Mark Ruffalo, and really good people who are seeing the truth and responding rather than worrying about their career or fallout or their fans reacting negatively. So, yeah, ever since we put that movie out, it's been quite the journey. Even putting the movie out was quite the journey.

ET: Was this before the fires that happened in Los Angeles?

AM: It was before. Anyone who knows how climate warming, rapid climate warming works, knows that windblown fires are one of the major threats.

We had been trying to reach out to the mayor of Los Angeles [to ask] like, what are your plans? We watched in horror as the mayor cut the firefighting budget. At that point, I had spoken to enough elected officials to understand that for the most part, none of them had any clue– [or] any care about what was happening.

When that red flag notice went up, I had done posts on social media saying, hey, I'm not saying it definitely will be a mega disaster, but it's got a very good chance to be one, be prepared. And it was funny because you could see in the responses, people were rolling their eyes like, oh, he's the crazy climate guy. So, people have died, people have lost their homes. You feel a sick, kind of queasy feeling about it. After the fires, they burned down pretty much whole cities.

The news of the fires failed to mention that humans cause fossil fuel warming or are the driving force behind it. Still most people in LA think it was caused by arsonists or power lines. I mean, it's really something to behold, the amount of power these oil companies have over our news media and the information we get is much stronger than I thought entering this arena.

ET: Is there some hope in the US having capacity to do something about climate?

McKay: I really don't know. For anyone not in the US, I would just say this: It is much worse than you think. I mean, corruption has spread everywhere. Elected officials are really glorified spokespeople, not even really leaders. The exceptions to that, I can maybe name 10, 12. They call me when they have to fundraise and I've had dinner with these people. [But] yeah, the US is not going to be the leader in action when it comes to the huge catastrophe we have entered. It's probably going to be China, maybe Spain, possibly France, South Korea, Brazil.

It'll be interesting to see what Pakistan does. Canada, I think they're too biased. The Scandinavian countries get it. Norway is tricky because they're heavy into oil. But I think it's going to be a case where, you know, 30 to 40 countries are going to have to form an international coalition.

The reason I say this [is that] we are out of time. We have crossed the threshold, the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold. And with this El Nino, we're being pushed towards 1.7 degrees Celsius warming, which means we likely will have our first full month at 2 degrees Celsius warming. The reason that is significant is because that officially and completely takes us out of the last almost 12,000 years of stable climate that scientists call the Holocene. The Holocene is what created the four seasons, agriculture, civilisation.

And we're now going back to that pre-history time. During the Younger Dryas period almost all bipedal apes like Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons, Gigantopithecus all died when the Amok or Atlantic Current shut down. And they think only 10,000 Homo sapiens kind of clung to life. God bless them. We are re-entering pre-Holocene conditions. And first and foremost, it's going to be the collapse of agriculture, both plant and livestock.

And that's already happening. Harvests fail around the world from rains, extreme heat, storms, fires. We scientifically, empirically are in it.

I know Pakistan has been devastated by floods.

They're going to make a lot of us feel powerless, confused, and desperate. And the one truth at the centre of these natural disasters is that the big oil companies did this knowingly and the politicians they own knowingly supported it. And the news media that didn't tell us this was happening, knowingly in exchange for money, betrayed life on earth.

And I say that not because it's about revenge or anger, but because unless you understand that, it becomes an act of God or Allah or Yahweh. And this is not an act of God. This is an act of man and greed and knowing destruction.

Once you get that, you realise we can take action. We have never let science loose on this. It's always been half measures, empty pledges.

There is no question that if in the next year or two, we, or the 30, 40, 50 countries that aren't so far gone, release science, like well-funded, high level innovation, research, development, and engineering, like scaling up. I mean, we have like five things we're going to have to do in the next two years to stop the planet from careening into God forbid three degrees, four degrees Celsius. I mean, at those numbers, that's a mass extinction.

I mean, a few people or whales or dolphins or more likely alligators and jellyfish survive, maybe, but it's a mass die-off event, unless we get to work on creating artificial albedo, geoengineering, like it's going to have to be a host of responses. It is really important to remember that human beings did this.

ET: . Part of the reason that it seems we don't get the reaction that we want from the public is that people don't know just how efficiently resources can be mobilised as they were in the second world war in the US.

McKay: It's very true. I think the one big thing is the fact that big capital, the banks, whatever you want to call it, that the big money took over the news. And even though more and more people doubt the news or are cynical, there's independent news outlets that are rising as fast as they can to kind of fill the breach. But we're really in a moment where time is of the essence. The quote I always throw around is Sir David King from England, who's as establishment as they get. He said, we have three to four years to determine the fate of mankind. And he said this in 2021.

Didn't Pakistan have a natural disaster? And was it Musharraf who didn't respond properly? And that was kind of the end of him. I mean, natural disasters have a way like Katrina with George W Bush. That was when Bush really slipped in the polls. He wasn't doing great before that. But the entire reason for organised government, a lot of it is about natural disasters. If we all work together, share resources, we can get through famine, mass destruction, [etc] by supporting each other. So after that I have no idea what's going to happen.

I mean, there is going to be an energy released from the people that we've never seen before. So you can read all these dusty political commentators, but they have no idea the paradigm shift is coming.

ET: Do you have upcoming projects?

McKay: We're producing the second season of a great, hilarious, absurd show called The Chair Company. And if you think, oh, it's weird that he would bring that up while talking about the end of the civilised world, watch the show and then you will see why it fits. And we have a couple of really cool movies in post-production. One is called Hotel, Hotel, Hotel. Another is called Flesh of the Gods. I personally am going out with a TV show and a feature film. The feature film is purely about climate. It's called To See. And yet, parts of it are funny, dramatic, thrilling. And it's about the new chapter that, you know, mankind, homo sapiens are now on or in.

Yellow Dot, our climate studio, is about to release a commercial parody that is voiced by Woody Harrelson that I think is pretty funny. And it's about this freakish El Nino that is about to supercharge planetary warming around the globe.

 

The writer is a climate activist focusing on the mechanics of mobilisation and organisation

All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the writer